Mental health is the necessary balance to physical health. It's great if you can maintain a healthy body, but as the entire body and its functions rely on the health of the brain and mind, mental health is an utterly necessary and crucial component to a happy life. Working on mental health means investing in yourself, and that metaphor can be read very literally. Working on your brain and mental functioning won't produce tangible, visible results immediately but is rather a slow build of value over time that will allow you to access parts of yourself that you previously had difficulty with.
Family Nurse Practitioners can provide limited help with family mental health issues, and FNP programs in Texas are excellent and offer tutelage in freshly relevant skills in the future job market. However, if you can't pursue this kind of education or service for any reason, there is a comfort to be found because you don't have to be a nurse to look after your family's mental health. These six steps can help you prioritize and care for your family's mental health in the new year.
1 – Ask Questions/Do Research
If you suspect that a family member may be struggling, the best thing you can do for them is to inquire about their struggles. This may seem simple enough of a concept. After all, we can all talk, but family dynamics are often complicated, and you may feel like you're intruding or concerned about triggering a difficulty for your loved one.
The most important thing is the approach. When coming to your brother, sister, husband, wife, son, or daughter about their mental health, it may be worth examining what kind of family communication pattern they use and how to create a constructive dialogue. This can help you frame your concerns correctly, especially when coupled with your knowledge of them. For example, if you believe that your sister is struggling with ADHD but doesn't understand where her issues/differences come from due to a lack of support/diagnosis, you may find it beneficial to broach the topic with her at some point.
However, if a family member of yours is diagnosed with a mental illness, it can be worth researching to see how you can or asking how they're handling things.
2 – Check In
This might sound like a repetition of the first point, but checking in deserves its place on the list simply because of how effective it is. When you're dealing with emotional turmoil there is something incredibly special about someone taking the time out of their schedule to intentionally and purposefully create a space for you to freely express yourself.
Checking in with loved ones is a tool that a lot of people are using these days to make sure their romantic relationships are being cultivated in the best way possible, however, the questions involved in a check-in can be applied to any relationship.
Setting aside time and space for your loved one to freely voice their thoughts, feelings, and concerns doesn't just allow them time for much-needed release, but it also reaffirms your image in their mind as a safe place, someone they can rely on, and a source of comfort and joy. For 10 minutes a week, you can build your loved one's feelings of support and stability exponentially, a reward in and of itself.
3 – Love Languages
Recently the internet has blown up with something that people probably should have been aware of quite a while ago—love languages.
Simply put, a "love language" is how a person expresses or interprets affection. For example, someone whose love language is physical touch may be a persistent and incorrigible hugger or the person who puts their hand on your back when you're in strife and also gains the most concentrated feelings of being loved through such action. A person whose lover language is words of affirmation constantly offers encouragement and verbal support and feels most loved when they receive the same.
Knowing your family member's love language will enable you to offer the most effective and efficient doses of love during difficult times. This will help ease their suffering, and just like the check-in, it will show them that you genuinely care. Obvious effort never goes unnoticed.
4 – Taking Accountability
There are all kinds of families, and as the conversation around mental health and trauma expands, more people are coming forward with their tales of familial abuse. However, abuse isn't always on purpose, and it's not always obvious to the perpetrator. There are cases of people going through an adjustment period and realizing that the way they treated people in the past wasn't good, possibly even abusive.
If your loved one communicates to you that in the past, they have felt neglected, abused, or invalidated by you regarding their mental health, it's important not to take this badly.
Yes, they are telling you that your actions have worsened their mental state, and it's okay for that to break your heart, but you don't fix the situation by getting defensive and claiming that they've misread your actions. Noticing unhealthy communication patterns is key in offering the appropriate support to your loved ones. Taking accountability doesn't mean that you're at fault or an inherently bad person. It means accepting that you've made mistakes and that improving your relationship with the person is more important to you than protecting your insecurities.
5 – Help with the Process
Taking care of one's mental health is a process that will likely take years. Unlearning trauma responses, reconstructing self-image, developing new perceptions, adapting to new knowledge, and finding/engaging in helpful resources can be confronting for people suffering from mental illness. This is where being proactive about assisting your loved ones with the process, whether that means finding reputable sources of information and therapists, researching medications, driving people to appointments, or helping loved ones take care of their residence, are all ways that you can offer real, tangible, evident support that shows your family member that you're dedicated to helping them overcome their challenges.
6 – Patience
Prioritizing your family's mental health is going to take a lot out of you, and while certain aspects of the process can be delegated to other family members so that this feels like something everyone is in on—depending on the specifics of your family and the mental illnesses you're trying to address you may find that almost all of it falls on your shoulders.
The important thing is to be patient with the process. It will start to bear fruit eventually, but it requires patience, persistence, effort, and a willingness to be vulnerable and hear things that may hurt from time to time.
