Mental Health: Whom Can Be Trusted?
When it comes to trauma, the immediate issue is to find someone to confided in. That raises another: whom can be trusted? For being mislead for the 2nd or 3rd time really magnified the damage.
There is no easy answer to that. Common sense would tell “ Check the track record of the person, bla bla bla”. But there is no guarantee. And being traumatized, we’re not in the best position to evaluate objectively.
But what do we need from a confidante, really? Someone whom will listen to our story & someone whom can give an honest advice. And thank God, there are alternatives to a person when it comes to fullfilling these functions.
Writing
Want to feel heard? Write. Sing it. Or whatever that let out.
It might not felt as good as talking to a confidante, but in the event of having none, it is a very great alternative. Even if you had one, it might not always be the great idea to tell everything to a person. It is a person after all whom always have a conflict of interest. So writing could be the place to share your most intimate thought.
You’ll be surprise — how much it help — just by uttering everything out and hearing that back yourself.
Reading
We want unbiased & conflict-free advice. When we started, we gravitate toward the loudest speaker in the room which usually financially-motivated (least they wouldn’t make that much effort). They are prone to saying what makes them the most money than what actually helping. People around us have different kind of conflict of interest. Even in the best case, they won’t talk frankly in fear of jeopardizing the relationship. They are no expert too. So where that leave us? Books!
Books are written by man of course. And thus has similar pitfall as hearing advice from a man. But the writer least likely to have conflict of interest with us since they don’t know us personally. Furthermore, we could exercise it in our own phases & see how it goes. And this might be the biggest advantage of getting advice from a book: You could get advice from people that you’ll never meet (either because they are too expensive or they already dead). And that’s why books are superb.
The common pitfall of readers is reading too narrowly on a subject. That might works once you identified ideas that works for you. But more than not early readers fall into trap of wasting too much time on ideas that’s not working for them because they are not aware that there are other ideas out there that are worth look into. So read diversely.
