Mental Health Educator

21/05/2026

If Joy is an uncomfortable emotion, just be aware of the possibility of self sabotage.

Reach out and talk to friends and family, and those who understand. 

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19/05/2026

14/05/2026

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20/04/2026

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Sarah Wilson has lived with anxiety since she was a child. She made several attempts on her own life, spent years in the exhausting project of trying to kill something that would not die. And then finally, she arrived, battered, yet still standing, at the only conclusion the evidence would support:

The beast was not going anywhere.

So she stopped trying to destroy it, and this is one of the bravest things I have ever read someone do with their own suffering. She decided to understand it. To sit with it in the way you sit with something you have finally accepted you cannot outrun.

To look at it, without flinching, and find something in it worth keeping. To make it beautiful.

The title of her book comes from a Chinese proverb: before you can conquer a beast, you must first make it beautiful. That sentence, and what it looks like to live that it out, imperfectly, and in the ordinary hours of an ordinary anxious life is the whole book, really.

1. Anxiety is not a malfunction. It is a message you haven't learned to read yet.
We have been taught to treat anxiety like a fire alarm going off in an empty building, loud, disruptive, embarrassing, something to silence as quickly as possible. Wilson asks a different question: what if the alarm is right?

Anxiety, she argues, is not noise. It is a signal, the soul's way of insisting that something in your life is misaligned with something deep in you. The racing thoughts, the dread, the sleeplessness are not punishments. They are invitations, badly worded, arriving at the worst possible hour. The work is not to suppress them. The work is to become fluent in what they are trying to say. That reframe alone is worth the price of the book.

2. You cannot think your way out of something your whole body is living.
Wilson is a journalist, fiercely intellectual, research-obsessed, someone who believed for years that if she could just understand her anxiety completely, she could dismantle it. She couldn't. And the admission of that, from a woman of her particular brilliance, is one of the most quietly devastating and liberating moments in the book.

She ultimately reframes anxiety as a state of yearning that will lead us closer to what really matters. The mind alone cannot carry you there. You have to walk it through the body, through stillness, through nature, through the radical act of stopping. Of making your bed. Of breathing deliberately. Of choosing, one small moment at a time, to be here instead of everywhere.

3. The people who feel everything are not broken. They are built for depth.
One of Wilson's most generous gifts in this book is the company she keeps; she places you alongside Emily Dickinson, Charles Darwin, Martin Luther King Jr., all of whom wrestled privately with the same beast. She asks: what if the sensitivity that makes life so painful is the same thing that makes certain people see the world more clearly, love more fully, create more honestly?

4. Healing is a practice you choose, again, every single ordinary day.
Wilson does not end the book cured. She arrives, still anxious, still tender, still wired for worry, but differently oriented toward it all. She keeps herself in check not by eliminating anxiety but by refusing to get anxious about being anxious. That second layer, the shame about the struggle, is often what breaks us more than the struggle itself.

What she offers instead is the quiet discipline of showing up for your own life even when your mind is screaming at you to hide. Healing, she teaches us, is not something that happens to you. It is something you choose, again, in the small and unremarkable moments no one else sees.

I think this book finds you when you need it. When you are exhausted from performing okayness. When the weight of your inner life has become something you carry quietly, invisibly, because you have learned, as so many of us have, that the world is not entirely patient with people who feel things so loudly.

The beast, looked at long enough, with enough courage and enough compassion, can become something you no longer need to run from.

Read this book slowly. Underline the sentences that find you. And when the beast arrives at 2am, as it will, remember that someone sat down and made it beautiful once.

You can too.

BOOK: https://amzn.to/4ckRtDn

20/04/2026

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In 1961, an 18-year-old girl was locked inside a seclusion room at one of America’s most prestigious psychiatric hospitals.

She would later invent the therapy that saved thousands of people just like her.

Her name was Marsha Linehan.

The Institute of Living in Hartford, Connecticut, was not a grim state asylum. It was an elite institution with sweeping lawns and Tudor-style buildings where wealthy families sent their troubled children. The protocol for severe cases involved heavy containment and quiet hallways.

Marsha was not there to study medicine. She was the patient they did not know how to fix.

Her diagnosis at the time was hazy. Some charts listed schizophrenia. But her behavior was something else entirely. She actively tried to end her own life. She burned her wrists with ci******es. She cut her arms, her legs, and her midsection with any sharp object she could find. She lived in a constant state of overwhelming emotional fire.

When the nursing staff could not physically stop the self-harm, they moved her into isolation. The seclusion room contained a single mattress on the floor. There were no windows. There were no sharp edges. The door locked from the outside.

She spent hours inside it alone. She would bang her head against the walls until the staff physically restrained her.

The treatment escalated. Over the course of twenty-six months, the medical staff administered massive doses of Thorazine. They subjected her to extensive electroconvulsive therapy. Her medical charts documented a young woman who was fundamentally deteriorating. The interventions were not working. They were simply keeping her alive in a state of permanent confinement.

During one stretch in the seclusion room, she experienced a sudden shift in clarity. She made a private vow on that mattress. She decided she would figure out a way to survive the hospital. She promised herself that if she got out, she would come back and get the others out too.

