Mental Health Isn’t Just the Absence of Mental Illness. Here’s What it Is.
Most people think mental health is just the absence of anxiety, depression, or stress.
But that’s only part of the picture.
True mental health is about how well you function in your life, how you handle challenges, relationships, and your inner world.
In this post, I’ll walk you through six essential qualities of mental health and how therapy can help you develop them.
What You’ll Learn
In this article, you’ll learn:
- What mental health really means (beyond symptoms)
- The six essential qualities of mental wellbeing
- How therapy helps you develop these capacities
The Six Essentials of Mental Health
Energy; The Foundation of Mental Health
Healthy Relationships: The Core of Mental Wellbeing
Psychological Strength: Building Resilience
Psychological Balance
Mental Flexibility
Versatility
A Simple Way to Understand Mental Health: A Gymnastics Analogy
Being mentally healthy is like excelling as a gymnast. By harnessing our energy, relationships, strength, balance, flexibility, and versatility we navigate life’s obstacles more effectively and experience greater enjoyment. How mentally gymnastic are you in your life?
After reflecting on countless clinical experiences and what I’ve learned from mentors, teachers, and the pioneers of psychology, I set out to name the essentials of being mentally healthy.
The Essentials
My working list of essentials are: energy, healthy relationships, strength, balance, flexibility, and versatility. As they came together, I was struck how the language overlaps with the way we describe great athletes, particularly gymnasts.
Olympic gymnasts demonstrate for the world qualities necessary to navigate challenging circumstances with their routines. It takes proficient use of these essentials for a gymnast to become able to overcome the challenges of a routine such as the balance beam.
To mentally overcome the challenges of our lives so we experience more enjoyment, poise, and effectiveness, we need these same qualities. Much of what gets in the way of accessing, cultivating, and maintaining these essentials is unconscious to us.
The Gym
Psychodynamic therapy gives you a space to practice these skills, like a gym for your mind. Therapy can help you learn to better cultivate and manage your energy, relationships, (ego) strength, balance, flexibility, and versatility.
In psychodynamic therapy we realize what has been holding us back and take steps to face and overcome it. The growth process in this type of therapy helps us to accept the realities of our inner worlds that are impacting our current circumstances, feelings, thoughts, and behaviors.
I will briefly describe each of these qualities of mental health here and will write more extensively about them with individual posts to come.
Energy: The Foundation of Mental Health
Energy is the foundation for psychic functioning (mental life). Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, psychoanalytic and psychodynamic thought pioneers, based their understanding of the psyche on the principles of thermodynamics.
They acknowledged that energy is not created or destroyed but is transferred within systems such as our psyches. They also focused on how we direct our energy, whether toward people, goals, ideas, etc., just as gymnasts must harness their energy to manage their routines.
Libido and Life Force
Freud and Jung were interested in the conditions that cause our energy to get dammed up or disturbed in some way from flowing naturally. What they found became the bases for their understandings of psychological distress and suffering.
Freud focused on sex as the primary desire of libido, and to this day we understand the term “libido” as having a sexual connotation.
Jung saw this energy as a life force that moves us toward growth and wholeness. Jung’s libido seems synonymous with the energies described by others as vital energy, life force, prana, chi, and qi.
Natural Flow of Energy
Much of the task of becoming healthier mentally is a return to the true Self, nature, essence, and being, which entails letting go of the ways we disrupt the natural flow of our psychic energy.
Without the energy necessary to dedicate oneself to a relationship, a discipline, or a craft, we will be frustrated in our efforts.
When we align with our energy, it can give us purpose and meaning and guide us toward health and wellbeing.
What’s your relationship to your energy?
- Are you moving in accordance with your energy?
- Are you stuck, stagnant, or feel a lack of energy for your work, relationship, recreation, etc.?
We can overcompensate perceived deficiencies in ourselves by directing too much energy to one focus of attention to the exclusion of other areas of life. We can also react to such perceived deficiencies with a total withdrawal of energy from that particular aspect of life, such as a significant relationship, self-care for our survival, or our social belonging.
Improving Your Relationship to Energy
Psychodynamic therapy is an invitation to discover what your life may be saying about where you might be headed and/or where you might be resistant to go in your external and internal worlds.
- How are you making meaning of your life?
- How might you be holding yourself back from the life you truly desire?
- Could you be allowing other influences to keep you from being who you really are?
The journey of psychotherapy can empower us to confront the blockages to our life’s natural path and to harness our energy to enliven us towards a fuller, richer, more whole life.
