Something I recommend often with my coaching clients is to see a psychiatrist to potentially get some prescription drugs. There are multiple reasons for this.
One, we must destigmatize mental “illness” and see it as something not too different from a physical “illness” like a foot sprain or strep throat.
Two, many times a great amount of suffering is actually caused by something that can easily be resolved with drugs. Practically all of the diseases that have been eradicated by the year 2025 were diseases that used to kill people. But thanks to medicine we don’t have the disease AT ALL. Many people who seek my services come with early-onset CPTSD, and in that specific case brain development is affected and there is a chemical reason for the overwhelming sensations of debilitating panic and traumatic shock. A proper drug for the chemical environment in the brain can significantly aid the coaching process.
Three, some minds are so unconsciously threatened all the time that it actually does not know what a calm, relaxed state feels like. Even when attempting hypnosis, instead of feeling relaxation they will feel even more anxiety. Even when talking about something completely unrelated to the topic at hand, something will trigger the mind and we won’t be able to have a session. In these cases we have to understand that we need to at least be able to access a baseline state of calm relaxation, and even if you need drugs to access that state it will work as a great tool that can allow you to work downstairs in your unconscious.
The primary resistance I see against taking drugs is, many people feel like they’re broken because they can’t even get into a clear state of mind without drugs. This is a thought that is centered around the binary of right/wrong, good/bad, well/broken and so on. It assumes there’s a “right” state to be, and because we’re not that state we’re “wrong” or “broken”. But when we try to dive deeper into ‘then what is that right state?’ the more we find that we are actually unable to answer that question.
This line of thinking is what leads type 1 diabetics to think there’s something wrong with them. This line of thinking is what leads ADHD people to think there’s something wrong with them. Sure, you could qualify some standard of evaluation but we forget that very important part: it is some standard of evaluation, not the objective, real truth.
Seeing people, even yourself, as “not working” or “broken” is a fundamentally inhumane way of viewing people. We all have some unconscious belief around what humans deserve, what humans need, what humans thrive on. When we subscribe to “I am broken”, we are qualifying ourselves as not deserving of all the things that humans deserve. This is the same line of thinking as racism, colonialism, imperialism; we look back on history and think, ‘how did humans do this to one another?’ and the answer is depressingly simple: they did not see each other as humans.
My friend Kiki over at Spill The Tea Cafe frequently tells me that she doesn’t like the word “resilience”. She feels like that title is earned after going through so many unwanted trials and tribulations, and I think that assessment is fair. When I look at the world’s preventable sufferings of famine, illness, and war I don’t want the survivors to have to wear the mantle of resilience.
But I do think resilience is important, so let’s define it in different terms. Resilience to me is the ability to bounce back from stimulus. I don’t just mean negative stimulus; if you find yourself excited at something and can’t calm down, make choices from that excited state that you regret in the future… To me that wouldn’t be mental resilience.
So it’s this elasticity or bounciness that brings you back to your normal state. As explained above, the ideal desired normal state is the state of calm relaxation. When you’re in calm relaxation and you can think clearly about reality from an objective lens, you can employ multiple perspectives and hold them at once. But without this normal state you’re more likely to make skewed, fueled-by-the-moment decisions.
An important factor to keep in mind: I’m looking to cultivate a holistic resilience, which means resilience across the board. If I’m generally well off in most areas of my life but I’m instantly triggered when it comes to a certain topic, then I’m not completely resilient.
This framework of thinking about resilience helps you understand how I structure the coaching experience for you. We work on things piece by piece, we use one problem to learn how to arrive at the calm, relaxed state of mind and solve it using the truth. Then we replicate this process, we challenge ourselves to find hidden factors that make us smaller than we actually are in truth.
Now, what to do with this information? Take my mental resilience quiz and see where you lie on the resilience scale. It’s full with different categories to help you figure out where you may be strong and where you may benefit from development. Afterwards if you want to talk a bit more about your results and how you can benefit from coaching, you can always email me at billy@julylifecoach.com.
Billy Seol
July Life Coach
julylifecoach.com
