I have a confession … 2020 was my best year because it led me to self-examination. I gave birth to my daughter and faced the most anxiety-inducing time of my life. For the first time in my life, I had to face pain in all areas of my life at once. I was in extreme physical pain and weakened like I had never experienced, isolated away from everyone like everyone else, starting a new chapter in life with no guides or assistance. Building something new in my career, physically changed forever, overly emotional from hormones and the onset of grief that such a joyous event in my life would pass like a thief in the night. I had to dig deep spiritually, wondering what would happen next, stressed in my marriage – it's hard to spend 24 hours a day for a year with a newborn with no breaks with someone in a global pandemic even if you love them.
Everything amounted to my coming to terms that I have a lot of unresolved grief to deal with, and the pandemic was the pandora's box that opened it for all to see. I knew that I had always purposely made myself not "feel" in different parts of my life as a way of survival and what I learned as a path to success.
I believe many people had turned off their ability to "feel," and now this river, or should I say ocean of emotions, lays before all of us, and for many, it has turned into a hurricane or tidal wave. I know that I am not alone because as I was working one day, a text message appeared on my phone from the company T-Mobile as a public service message offering people a number to text if they need help with a mental health issue.
I was not surprised as there are regular reports in the news about the mental health crisis in America and worldwide.
Since I am an optimist, I try to see the silver lining in facing all my issues at once. At least they are now out in the open, this is the best time to have problems since you are not alone and almost everyone can understand. It is the start of a new world. This is the chance to rewrite, edit or change our story.
And although I am an optimist, I am no Pollyanna and know that changing your story is not easy. We must get help to make a change.
I reached out to Adonica Shaw, author of Depressed to Daring, Founder of Surrender Circle, and the Self-Care Saturday Podcast, where she interviews leading wellness experts about self-care. Ms. Shaw's organization called Surrender Circle creates solutions for women to improve their mental health and wellness outcomes. In addition to being an author, founder, and podcaster, she is the creator of the Self-Care Everyday Bookstore, an online Bookstore launched in 2020 during the pandemic specializing in providing books to help with your mental health and self-care needs.
Ms. Shaw's easy-to-read, no-nonsense book and revolutionary self-care bookstore inspired me to dive deeper into the mental health crisis. The online bookstore that starts with an online mental health assessment then finds and offers you what you need to improve your mental health and develop a self-care ritual. I was amazed at how accurate it was and asked Ms. Shaw to tell me more in an interview.
My Interview with Adonica Shaw
What are the three main factors contributing to the mental health crisis?
I think some of this was already there, and it was under-reported because of the stigma. The pandemic almost pushed people to the point of not having a choice but to report it for their safety and sanity. Now that people are starting to feel a little bit more comfortable and confident seeing ads on social media from the various mental health platforms and apps that have emerged in his last year, people are more confident reaching out for help. They feel a bit better about admitting that there's some information they may need to feel better and feel more balanced.
It could be financial concerns, health problems, having issues with family or loved ones, domestic violence, an increase of substance abuse, social disadvantages or, perhaps not having the ability to work from home and not having childcare.
If you're a single parent or don't have somebody who can help you, if you already had stress pre-pandemic, having that stress be prolonged for over a year and not knowing when things will let up. I think many of those things contributed to people coming forward and being far more vocal than before.
Can you explain why catharsis (emotional purging) is essential?
Just like taking out the trash, if you have a house and you have a bunch of trash building up, eventually it must go outside. Similarly, if you go through many experiences where perhaps you feel treated unfairly, you felt that something was unjust or you disagreed with, if you don't say anything and let those emotions out, they end up staying in your body. It has a negative impact on your body and your mental health. Purging is letting out of those emotions now. There is a different way for everyone, but if there is a way to get the information out regularly or get feeling the pain out. The key is to purge periodically.
In my book, I discussed that I was going through my divorce two years ago. I had a lot of pent-up energy in my body some nights. Thinking about the ups and downs of the relationship and needing to release the pain to move forward, I got pinatas and used them to help me get that energy out of my body and release pent-up anger and feelings. Sometimes if I didn’t, I would be up fidgeting in the middle of the night. There are only so many times you can clean your whole house at 2 a.m. The purging of it, going to counseling, talking to friends, then just doing other things with my entire body and showing up in those moments of feeling hard on myself or worthless or whatever; It was a way that I worked to get the anger, pain, and anxiety out of me.