Healthy Relationships: The Core of Mental Wellbeing
Gymnasts do not develop into more skilled athletes without the encouragement and support of caring parents, coaches, trainers, and peers. It takes a village and their countless hours of support to raise a champion gymnast.
We know the importance of having community for a sense of belonging and living for something more than ourselves. Our mental health relies heavily on our capacity to develop, which begins as infants dependent upon others for survival and sustenance.
Humans are the only mammals that remain with their caregivers as long as they do. And thanks to studies and advances, we have more of an understanding of how crucial it is for children to develop good relationships with their mothers (parents) and families.
Human Development
Psychology first emphasized the importance of the child-parent relationship with Object Relations Theory, which is based on our ability to distinguish between ourselves (subjects) and things outside of ourselves (objects).
In safe, positive environments of trust and care, infants can develop mentally to bond with others and learn to manage their stress and anxieties. Children who do not have such positive environments will suffer more anxiety, all other things being equal.
Infants learn to distinguish themselves from their sources of nourishment and over time deal with their frustrations with them. Healthy development entails coming to realize that our nourishment and frustration come from the same person.
The ability to work out through the stress of this conflict by making amends with parents gives children the security they need to know they will be okay.
Safety and Security
Attachment theory derives from object relations wisdom that children develop better mental health through having environments where they can develop secure attachments and a good sense of themselves.
Developing secure attachments from good care prepares children to become capable of attaching securely as adults. When we are more anxious or avoidant regarding relationships, we may struggle in ways that call for treatment.
Set and Enforce Boundaries
Learning to set and enforce boundaries is a bi-product of increased security and self-esteem. As we become healthier mentally we know when and how to advocate for ourselves, meet our needs, and stop enduring toxic relationships.
Relationship with a Good Therapist
Psychodynamic therapy is designed to help us work through these relationship challenges through a good relationship.
In psychodynamic therapy explore our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. In therapy we typically get a different response than we might be expecting, which causes us to question and test our preconceived thoughts, emotions, and behaviors.
We discover:
- That our perspectives may be distorted by our stress.
- The ways we have gotten stuck from feeling free and thriving.
- There is much more good in us than we may have thought.
- Improvement in our relational abilities to work, love, and play.
Indeed, over time we can develop new views of ourselves and others through a good relationship with a psychodynamic psychotherapist.
Psychological Strength: Building Resilience
With enough energy and good relationships, we can do the work towards strengthening ourselves. Our strength increases from resistance, tension, and overcoming, whether through our muscles or mental capacities.
Trusting their coaches allows gymnasts to receive feedback and recognize patterns that hold them back.
As gymnasts strengthen their bodies callouses form to allow them to develop an ability to do more work and manage events, like the bars.
The same process applies to our increasing mental capacity to endure our interpersonal and intrapersonal conflicts, challenges, and tensions. To grow, we need friction, getting outside of our comfort zones, and learning the resilience to overcome the discomfort.
By strengthening our psyches we:
- Accept the realities of our situations and become self-aware;
- Take in others’ observations and feedback about our tendencies and blindspots;
- Tolerate our circumstances and anxieties;
- Regulate our emotions;
- Have a sturdier sense of self and healthier self-esteem;
- See more possibilities for ourselves and others;
- View ourselves and others as complex;
- Set boundaries; and
- React less and respond with more agency and autonomy.
Among the many benefits of psychodynamic psychotherapy is that it offers us the space to strengthen our mental capacities so that we can accept reality and overcome the obstacles that hinder us from healing and growing.
Psychological Balance
The more strength we have the more we know where we need to balance ourselves.
When a gymnast goes too far in one direction, she has to direct weight in the other direction to reestablish balance on the beam. Otherwise it is a quick fall to the floor.
We similarly become ripe for a fall in our lives when we place too much weight in one aspect of our lives or one focus of attention.
When we experience stress or anxiety, we can react with defense to protect ourselves from it. Over time we can come to overuse and overrely on this same maneuver to a limited way of dealing with our struggles.
Prevent One-sidedness
It is easy to become too “one-sided” psychologically. We all like to do the things we are good at and to neglect the things that are more challenging for us.
Doubling down on our strengths to the exclusion of other aspects of ourselves is asking to become imbalanced. With sufficient energy and strength, we too are able to counter our tendencies to place too much emphasis on one focus of attention.
Avoid Stagnation
We interestingly can become stagnated by focusing too much on being balanced. A gymnast can achieve balance on the beam by simply standing there the whole routine. She will not fall from the beam, but she will also not grow as a gymnast.