At the time, the psychiatric establishment viewed Borderline Personality Disorder — the diagnosis she would later receive — as a clinical dead end. Archival records from mid-century medical boards show that specialists frequently refused to take these cases. The prevailing institutional logic dictated that such patients were manipulative and fundamentally untreatable. The psychoanalytic community offered no practical framework for chronic suicidality. The system was designed to manage their long-term decline, not to engineer their recovery.

She was discharged in 1963. The exit evaluation noted she had not improved.

She moved to Chicago. She took a job as a clerk for a life insurance company. She lived at a local YMCA. She spent her evenings working at a su***de prevention hotline. She answered calls from people who sounded exactly like she had sounded in Hartford.

She applied to night school. She took undergraduate courses at Loyola University. She applied to graduate school, eventually earning a Ph.D. in psychology.

She was carrying a dangerous secret. The mental health stigma in the academic and medical worlds of the 1970s was absolute. A history of severe psychiatric confinement was a career-ending liability. The professional boundary between the healer and the sick was not to be crossed. If a university committee discovered she had been subjected to electroconvulsive therapy, her clinical career would end before it began.

She adapted by hiding. She wore long sleeves every single day. Even in the humid peak of summer, she kept her arms covered to conceal the thick network of scars. She stood at lecture podiums and presented data to psychiatric review boards, terrified a colleague would uncover her medical files.

She applied for a post-doctoral fellowship at a su***de clinic in Buffalo, New York. She intentionally omitted the fact that she had been a suicidal patient herself. She was infiltrating the very establishment that had once locked her in a room.

She focused her research on the exact demographic the system had written off. She took on the chronically suicidal women. She took the patients who cut themselves.

Her early clinical attempts failed. She tried applying standard behavioral modification to these women. She told them they needed to change their actions. The patients reacted with intense hostility. They felt criticized. They lashed out at her. During one session, the friction escalated until the clinical hour devolved into shouting. She had pushed too hard.

She realized the existing science was dangerously incomplete. Standard therapy demanded immediate change. Behaviorists told patients to stop crying and start functioning. But patients who were constantly in emotional agony could not tolerate the demand for change without feeling invalidated. Psychoanalysis offered deep exploration of childhood trauma, but it provided no immediate tools to survive Tuesday night when the urge to self-harm became overwhelming.

She needed a third path. She studied Zen practices and behavioral science. She built a new framework. She taught patients that their pain was valid and real — and simultaneously demanded they learn the rigorous skills to change their behavior. Two opposing truths held at the same time. A dialectic.

She called it Dialectical Behavior Therapy.

She tested the protocols in clinical trials at the University of Washington. The data came back clean. Her methods worked. Her patients stopped returning to the emergency room. The self-harm rates plummeted. The women who were supposed to be untreatable were building stable, functioning lives.

The system labeled her untreatable. So she invented the treatment.

The medical establishment began adopting her manuals. Clinics around the world trained their staff in her systems. Marsha Linehan secured a prominent faculty position at the University of Washington. She became one of the most cited researchers in clinical psychology.

She kept her past hidden for three decades. The long sleeves stayed on.

Then, in June 2011, she accepted an invitation to speak. She returned to the Institute of Living in Hartford. She stood in front of an audience of doctors, psychiatric staff, and current patients.

She did not deliver a standard clinical lecture. She told them about the seclusion room. She told them about the Thorazine. She pulled back her sleeves and showed them her arms. She told them she was one of them.

The hospital where she was once classified as hopelessly broken still operates today. It features a specialized clinical program for severe cases. The staff there treat patients using the exact therapy she developed. Some of those patients sit in chairs just down the hall from where the seclusion room used to be.

09/03/2026

A Recovery (Relapse Prevention) Self-soothe Toolbox is a personalised, physical/digital collection of items designed to manage intense emotions, reduce anxiety, and promote calm by engaging the five senses.

It serves as a distress tolerance skill to help ground us in the present moment and help us through urges, cravings and impulses.

Key items may include sensory objects (fidgets, putty), calming scents (lavender), comforting tastes (herbal tea), soothing sounds (playlists), and comforting visuals (photos).

How to Use the Toolbox
Purpose: Use when feeling low, anxious, or in distress to prevent a crisis from worsening.

Method: Engage with items one by one while practicing mindfulness to focus on the present moment.

Types: Create a physical box at home, a mini travel kit for on-the-go, or a digital folder of comforting images and songs.

Preparation: Assemble items that personally bring you comfort to ensure they are accessible during high-stress situations.

While likely not sufficient in itself to prevent relapse - it can be used in conjunction with other relapse prevention skills and techniques.

Those who action this suggestion all report back positively saying that it has been helpful/ invaluable.

01/03/2026

Hello March….Spring is coming 🌷

31/12/2025

Happy New Years 🎆 Eve.

29/12/2025

Anthony Hopkins
50 years sober

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DS2R3fviOsE/?igsh=ZG1vd2R6bjk0NHNi

17/12/2025

This time of year, it seems everywhere you look, there is alcohol advertising, friends hosting alcohol oriented get togethers, or promotion of overindulgence.

Without some mindfulness and a plan, it might be easy to get swept up, triggered, and overwhelmed. Hopefully, these tips give you a few ideas to navigate the season.

Our website resource pages have additional recommended links and resources for the kind of support you might be seeking.

Have a great holiday - your way!

See our resources directory at www.together-sswr.com (link in bio).