Over the past 15 years my views on what it means to “have issues” have changed. Sure there are people who have serious mental illnesses – and that absolutely cannot be minimized. It’s important to act quickly and thoroughly when someone has acute health issues. Yet I have come to realize that most of us are just dealing with the human condition. Anxiety, depression, shifts in mood – there are almost no people who don’t struggle with these issues in some way. I have also come to realize that there is a consistent and powerful solution for most of this struggle, we all simply need a place to plug in.
What does it mean to plug in? It means finding the place, YOUR place to effectively place a certain kind of your energy. And once that is done, a great amount of relief from day to day malaise can be felt.
Once I started to notice a “plugging in” trend, I started asking the same question to every person that came in….Where are you suffering and how can we get that part of you plugged in?
Overall I noticed that the anxious person needs to feel more in charge. Once plugged in and in charge of something, anxiety may decrease. The depressed person may need a creative outlet for that swirl of emotion that arises. The person with the mood swings may need to be in a business that bounces up and down like he does. Just this morning I was reading that CEO types are more likely to have Bipolar Disorder. The big ideas and wild energy from mania can help fuel success. In many ways it seems like all the greats have some form of extreme tendency. Do you think competitive athletes get there by practicing life in total balance? Eventually they may strive for that but more often than not they are plugging in their obsessiveness, perfectionism and maybe even their grandiose ideas. Would anyone discourage greatness? I want to note here that I am in no way promoting mental illness as a fuel for success. Just the opposite really. I have noticed that we all have different needs to balance out our different personalities and finding the right outlet can do the trick.
What has happened to many of my clients is that when they plug in, they simply stop feeling so bad. Their troubling energy is being moved into something productive. And furthermore, that troubling energy is lessened and so is less likely to cause problems in the person’s life.
So maybe when you encounter troubling energy in your life, you can stop being so mean to yourself. Stop judging yourself so harshly. Instead, when that energy pops up, what if you just shrugged and asked…
Where can I plug you in?
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