Becoming Well With Liz Tafadzwa

Hello BW tribe. How has your week been? If it hasn’t been great be encouraged to know that this too shall pass and if it’s going great be fully present for all of it. To my new readers, welcome! You are already loved here and to my regular readers welcome back tribe! This week we are going to be tackling our mental wellness pillar. 

In a time where mental health conversations are slowly becoming a norm both in individualistic and collectivistic cultures, mental wellness is still a daily battle for many. For others, it feels like an impossible task despite many free resources. It leaves them feeling helpless and overwhelmed and seemingly further sinking into the pit they are trying hard to escape. As a person who grew up with a habit of suppressing the impact of my dysregulated emotions and damaging thoughts and eventually exploding after high school, I know too well the pain of mental struggles. Isn’t it funny how connected wellness is, yet we want to convince ourselves that they are separate entities? When your mental health is fighting for its last breath chances are your emotional health is not doing great and if that’s not well then your relationships will inevitably suffer too.

Spiritual and financial wellness are the two areas I have seen where most people can keep relatively well while other areas suffer and still be okay for a while. Strong in your faith but destructive emotionally. Financially thriving while relationships are breaking down.  I don’t think that’s God’s intention for our lives, where we are partially well. He wants us to be whole in our wellness, which means the different facets of who we are as individuals must be well.

I put my hands on “Purpose Driven Life” by Rick Warren in early 2019 when I had hit rock bottom in my life and that book completely changed my life after the Bible. I suppose I was ready for it too, so the impact was substantial. Rick challenged me spiritually and mentally because the book is filled with Scripture. I kept going to the Bible and that’s how my love for God’s Word was ignited. In his book, Purpose Driven Life by Rick Warren, and in just about every other book, teaching, devotional, or newsletter he has put out he emphasizes the responsibility we have in managing our thoughts. Initially, I was resistant because when you are sick mentally you often attack or resist the truth meant to set you free. My greatest affliction at the time was emotional pain and some counterproductive coping mechanisms I had picked up since I was a kid and he straight up said that all started with your thoughts. I thought at the time and maybe that’s your thinking too, that it was not my responsibility to manage your thoughts. You may feel strongly that trauma, God, your background, your religion, or something else is responsible for the status of your mind.

” When you are sick mentally, you often attack or resist the truth meant to set you free.”

I hate to break that news to you, but you are fully responsible for managing your thoughts. You can’t control everything that comes to your mind, but you can control how long the thoughts stay in your mind. I was tested by this reality when i was navigating a storm that started late last week. Rick gave a great list of things that influence our thoughts: how much sleep you got last night, conversations you have with people and those you overhear, all media formats (TV, news, radio, etc), social media, what you see, trauma, your environment and more. Whether you like it or not these things are constantly feeding your thoughts and you have no control over that. That means all you have control over is how you respond and manage all the thoughts that are fired at you all day. Merriam-Webster dictionary defines the word manage as “handling or directing with a degree of skill. You have to learn how to manage your thoughts. The good news is you can learn that skill.

How Do You Manage Your Thoughts?

You begin managing your thoughts by actively assessing the lingering thoughts that come to your mind. Notice I said lingering because not every thought that comes to you will stay for long and if it does stay, it does not bother you. The thoughts that prolong their stay and start influencing your emotions negatively are the ones that you need to actively assess. The second thing is to ask yourself a basic question: “Is this truth or a lie?.” Is it true that you are dumb, ugly, and useless? Is it true that you are not worthy, unloved, and unaccepted? Is it true that you are too far gone? Is it true that you are a joke? Is it true that you are the first and only person struggling with that addiction or disorder? If more and more people would pause for a few seconds and answer this question, we would have a lot more mentally healthy and strong people. This is something I am actively doing in my life and I am seeing how many lies I let break me for years. Some lies are still strongholds in my life because choosing to engage in that tough work of identifying the lies, confronting them, and replacing them with truth can be a slow process. Rick Warren often says, “A lie does not have to be true to hurt you. You just have to believe it.”  Those lies I was told or told myself hurt me not because they were true, but because I believed them. If I had paused in those moments when those thoughts resurfaced and asked myself that question they would not have become strongholds over time. 

“A lie does not have to be true to hurt you. You just have to believe it.”-Rick Warren

The third and final step is to reinforce or release and replace the thought. This is probably the most important step because most people’s mental struggles stem from ignoring this step. If it’s true that you are fearful and wonderfully that means you have to reinforce that thought by thinking intently and consistently about that truth for a period of until you believe it. On the other hand, if it’s not true that you are unlovable you have to practice releasing that thought by freeing your mind when that thought is reignited. Most times for many people, the main problem is that they don’t know the truth. If we don’t feed our mind with the Bible then it makes sense why we can’t release the lies replaying in our head. You have to make studying and meditating on God’s Word a habit and a priority to effectively replace lies with truth. When you know the truth, you can easily pick up a lie because it won’t align with what you are fully convinced is truth based on scripture.

Mental health struggles are 100% real and not to be undermined, but I have come to realize that most of the mental torment is self-imposed. There are exceptions to this, but the Bible is very clear about the importance of feeding your mind with the word of God. It’s the only source of truth strong enough to uproot and expose lies and offer the truth that ultimately sets you free. It breaks my heart to see people reject this very truth that will set them free from their mental battles. They are more committed to the mental struggle than to accepting the truth, which will not feel great for a moment but will give them lasting freedom.

 Managing our thoughts also requires taking full responsibility for the state of your mind. It’s not to shame your struggle but to shift blame from the contributor of the torment to taking ownership of the state of your mind. It is easier said than done, but it won’t continue to be hard if you commit to doing it. Work on your tolerance for taking personal responsibility, by saying to yourself every day in the mirror, “I__(Name) am fully responsible for the state of my mind, but when it’s out of control, I can make use of the help that Holy Spirit gives me.”  I want to encourage you that you are never alone or left without options. Neither are you completely helpless if you have Christ inside of you. Satan also can’t control your mind, when you are born again. He can only plant suggestions into your mind and reinforce those lies by pairing them with something you are already weak in. The good news you don’t have to be bullied by his tactics if you ask the Holy Spirit to help you.

If you can learn to manage your mind, you will also have enabled yourself to manage your life. This is because the state of your mind governs what you think, how you feel, and how you act. I love you and I will see you at the next one.