Mental Health for Holiness
A podcast for young Catholic moms who want to build a strong and stable foundation for their mental and emotional health so they can grow in virtue and holiness and love their motherhood. At the age of 24, Talia Kruse was diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder type 2. She wondered how this would affect her future, her faith, and her identity. She felt quite hopeless, unable to find or connect with others who had successfully managed their bipolar disorder in a way that led to growing in holiness and virtue. Encouraged by her psychiatrist, she started a journey of mental healing. After getting married and becoming a mother, Talia saw the desperate need that other women (particularly young mothers) needed in learning to manage their own mental health. She began coaching women and became passionate in spreading hope for all those who suffer from the depression, anxiety, and mood swings of everyday life. Talia learned to see her management of mental health as imperative for growing in holiness, and loves to explore the connection between psychology and faith.
Mental Health for Holiness
Why is Emotional Regulation so Important? Part One: Decision Making.
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
The first in a 3 part series on why emotional regulation is so important.
In today's episode I give a short explanation of why emotional regulation is important for our decision making skills. We make hundreds of decisions every day, and when our decisions are strictly emotion based, it can affect our whole life - our relationships, our finances, our prayer life, our happiness, our holiness - everything!
When we can grow in emotional regulation so that we can still make sound decisions that are not just reactions to our emotions, we will be on our way to making good habits and growing in virtue.
Want to know how you can learn to be more emotionally regulated? You can access my 8 Week Emotional Regulation Course here:
www.mentalhealthforholiness.com
Get your Free Gentle Self Care Tracker:
www.mentalhealthforholiness.com/tracker-sign-up
You cannot emotional regulate if you aren't taking basic care of yourself. When you are a young mom, I know it's so hard to do even the basics! But the point is to do what you can, and start with awareness of where you are.
You need to be able to make good solid decisions every single day - but if you make all decisions based on emotions it’s going to have a huge effect on the quality of your life - the quality of your relationships, your prayer life, your finances, your family size, your happiness, your holiness, everything. A huge part of the Christian life is discernment, and I remember when I used to only think of discernment as like only big decisions. What your vocation is, who you are going to marry, if you’re going to take that job, big things like that. 10 years into marriage, I realize how important discernment is on a daily basis - those little decisions that affect our quality of our life. Now, the Latin root of the word discernment is actually “to separate.” Isn’t that interesting? I literally looked that up like 2 minutes ago and it makes so much sense because the ability to make a smart judgement on something is to be able to see all the factors that are affecting this decision that you need to make - and I’m not saying you should overthink every little step of your day, because when you make lots of smart decisions in a row - it becomes a habit. Because your brain has the capacity to make a new “wiring” if you will, that says “oh we do this.” We made this smart decision yesterday and it produced good fruit and we’re going to do it again. Now where emotions come into this, emotions can have the ability to cloud our perception of things, - I mean how many times have we decided to do something only to not follow through because “we didn’t feel like it.” It was hard. There was something easier that came up. We got distracted, by that more easier thing. And so part of this decision making is being emotionally regulated, or emotionally intelligent, or emotionally aware - there’s lot of different names for this kind of same concept of emotional management - not letting our emotions overtake our decisions. Because our emotions and feelings can just overtake all of our decision making and because our emotions are fickle things - they are not stable, they are not always in line with truth or goodness. So an example as a mom is I know I feel so much better if I can go outside at some point in the day, but then I just don’t feel like it. I don’t feel like getting my shoes on, then I have to get the kids shoes on. And we go down this thought progressions of “it’s just too hard.” And then we’re not motivated and we don’t do it. And then we don’t get the fruits of what going outside could have given us. But when we are able to say “I know I don’t feel like doing this right now, but I’m going to.” And then there are a whole bunch of other factors that we have to allow ourselves to be able to challenge all the other reasons why we shouldn’t go outside. That’s where the thought work starts to come in - and we have to challenge what it means to go outside because sometimes we can make way too difficult. “I have to go for a walk, I have to go weed the garden, I have to go shovel snow, we have to be outside for at least 20 minutes to make it worth it.” No. The goal is to get outside. Breath in the fresh air. Put some sun on our face. I don’t care if it’s 2 minutes. I don’t care if you take the kids outside with you or not.