Is staying positive the answer to staying mentally fit?
I will say it is one answer, but honestly, it is not the only one for me. I think allowing yourself to feel those contrasting experiences, taking the data you gain from them, and then allowing those things to work towards your overall balance, not only isolating the good stuff.
I read this article on Very Well Mind sometime in February, where they outlined the harsh truth around toxic positivity. I thought the content of that article was extremely well-written. It talks about forcing yourself to be happy all the time and how it is harmful. Instead of sharing an authentic emotion and gaining support from other people, you end up putting yourself in this position where nobody knows there's a problem. If you feel a certain way, you prevent yourself from getting validation from that authentic experience.
The other thing that it does is that it can cause guilt, sending this message to your brain that you are doing something wrong if you don't feel positive. You do need to be able to experience those contrasting emotions. Lastly, going through this phase of positive vibes does not allow for genuine connection when people tell you real stories about themselves and need support.
Why do you think that a record number of young people and children suffer from depression these days?
I think there are a lot of factors causing the rise in youth mental health issues. One factor that can sometimes be overlooked especially right now is parents who are struggling to reconcile their own beliefs around their mental health. If they cannot manage them correctly, it could result in behaviors that are trickling down to the children that are making it hard for the kids to cope.
What is your definition of self-care?
If I am talking about mental health, I am talking about self-care.
Why have you chosen to focus on women with Surrender Circle?
The mission of our company is to help women improve their mental health and wellness outcomes right now. Were focused on women because it is based on my life experiences and my access to resources. That’s who I feel uniquely positioned to help right now. That doesn’t mean that that it won’t expand into men or different people in the future. That’s where we are now, but our new product, my wingwomen.com, has launched its beta version. If you check us out online, you will see what it’s all about and a community of professional women who are all interested in wellness and mental health and improving those things.
I have had a very varied background. I started as a weather woman. After weather, I transitioned into doing marketing and public speaking. I’ve written a book, run for office, and given several TED talks, and so in all of these environments, you would think that they would be incredibly different just given the industry types. They were not particularly for other women that I ran into and how that stress impacted us. I wanted to create a safe space where professional women who were either coming into power or in this I’m going to break the glass ceiling in my industry type of mindset had a place where they can come to and get peer support from one another.
It is a peer-to-peer social wellness platform. So it is safe to talk about things that are on your mind that could be causing anxiety, you know, things that could impact your reputation or career. For example, if you’re going through financial hardship and it affects your career in some negative way or affects your mental health negatively. Wingwomen.com would be the platform to talk about it; our forums allow each of the members to put content on there or to ask questions anonymously, which I think is fantastic because sometimes you want help, and you don't want people to know.
It was imperative to me to make sure that for women who didn't have a support system around them or came from families where mental health is highly stigmatized, or honestly don't want to tell people their business, they could get that support and help.
I would encourage women to check out that platform; it's free for now. It is there for you as a resource to get feedback to purge. If you need to find that community of people who will get it even if you don’t have others around you to do that, it’s terrific.
The Everyday Self-Care Online Bookstore
The Everyday Self-Care Online Bookstore, at the very top in the navigation panel, you can access the self-care quiz. It’s a behavioral assessment that will tell you what area of self-care you should focus on, and from there, you can use that result to search this site. So, if you are looking to improve your physical self-care routine or get ideas, you can go directly to the website's physical self-care portion, and the books are already there for you. So, you are not trying to figure out what is going to the spa fixes, or is he the right thing for me? It is a matter of really being strategic about it. When I vetted the titles for the books in the store, I made it to help women get more specialized information because yoga doesn’t work for everybody.
I wanted to find a solution that people could see themselves reflected in because if all they heard about on social media was about self-care was doing yoga and drinking tea, if that wasn’t their thing, I didn't want it to feel like it was something that wasn't for them. I very much wanted it to be very inclusive. The thought process behind it was very intentional. It is designed to be very pretty and attractive and appealing because I want women to feel like it was just like any other site or whether they are on there for mental health purposes or get themselves back to start feeling more balanced.
Do you think the mental health crisis will continue to grow even after Covid-19?
Some children have missed an entire year of school where a lot of social-emotional learning takes place. Children have been around their families for a whole year. They have not had access to school counselors and have not had access to a coach or community member who might have looked out for them. So even with the children alone, they have potentially lost a year of school. I think we are going to see those numbers go up as time goes on. The picture will get clearer of what has happened and how it has impacted the kids when they go back to school for some of the assessments, or we start to see families come forward with that information in the years to come.