Similarly, we need to shift our mental weight so that we can grow. Psychological growth is an ongoing process and requires consistently stepping outside our comfort zones.
Mental Flexibility
Gymnasts spend significant time increasing their flexibility so they can do more with their routines and demonstrate more challenging skills within each event. They also do well to be able to adjust their routines and adapt mid-performance to navigate their events.
To avoid becoming rigid and relying on one way of responding, we instead rely on our capacity to be flexible and adapt to our circumstances and come up with new ways forward. Flexibility allows us to accomplish more and to have a larger range.
Willing to Bend and Adapt
The psychologically flexible are willing to adapt to circumstances instead of adhering to one way of being.
The most mentally rigid among us have touchy personalities and difficulty maintaining relationships whether work, personal, or romantic.
When we are flexible we do not always insist that others bend to our ways and perspectives. We creatively demonstrate resilience and the willingness to adapt.
Versatility
Versatility in gymnastics is best demonstrated by the gold medal winner in the All-Around competition. These champions are capable of navigating all of the events.
They display wide-ranging proficiency and skill, the ability to employ more maneuvers to perform well. They are the Swiss Army knives of the gymnasts.
When we are versatile psychologically we are not only willing to adapt but are capable of using more of our psyches and a wide range of ways to respond.
Use More Tools
The versatility to use a wide range of tools allows carpenters to create and repair the most nuanced of final products. If they only used a hammer, you’d end up with a very rough piece of furniture.
When we only use one psychological tool to manage life, we reveal our limitations and tend to be less effective in our work and relationships.
Psychological versatility is best depicted with the ability to utilize more of one’s potential. In more clinical terms, mental versatility means the ability to utilize more sophisticated defense mechanisms.
Cultivate More Capabilities
Psychotherapy benefits us by offering us an opportunity to cultivate more versatility in our lives. We discover the parts of ourselves that have tried to dominate our minds and the parts of ourselves that we have neglected to develop.
Through the therapeutic relationship we can establish new ways of perceiving our lives and gain access to more effective ways of handling the challenges we encounter.
Why These Qualities Matter in Real Life
A gymnast uses all of these qualities in concert to improve their performances. We too use these qualities mentally to work through our problems and grow.
For instance, we may recognize that we have energy for a certain vocation, like practicing law, but we have a conflict with our beliefs about what is the right thing to do given our parents’ desire for our lives or our lifestyle.
* This kind of conflict can dam up the energy towards our desire. Perhaps because we deem it irresponsible and anxiety arises when the desire comes up.
* We can defend against the anxiety in many ways by consciously or unconsciously avoiding it, but if we pay attention to the energy and draw upon our ability to effectively relate with others, we can strengthen our mental life to handle the conflict and hold the conflicting mental forces in tension.
* Addressing the imbalance, we can flexibly adapt and recognize that we have more ways to understand our predicament than just doing what we’ve always done.
* Creatively approaching our dilemma we can courageously follow what we truly want and tolerate the anxiety.
* Years down the road, we can look back and reminisce about the conflict with gratitude that we worked through it.
To work through the challenges we encounter in life, we can draw upon these essential qualities to overcome our barriers and live lives of meaning and purpose. In other words, the more gymnastic we become, the more capable we are of growing beyond our obstacles and the more fulfilled we feel in our lives. Now that’s mental health.
How Mentally Healthy are You?
You might already see some of these patterns in your own life.
Ask yourself:
— Am I feeling overwhelmed by my responsibilities?
— Do I have enough energy for what matters to me?
— Am I feeling secure in my relationships?
— Do I accept feedback from others without getting defensive?
— Am I able to overcome challenges without too much distress?
— Do I feel stuck in the same patterns?
— Am I willing to adapt when things do not go as planned?
If you said “no” to any of these, therapy may be the opportunity for you to feel more fulfilled in your life.
How Therapy Can Help
Together, we:
- Identify what’s blocking your energy
- Explore relationship patterns
- Build emotional strength and flexibility
- Help you respond differently to life’s challenges
Over time, this leads to a greater sense of clarity, stability, and purpose.
Take the Next Step
If you’re feeling stuck, overwhelmed, or caught in the same patterns, therapy can help you understand what’s getting in the way.
I offer psychodynamic therapy for individuals in Raleigh and across North Carolina via telehealth.
You don’t have to figure this out alone. Schedule a consultation today to see if we’re a good fit.
