Video Transcript: Integration Part 2

Welcome back to mental health integration the short course. I once again, I'm  Brandon and Brandon Appelhans, I am Brandon, and I'm happy to see you here. This time in this course, we're going to do a little bit more about self care, just a  little bit, and then we're going to start walking through what integration actually  looks like and how it occurs. Okay, so once again, if this is intriguing to you, take the long course. I am cutting out so much material, it's not even funny, so take  the long course. It's going to be great. We start with physical care. We've talked  about how to take care of ourselves and exercise. We have not really touched  on what kinds of exercise you need to do. In general, it's a great idea to do  weight training, and it's a great idea to do some form of cardio. Whatever that  looks like for you, is great. I like running. I like throwing things around, like we  talked about earlier. You still can't we also talked about sleep and how important  it is, so continue to work on sleep. We talked about diet and how important it is,  so work on diet, but how does that affect the questions like, Who am I? We're  talking about mental health integration. We have to talk about how everything is  falling apart, right? These concepts of ourself fall apart because our capacity  shrinks. And in the West, and especially in the United States, we are people who judge each other by our capacity. Having a degree from Harvard is a great thing. Having no degree or an associate from a community college is not why, because it's a designation of capacity. This person is clearly really bright. This person is  not so. What do we do in the face of big questions like, Who am I? Well, if you're dealing with mental health integration, you're dealing with disintegration as well.  You've been disoriented, and now you need to get reoriented. We ask the  question how who am I? Because we don't know anymore. For most of our lives, we've worn masks to cover up who we are that are made up of things like our  job titles and our prestige and the things that we carry, and our titles, like  husband or father, and when we start peeling those off, because we don't feel  like those things anymore, we often don't know what's underneath, it feels like  we peel off the mask and there's nothing underneath, like we're some sort of  hollow person. But the truth is that there are parts about you that God wants to  sow into you desperately and wants to make you whole in there's parts of you  that never change. And the reason that we talked about Genesis 1-3 in the  beginning of this is because Genesis 1 and 2 outline who we are as human  beings in the beginning, before the fall. Where are these beloved cared for,  image bearers. And Genesis 3 cracks everything. Sin comes into the world, but  all of a sudden we are not sinners who are terrible. We are beloved image  bearers who are tainted by sin. Okay, then the work of Jesus is to redeem that  image bearer and help them be adopted back into God's family and be as they  were, even more so, because now they have the Spirit of God actually living  within them. So when we talk about the question of who am I, we have to ask,  what about you never changes, and that identity as a beloved son or daughter  never changes. The hard work about integration is not understanding who I am, 

because I can understand this. The hard work about integration is helping  someone believe who they are, because the way that we believe who we are is  we have to slowly understand this thing and then have testing come upon us  that kind of grinds it into us. We have to experience hearing who we are from  God Himself. We have to start processing what our masks are, what we're  hiding under, how to take those off and slowly, slowly reintegrate. We, in some  ways, have to lose ourselves to find ourselves that almost sounds biblical, when  we ask the same questions, we can discover that we are beloved sons and  daughters of God that have inherent meaning and purpose and that that can  never be taken from us. And that's even true, we're in the midst of a mental  health crisis when someone like me can have bipolar disorder and cannot know  which way is up at times, like my friend who has schizophrenia, but he's a  beloved Son of God, like my friend who went through PTSD and her life was  absolutely shattered, and she was a beloved daughter of God when she couldn't do anything. This is the process of integration. Take the three credit course  there's more in there. Who is God? Our ideas of God are often broken when we  expect God to treat us certain ways and then he doesn't. We talked in the  previous sections about how there was this idea that came up of God must not  even love me. He must not have good intent towards me. He must even have  malintent towards me, because why else would he let me go through all of the  things that I've gone through? It's not enough just to say, Jesus loves you. We  know that. But Richard Rohr has a way of understanding knowing. And he says,  you hear something and you intellectually know it, and then you go through a  process of having to understand it for your life. And that's when you learn  everything there is to learn about this thing. You have to go through. You have to break it apart. You have to tear it down. You have to learn every single facet of it. It gets really, really complicated. And on the other end of that complication, there is a simplicity that comes out of it, which is often the same as the thing that you  knew before, except now, instead of knowing it, you know it. And that space  when we say God is love, or Jesus loves me, that's true. And then we go  through trials that break it apart, and we have to learn everything about it, and  we have to discuss who we are and who God is. And we wrestle with this over  and over and over again. And then we come out the other side and we say, God  is love, and I am a beloved son, right? This is the process of integration. What  am I capable of? When our capacity shrinks, it changes how we see ourselves,  especially when we define ourselves as valuable and worthy only in light of our  capacities, which is the American dream, in some ways, you were nothing. You  became something because of your incredible capacity and your willingness to  strive and do it. So what happens when that all disappears and suddenly you  can't Are you still somebody, and are you still capable of anything? One of the  big lies that comes up is I am no longer capable of anything, because I'm not  capable of the thing I was before. That's an absolute lie. In the midst of mental 

illness, I have learned empathy and compassion at levels I never thought  existed. I have learned how to be a good human being to other human beings  and how to care for them, because I have desperately needed that care. There  are parts of you that you will experience an incredible depth of capacity and  there are parts of you that will experience an incredible lack of capacity, and that is okay. You are no less valuable and worthy and loved because your capacity is diminished. You are still good. As a final note, a lot of the time you'll get your  capacity back later. The work through this mental health issue. My mental health issue was really 14 to 16, and then my capacity came back. Then in my 20s, I  had to mourn all of the things that I lost in those high school years. I had  discovered what it was to be a beloved Son of God. I had to learn how to work  through my own identity, and I added actually, a lot of capacity during that time  that has propelled me forward. Are you capable? Yeah. Is there a time where  you won't feel capable, yeah? Is that okay? Yeah. Your job in the middle of a  mental health crisis. This seems really simple, is to stay alive and stay at it. I  was considered a massive success, and it's because I didn't die. That's it. I  didn't die for two years. Instead, I was a really good client. I failed school. I failed most everything else. I didn't die, though, and because of that, I'm capable now,  and God's done all sorts of crazy stuff. So if you don't feel your capacity now,  you'll get it later. It's okay, and God will show you even newer and cooler ways.  You couldn't have imagined that that'll come about. I'll see you in the next  section.