It will be hard to put the finger on it, I would say at least for the next five years. When you remove an entire year of that type of development for children, it will have a lasting impact not just for them, not just for adults.
What should a person look for in a therapist?
Find out what their specialty is, know how much they charge; obviously, those are your must-haves on any therapy list, the basics. Depending upon what it is that you are trying to unpack, you can be more strategic. One thing that I saw come out a lot last year, particularly with people of color, was the idea of finding a black therapist or a therapist that understands where you are coming from if you are trying to unpack racial trauma or microaggressions. So that you don't feel the need to have to regurgitate your entire traumatic history to somebody every time you walk into an office.
It takes you off the hook of having to do that, and when it comes to getting real and honest feedback and even validation, you are speaking to somebody that understands. Again, depending upon what you are using the therapy or the counseling sessions for, I would encourage you to see what type of background they have and, realistically, if they are positioned to help you uniquely.
Be strategic because when you get on the internet and you Google therapist and the top five Google results come up, that doesn't mean that one of those top five is your person. I would encourage you to treat it like going on a first date with somebody do a little bit of research, see what comes up, check the reviews. I’ve seen people do more research on somebody they met on Tinder; you're going to entrust this person to help you work through some challenging memories and experiences in your life. You want to make sure that you are getting the best fit and so irrespective of where they come up in those search results. It would behoove you to check out that information and make sure you’re not wasting your time; find somebody more likely to help you from a place of love and compassion and understanding when you walk through those doors.
What do you think happiness is?
I think it is about being self. I remember my twenties. I was like, I am going to be happy when I’ve got a castle, a million dollars when I got the perfect body, and then you get older, and those are the things that keep you up at night, you know the things that keep you up at night or your relationship with others. It’s how you feel about yourself and how you feel about your body. Sometimes it can be, like, how much money do you have in the account? But a lot of that thinking stems from your perspective of yourself. And so, for me at this stage, being self-accepted means I’m in a position most times to take myself off the hook when I start feeling like I don't measure up or I'll never get it right, or nobody's listening or nobody's cares. When you think I can’t believe this is as far as I've come. Even though I've been working this hard. Being in that place of acceptance and being in that loving, compassionate space for myself first and foremost allows me to be uniquely positioned when something comes up that could be triggering.
Happiness is my ability to see myself as imperfect but perfectly, and with that clear vision, I can do all things and continue to work hard and continue to make progress and know that even when things get out of balance sometimes. I love myself and respect myself enough that I can bring it back to that center place, and I can act from that place again, and while my definition of happiness has certainly changed, self-acceptance is the one that works for me.
About Adonica Shaw
Named as one of the top 136 Black Innovators in STEM + Arts by Wonder Women Tech, Adonica is an app developer and intentional wellness advocate dedicated to cultivating digital spaces that inspire and motivate professional women to improve their mental health by dedicating themselves wholeheartedly to self-care.
An intentional advocate dedicated to cultivating spaces that inspire and motivate professional women to live in their truth, Adonica is an impactful leader who proactively encourages others to show up for their truth.
As the Founder of Surrender Circle, she’s an expert in adversity who believes that overcoming and embracing difficult life experiences creates a space for you to show up as your authentic self daily. With her relentless passion for walking in your purpose, she has discovered innovative ways to help people connect and not hide from their past while acknowledging and protecting who they truly are.
As a 3-time TEDx Speaker, Adonica has incomparable messaging and speaking experience in managing high-functional depression, stress, and anxiety and is powerfully unique at helping others define and craft the role of self-care and mental and emotional health while achieving professional success.
Stay in touch with Adonica on Instagram @adonicashaw and Facebook @adonicamshaw.
Fresh Mental Health and Self-Care Resources
Everyday Self-Care Online Bookstore
The Wingwomen (www.mywingwomen.com)
https://www.thesurrendercircle.com/
About the Author
Annmarie Hylton-Schaub, Head Marketing Strategist and Content Developer at Project Good Work a boutique marketing group focused on helping individuals who want to launch social impact projects, charities, and change-making initiatives. The marketing group works to develop branding, marketing strategy, and content to connect clients with the people who believe what they believe so that their project and business can thrive.
If you have a passion for an unserved community, a social justice problem, or simply want to change minds contact Project Good Work at ProjectGood.Work to start your project of change today.