I get just as passionate every year when it’s getting close to October 10, the World Mental Health Day that focuses on various themes to create raised awareness about mental health.
We want openness and information campaigns about mental health, and that is good. However, generally speaking our mental health hasn’t improved, rather quite the opposite. Statistics for suicide, for example, haven’t been significantly reduced by using one day a year to focus on mental health, or by medicating for that matter.
What we really need are information campaigns that tell us how we in fact can use our own innate resources to take charge of our own mental health, so that we can cope with changes in life. We must learn how we can in fact get the change we want, and not just talk about it.
To get change, we must create change! It’s about time to focus on a much deeper level than just outer changes.
In my life, I hit the wall 30 more than years ago. Difficult and painful experiences had accumulated that had not been processed or worked out, because I hadn’t learned how to do that. Feeling emotional despair and not being able to see any solutions led to desperation. I asked the public system for help, but was sent home again. Desperate to get help, I sat down and refused to leave the psychiatric clinic until I was admitted. I was admitted, then sent home after one week with a journal entry stating that they had nothing to offer me because I understood my own situation so well.
I was offered pills and a psychologist. After meeting with the psychologist I understood that what he had to offer wasn’t for me. I was to sit and talk about whatever I wanted to, but he gave me no feedback. What I needed was someone who could advise me about what I could do to help myself, and some techniques that I could use – not just sitting there to talk about painful memories and incidents that had occurred. Pills were not a solution either, they only treated symptoms and did nothing about the cause. Emotions were just suppressed but not processed. The route to suicide was just as close as ever, and my desperation was just as great.
I was a “successful” person on the surface, with a good education as a financial manager and a family life with small children. It was due to the children that I held on. In this same period of time I had a near-death experience that changed my way of looking at life forever, and was also the driving force that gave me the strength and courage to seek out new ways of doing things.
After many years of my own self-development and research about principles in various scientific theories, I finally understood how I could use innate resources within myself to cope with the feelings I had. I used all my time to develop techniques that could help me to achieve good mental health, and now I use my life to share the techniques and principles I found along the way.
Even if you feel that mental health isn’t important for you because you have a good life now, we all will at some point in life encounter changes in life. Perhaps changing jobs, changing relationships, illness and/or death in the family or other changes that are heavy burdens. Then situations may become overwhelming because things that have been stored or suppressed in the subconscious can be triggered and rise to the surface.
One reason I get so passionate about this subject is that we haven’t made much progress in the past 30 years in our development and knowledge about human mental health. Now I know that many will react to this – but before you react, look at the results we see in society. More and more young people flounder and are given pills or sent to a psychologist. Some people tell me that they “unplugged” by using alcohol after a stressful day, ending up with alcohol abuse. If we had just learned to ask ourselves what we were “unplugging” from, and in addition had learned techniques that allow us to do something about the cause. We can do that today. We can learn to cope with stress and pressure in daily life.
In my enthusiasm about sharing the techniques that helped me to make lasting changes and achieve good mental health, I asked Norway’s Prime Minister to meet with me. I didn’t get to meet with the Prime Minister, but I was allowed 15 minutes with an Undersecretary. I went to Oslo with preliminary documentation on research we have done, and more than 300 reference letters from people who had made great changes in their lives with help from DB-System®. I wanted to at least give information that newly developed methods to train the brain are available, and can help us to cope with fear and anxiety in a new way.
As I mentioned initially, it’s good to be open and focus on our mental health, but we need to do more than just talk about it. We must be willing to acquire new knowledge about the brain and the way it functions, so that we don’t stay in a rut time and time again. Training the brain can help us to change old neural pathways and that helps us to change our behavior in daily life. Some people are stuck in what they have learned, and say that we cannot change what has happened – and that is correct. What we change is our feelings regarding whatever has happened and how we evaluate it. It was in that way I changed my traumatic life, instead of remaining a victim or becoming a part of sad statistics.
Deborah Borgen
Founder
