Where do I start?

Hi and thank you so much for reaching out to us, and for putting your trust in our hands. I hope that we can help you by answering your questions and give you the guidance that you need now. Let me start by introducing myself; my name is Alin Tovar, I am a licensed professional counselor in the state of Texas, and I have been working for BetterHelp for two years now. 

When it comes to your question “where do I start?” I know that you are already starting in a good place by reaching out for help. I want to start by thanking you for coming to us and trying to find your answers here. You should thank yourself too because you are already seeking this help. I am going to guide you and ask you some questions that I feel would be pertinent for you to meditate on and answer on your own. However, I feel that you do not have to go through this alone. If you feel that you are reaching rock bottom or that your walls are closing in on you and you are not finding any doors to escape, then it would be time for you to seek out professional help to guide you through this process. I do not know anything about you besides the few words that you have sent our way, with this limited information I will still try my hardest to answer your question and to give you as many tools and tips that I feel will be helpful for you to consider.

Based on what you asked I think that it would be important for you to first define what “alone” means to you? How are you defining this term. How are you defining being alone? Also think about what do you think is affecting you the most? Have you ever felt alone before? What has helped in the past? We might not have to reinvent the wheel, and if this is something that has happened in the past and you have been able to surpass it, then what were some tools and techniques that helped you? What would a person, based on your perspective that knows how to take care of themselves look like? What behaviors and life patterns would this hypothetical person have? Compare your life to that definition and think of what is within your power to do to get there? 

When it comes to how to take care of ourselves or how to learn how to take care of ourselves, I would recommend that you identify what are some areas in your life that you think do not exemplify behaviors of a person that is taking care of themselves? What are some areas of your life that you feel are the ones that are weighing on you the most that you would want to change? Once you do this then I would define for every single one of the areas that you wrote down, individually define what would ideally taking care of that area would look like? And what is within our power to get there?

Then let us come up with a plan for each. An example can be, I want to take care of my spiritual health, I want to learn how to take care of my mental health, I want to learn how to take care of my physical health. And these are the stressors that are affecting me the most. Then we would start by digesting them.  For example, spiritual health: “well, I feel that a person that is healthy and knows how to take care of themselves spiritually they would attend church or they would congregate at least once a week.” Here you are already defining what that would looks like for a person that would be taking care of themselves in this area, so the next question would be “OK, now that I have defined this, what am I doing well or what can I do better in order to reach this? What plans do I have to start doing this if this is something that I want to do? What is within my power to get there?”

Another example is the physical health example that I provided earlier, if this is one of our stressors: “I feel that physical health is something that I know I am not doing well and I should take care of this, I feel that I am not in good health”. Let us come up with a plan and define what would hypothetically a healthy person look like: ”well maybe this person would work out three times a week, this person would not drink alcohol or would not partake in substances that might affect their body”. “What is within my power to ensure that I do this?, well maybe I need to create a routine, I need to create a schedule for my daily life activities in which I will incorporate physical exercises. I will set several reminders on my phone to remind me to workout three times a week, maybe I need to buy a Fitbit or a pedometer etc.” These are just examples of how you can learn to simplify what you feel is affecting you the most and let us do something with it. Let us come up with a plan for it. What I can see happening is that when individuals feel that they are reaching rock bottom, they try to digest all their problems as a whole instead of simplifying them and identifying them by dissecting them one by one.

I would also recommend for you to think about what you value in life? What is important to you in your life and what is within your power to achieve that and or to ensure that you are following what you value on daily basis? At the end of the day, you have absolutely no control over anybody else but yourself and that on its own is very powerful. Regain some of that control by defining some of these terms (what does it mean to be alone, what would a person that takes care of themselves act like, look like… like I wrote earlier). There are individuals that come to therapy and tell me I want to be happy, and when I ask them to define what happiness looks like for them or is to them they do not know. They will never reach their goal when you do not know what that goal looks like.

I wish you the best of luck and I hope that you took away a few tools from here and that everything turns out well. Thank you for trusting us and sending this information our way and I hope that over all you feel better each day.