If you, or someone you love, are frequently engaging in self-defeating, often self-destructive, behaviors and you don’t know or understand why…

These behaviors may include:

Excessive use of alcohol and/or drugs on a regular basis.

Engaging in eating disorders such as bulimia, anorexia, or excessive exercise

Over-indulging in other addictions such as gaming, internet, sex

Any of these can indicate depression as well.

Do I even need help?

So you drink maybe a little too much. Or have a bad relationship with food. Or like to distract yourself more than you probably should. Does that really mean you need to ask for help?

Your pride will tell you that you don’t need help and that you should be able to combat this problem on your own. Many people are stuck, some overcome it, and some give up completely. In my case, I kept my mental struggles secret until I finally reached a point where I acted-out. At that time, I didn’t feel my voice was being respected by my employer, I felt underpaid and undervalued for the work I was doing and I was struggling with depression. I broke down a little mentally, I believe I subconsciously needed to validate my negative feelings about myself by proving to myself that I was the bad person that I felt I was. Some people might have coped by abusing alcohol or drugs, or with whatever distraction they can find from the negative thoughts. I relied on my eating disorder until it wasn’t enough, and I eventually stole products from the employer with whom I was disgruntled before resigning.

When I was caught selling the items I had stolen, I was prosecuted by the State, spent a couple of months in jail, lost my house, car, and was forced to live separated from my spouse while I worked off a load of court-assigned community service. It took a lot for me to realize the severity of my problems before I committed myself fully to ask for help and then go through the recovery process - because ultimately I realized the alternative was to give-up and end my own life. While everything in life may be temporary, it doesn’t always feel that way. But suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem, because every situation you find yourself in will eventually end and there will be new challenges to face. No matter how bad your situation, tell yourself, “maybe things can get better.”

How do I know if I’m ready to ask for help?

Only you know if you are ready to accept help with your problems, but often we don’t even consider asking ourselves if we even want to be helped. Below are some questions you can ask yourself to help get some perspective.

“Would my life be better if I were able to get some help with my problems?”

“If someone I really care about were going through what I am feeling, would I want them to get help?”

“What will it take for me to ask for the help that I need and commit to following through to recovery?”

How professional therapy can help

Everyone struggles with feeling bad about themselves; for some of us, those voices are louder and more insistent than they are for other people. A professional therapist can help you learn how to examine these thoughts and feelings without letting them drive your behavior.

Consider the almost cliché analogy of a good angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other, whispering in our ears. These are our positive and negative thoughts. Our negative thoughts can, and will, overwhelm our positive thoughts if we let them. Start by identifying the negative thoughts and evaluate whether they are helpful or not.

“Are the thoughts that I’m having helping me to live the life that I want?” If the answer is no, identify the kind of thought you are having, and label it. Challenge that negative thought! Ask yourself: “why? Why am I having this thought?” Your goal is to understand where the thought is coming from in your mind - what triggered it and why.

It’s also incredibly important to examine and define what our values are, so we can be honest about what our motivations are. What is important to you? Why is it important? We need to explore our values because they may not be helpful to living the life that we know would make us happier. Try the following exercise and consider what your responses might be:

Where do you live—do you live in a high-rise apartment in a city, in the suburbs, or in the country—and what values led you there? What activities do you engage in most—cultural, physical, religious, political, social—and what values are reflected in those activities? What do you talk about mostly— politics, religion, the economy, other people—and what does that tell you about your values?

Finally, perhaps the most telling question reflecting what you value is: What do you spend your money on—a home, cars, travel, clothing, education, art, charity? Because money is a limited resource for most people, they will use their money in ways that they value most. Over and above what people say and other indicators in their life, where they spend their hard-earned money says the most about their values.

You can then ask yourself whether your current values are the same as those you grew up with. Have you gone through a period of examination and reconsideration? Have you consciously chosen to discard some values from your upbringing and adopt new ones? My experience with people who live unsatisfying lives is the values they grew up with weren’t mostly unhealthy and that their present values haven’t changed since childhood. They never questioned their values and simply bought into them early in their lives and created their life around those values. In contrast, fulfilled people tended to grow up with life-affirming values or had a “crisis of conscience” in early adulthood that caused them to re-evaluate and modify their values.

Excerpted from “Personal Growth: Your Values, Your Life” by Jim Taylor, Ph.D., Psychology Today





Most of us wouldn’t be able to say what our values are if someone asked us out of the blue. But thinking about and determining what your values are can give you a roadmap to help guide you to a better and more fulfilled life. A good therapist will help you explore your values and give you tools to help you work towards living them in a healthy and achievable way.

When you decide to ask for help, just remember: it takes work. Reading one article (or ten, or a hundred) won’t mean you’re suddenly cured. The best I can hope for in writing this article is that it may be the push you need to seek the professional help you may be afraid to look for. And, unfortunately, not all attempts will be successful. It is important that you feel you can trust your therapist, feeling you can be honest with them. You’ll have to find it in yourself to be persistent and be your own advocate - something that can be incredibly difficult when you’re struggling with negative thoughts and destructive behaviors. But the fact that you’ve read this far means you’re thinking about it, and that’s a huge step towards getting better.

I too was skeptical.

I promise, if you give the process the benefit of your doubt, you will gain insights, skills, and a level of awareness you never thought possible. No, it won’t be easy. You may want to quit because it’s hard to change, but you’re strong so you’ll keep going. You may think, like I did, that treatment only works for some people and you’re not one of them. I assure you that if the process didn’t work, I wouldn’t have written this note to you.

Yours truly, a friend.

Daily Mindfulness Skills