Why I Moved Away From The Mental Health System10 min read

It’s good to see y’all one more again, my name is Frantzces. I’m a Plant Medicine Integration Coach, which just basically means, um, I help people find healing through plant medicines and transformative coaching. Um, if they want to do both or one. Uh that’s that’s all good. Okay. She’s like, Hmm. I got things to say about let’s talk.

I’d love to hear your thoughts too chile, yeah, so I just wanted to go live tonight and I hope you can hear me. Okay.

You’re going to hear the motor bikes. Can’t do nothing about that, but I’m going to move a little bit closer. So I wanted to go live tonight because I wanted to talk openly about why I kind of veered off the beaten path when it comes to the healing journey and how I felt the mental health system just stopped working for me.

And I remember I walked away from the mental health system, uh, professionally in 2013 when I had burnt out. There’s a whole story about that on Chronicles Abroad, podcasts, first episode part two. So you can hear about that transition, but in 2016, I like personally left. Um, the mental health system and all that stuff. And that’s when I bought my one way ticket and went to Asia and just traveled the world.

And it was through that journey that I was able to find a lot of healers and teachers and guides to help me make sense of the stuff that was going on with me. And so I was very appreciative of that. Um, but the, you know, the mental health industry, as someone who is a trained therapist, now operating as a coach,

and just as a human being, there was a lot of things. It just didn’t, they didn’t sit well with me. You know what I’m saying? And I felt like I was doing all the things from like meeting with therapists and coaches, reading books, podcasts, and I just kept reaching a brick wall. And I couldn’t, I couldn’t figure out why, why with all the stuff that I was learning, why was I hitting a brick wall?

And some of it could have been too, like, I just wasn’t going deep enough within myself. But, you know, there was no one there to kind of help me figure that stuff out. And so I was like, man, bump this, you know, after doing all of that, because I had questions that people couldn’t answer. And so even as a therapist, when I think about the limitations of the mental health system, um, I had limitations on myself as a professional.

There are things that like I, in terms of, um, who I can work with, where I can work, what I can say, not say, do not do. And as a therapist, I was taught to really keep a distance from my client, like big, big wall. If, because you know, you couldn’t touch or hug your client, you couldn’t cry in front of them. You know, you couldn’t, uh, you know, you couldn’t really just be human, right.

You couldn’t be human. And I thought, okay, this is really weird because, and I understand like what it’s rooted in. However, when you think about it, let the motorbikes pass. However, when you think about it, people are coming to these healing spaces because they either lack or didn’t receive one of those things.

Right? Whether it was like a touch, a kind word, those kinds of things. So for me to be in a healing space to not mirror or reflect that or connect with my clients in that way, just didn’t sit well with me, man. And I ain’t even got to go about, I’m not even going to go into the whole, uh, medication management because I work with kids.

I work with families and there’s a lot of stuff I disagree there too. Uh, but so I had to, I couldn’t, um, what was that what I’m looking for? I couldn’t, I couldn’t find resolution in that. And so, because I couldn’t find resolution in that I kept meeting clients who would say the same thing. I’ve tried everything, I’ve tried everything, and yet I’m still feeling unsettled.

I’m still feeling imbalanced. I feel like there’s a cloud hanging over my head and that’s something that I felt myself like, I’m like, ah, man, what’s going on. And although I recovered pretty quickly, the frequent, the frequency of the bouts, were just too much. And I was thinking like, and this is what brought me into the journey of 2016.

And I started to put two and two together. And I was like, I believe the reason the mental health system fails us is because they fail to incorporate the spirit into the work. And we don’t talk a lot about the impact of the spirit. And we don’t talk about, we don’t talk about it because of all these social constructs around

how you talk about that. Um, and around us making sure that we have like a healthy dialogue, there’s no space to really just talk openly and freely about it usually. Right. Um, but let me tell you when our bodies yearn to relax, when it’s craving to feel grounded, that’s the spirit, right? When our minds desire less chatter or to be free from negative scripts, looping in our minds. That’s the spirit when our hearts ache for love, union wisdom, understanding peace, compassion, all of these things. That’s the spirit, you know, you know, when there’s imbalances with the spirit, you find it really hard to love, hard to be vulnerable.

