Your life, it’s yours, you’re busy living it, getting by the best you can.
You spend great efforts holding down a job. You dig deep to garner enough energy to get out of bed in the morning, get yourself ready to face the day, make your way to your workplace. Deep breaths perhaps, trying to calm yourself enough to step through that workplace door.
Your colleague is there, who has no idea of the magnitude of effort it has taken just to get to where you literally stand right now. Your colleague has a variety of questions to fire at you, all seemingly needing answers right now, here where you stand just inside the door, you haven’t even got the computer turned on yet, and already somehow you’re not good enough in the eyes of someone else.
That’s only the start of the working day.
It gets worse.
More and more demands, reasonable or otherwise, and more and more judgement is felt.
You try to shake all this off on the way home. But it hangs about, like some kind of internal mind gremlin that’s busy trying to seep into your soul.
When you get home, there’s a stressed atmosphere there – the kids have been troublesome, the bills haven’t been paid on time and the demands have been delivered, there’s still work to be done because even though you’ve left the workplace there’s some tacit expectation that you’ll continue to work when at home. This isn’t received well at home…..and you face yet more friction.
Eventually, with this repeated day in day out, your limit is reached.
Maybe you reach for the alcohol bottle, just to not feel this for a while.
Maybe you shout at the kids.
Maybe you shout at your partner.
Maybe you shout at the dog.
Maybe you blame yourself.
And maybe in that blame of yourself, you find familiar feelings of blame, shame, guilt….. and maybe you realise that these have been with you for years. Maybe that has been the underpinning reason you’ve worked so hard in your job, trying to prove something, somehow, to someone…..
Something needs to change.
You know this.
Because if this continues, the probable path can be anticipated – divorce, lost unemployment, court cases, CCJs, alcohol or other substance reliance and addiction, rejection from all around you….. you’re on your own.
We humans can be very skilled at sensing the possibilities of events, yet carrying on anyway, because maybe it won’t happen to us. We can handle it. It won’t happen, might well happen to other people but we won’t let that happen to us.
But then maybe it does.
In all of this there is courage.
The courage to carry on getting up in the mornings and going to work.
The courage to carry on trying.
The courage to carry on.
Courage.
The courage it takes also to stop for a while, to take a look at what is going on, and to notice if there is any history repeating, any mistaken beliefs that are driving the relentless efforts even in the face of messages from all round that something isn’t OK in this….
The courage it takes to reach out and ask for some help in this.
The courage it takes to go against the many messages you probably have received about this, that men don’t cry, men can handle the stress, men don’t talk about such nonsense as feelings….
…..the messages carried inside, in the shame and anxiety felt in even considering ‘perhaps I could do with some help’…
I have been honoured to work with many people, men and women, over many years as they start their journeys along their Roads to Themselves.
I probably can help you.
And I will understand and know the courage it takes to pick up that phone, or to press send on that email that’s been in drafts for weeks.
All those who have called, emailed, messaged have been courageous fellow humans. Prepared to face their demons. Demons of anxiety, shame, guilt, fear, dread, uncertainty, rejection. 
Sometimes it comes to pass that work is better done elsewhere, and that’s OK. Sometimes it comes to pass that work is brief and incisive, and that’s OK. And sometimes work is longer and more paced, and that’s OK.
I’m not restricted by arbitrary time limits, as might have been encountered if you’ve tried to get help from the NHS or other organisation that operates a time-limited interventions programme.
In any case, your efforts throughout have taken courage, pure and simple. If you need someone to walk beside you for a while on your courageous journey of self, reach out and make contact.
(all the above scenarios are fictitious and do not describe any individual)
Rosalyn Young is a qualified mental health nurse with 30 years
Experience in govt and private agencies helping those in crisis
and in recovery. She has studied counselling to degree level,
and specialises in working with survivors of childhood abuse
and neglect, PTSD, DID, and emotional regulation problems.
She lives in Lincolnshire with her husband and a variety of
companion animals, is a brewer of mead, and student of
growing things in the garden.
