For the longest time, I thought he did not understand what the word meant. I mean how can one word truly apply to so many emotions? It just didn’t make sense. But I started paying close attention to how others in our society use the word “fine”, and I realized I was the one who didn’t actually understand the true nuanced meaning of this word. For such a small word, it packs a huge punch. In this blog, I want to do the word “Fine” justice by exploring the many meanings of this tiny word.

If you are choosing to discuss your mental health struggles with someone, there is likely a reason for this. It is important to know what this reason is. Are you explaining why you hurt someone? Are you asking for help? Are you looking for an accommodation at your job? Are you needing validation? Are you informing a significant other as the relationship grows? Every reason is different. And every reason will require a slightly different conversation. Knowing your reason will help you find the words that need to be said, and have the conversation that needs to be had.

While logically, I understand that there is a lot of stigma around mental illness and mental health struggles, I often emotionally forget this. These types of conversations were my bread and butter nearly from infancy. I grew up surrounded by mental illness, I experienced mental illness first hand, and I jumped right into an education and profession that dealt with it. So I frequently forget that for the majority of society, mental illness isn’t simply a fact of life that needs to be dealt with, like eating or finding transportation to work. For many people in society, mental illness, whether it is yours or someone else’s is this big, scary, taboo thing that you keep hidden in dark corners and hope no one notices it. It’s the elephant in the room that everyone has been taught to politely ignore.

Personally, I believe that addiction and mental illness cannot truly be understood in a vacuum, or in a research lab. I believe there are thousands, if not millions, of factors that affect addiction and mental illness. I do believe that genetic predispositions as well as biochemical factors are relevant to our understanding. But I also honestly believe our environment, and our culture, play a huge role as well. When I read about this study, I began questioning the cultural messages I had been taught about addiction and about mental illness.

It is actually this open-loop regulation with another human that gives rise to the feelings of homesickness, pining, and heartbreak. Without realizing it, we find ourselves using others to balance our states (physically and emotionally). When that other person is suddenly gone, it feels horrible. Imagine a breakup, the first year away from home and family, or the absence of even a few hours of a new love. What you are experiencing is, in part, literal withdrawal from that individual. Your body is reaching out again and again to them to help balance itself and is unable to find the echoing call it needs. The result is a longing, an aching, and a disarray of your emotional and physical systems.

Resilience quite literally means the ability to withstand or recover from difficult conditions. When used in the context of trauma, resilience also refers to the ability to not just recover, but also to adapt to harsh environments. In fact, one the more popular mental health definitions of resilience is “positive adaptation despite adversity.” You will notice that all of these definitions include negative events. This is because resilience cannot be seen unless there is a reason to see it. If everything in life is optimal, there is nothing to “bounce back” from. It is only in the context of adversity that we can truly find resilience.

The researchers also found, what many had suspected, that childhood trauma does effect adult health. What they also discovered was that these correlations were massive. Once researcher even described the numbers as being of pandemic proportions. So what exactly did these researchers find? Let’s look at just a few examples.

As we all know, the childhood brain and body are highly malleable. Our genetic programming assumes that the events we encounter during childhood will be similar to those we encounter in adulthood. This assumption means that our bodies shape us to meet the stressors and requirements of our childhood. If our childhood happens to be traumatic, then our very being will be designed on the assumption that life is a threat to our survival. Trauma will be the forging fire that creates and shapes us

To understand how trauma is different than a typical memory or experience, we first need to understand how the brain processes information. Now I am not a neuroscientist, and I am betting that most of you reading this aren’t either. So, I have taken the most typically accepted research out there and super simplified it to make it a bit more understandable.