Hard to, to trust. Hard to accept the impermanence of life. You know, those things that come up for us are those things that come up for us are really, uh, troubles of the soul not the mind. You know, as I get more into like shamanic work and shamanic understanding a lot of shamans don’t even believe in like trauma.

It’s wild. I’ll save that conversation for another day. But I realized I didn’t learn any of that in the mental health system. Right. And part of that is not only just a system, but it’s, uh, your own personal one-on-one journey as you move about the world. Right. And so, you know, I do want to caveat and say, you know, that the system serves its purpose.

It does bring relief to certain people. Um, and so I’m not going to discount that because every stone along our path helps us to connect something. So if we’ve gone through that system and we’re able to find some sort of meaning or experiences from that, then, um, you know, we, we can take that with us still, but what I’m realizing is that that system, it will not help us to really know ourselves on a deeper level.

And I’m talking about like deep, deep. So I have clients who often ask me, I don’t know what my purpose is? I, how do I find my purpose? And I thought to myself, that’s not a question of the mind. Like that’s not a checklist that I can just say, okay, I just do this and I find my purpose. That is a philosophical, spiritual question.

And if you’re really disconnected from your spirit, it’s going to be really difficult for you to find your calling because finding your purpose or calling comes from like the depths of your existence. Which is the spirit, right? So if we aren’t connected to that, then you know, how can we really do what we’re here to do?

And I find that what helps to awaken the spirit is a relationship between the heart and the mind when they start talking together. Right? Because as these flows throughout our bodies and when they’re blocked, I mean, some people call them the chakras, you know, when they’re blocked they really keep us living separate lives, right?

We’re living not only separate external lives, but we’re living separate internal lives. Like everything about ourselves is so compartmentalized. And so for me, like modern mental health ignores the spiritual self, you know, without really understanding the spirit self we’ll find ourselves really struggling with things that are intangibles, like the intangibles of life impermanence.

Things with things just change and shift. We always want some sort of concrete answer, but often, um, there’s just a spiritual, how could I describe it? We’re looking for like a concrete answer that the words can’t really provide to us. Right. And so I learned on my journey towards healing that traditional methods

weren’t going to cut it. So I have to veer off the unbeaten path and find healing and in a process of finding healing, learning ways to connect with my higher self, you hear that term with my higher self, right? That sounds very esoteric, but really your higher self is just a, you finding your, the most authentic way of being, living, feeling.

So your authentic self, which I think is very difficult for a lot of us um, on this path because we wear so many masks and so many social constructs that get in the way of us really stepping into who we really are. And so, you know, the mental health system really has a tendency to really they drown out, not only our geniuses, but our inner standing of our inner world.

Right. And there’s so much in the system that it bypasses all of the elements of the self, all of it. And it keeps it separate. And that’s why you always hear, like, all is self people will say that all is self, um, so I’m coming, I’m coming to wrap this up now, but so as you walk on the journey to deepen your inner standing of yourself, you know, I just encourage you to not forget about the spirit. Take a look at the spirit, um, and just, you know, ask yourself some questions and see what you can

find, um, but that’s all I got for you guys. So that’s why I walked away from the mental health system. I mean, I do have a therapist, but it’s, it is different. She’s different. I, you know, I encourage people to find people who don’t mind coloring outside the lines. They understand how flawed the system is and they find ways to work around it.

So she does things differently and it resonates with me. But I also have a spiritual mentor. And I have other mentors in my life that do very different things, but there’s still a certain alignment. They all believe that there is a spirit that needs tending to, and that’s my philosophy. And that works on the journey that I’m trying to, to be on that I am on.

So you can have all these different elements in your life, uh, but really understand and ask yourself, is, is this connecting to my spirit? All right. That’s all right. Maybe I’ll see you all next Wednesday. Good night.

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