Common Principles of Mental Health in Session
In this article, I have included some of the principles I repeat most often in therapy. There is too much important information hidden behind paywalls and profit these days. You deserve to know what helps you feel better. I also want to avoid writing just another internet article - this article has lessons learned from years of education and clinical experience.
Principle 1: Establish Temporary Safety
Issue:
Safety includes being safe physically, but also feeling safe. Felt-safety is an internal state in which your body and mind are not perceiving an active threat.
The ground of modern life is constantly changing. While novelty and change can feel great and even help increase the number of brain cells we grow each day, constant flux and unpredictability are not helpful to mental health. Modern life can be a constant state of flux and unpredictability. The education and formation you got as a child did not prepare you for the new rules that the world now runs by. Technology is advancing faster than any of us can keep up with. Economic uncertainty affects many. Many of us have been affected by harmful substances, trauma, displacement, job loss, and social isolation. When your brain and body sense instability, they respond as though there is imminent danger or even threat to your life.
Your nervous system can go into fight, flight, or freeze and push you out of your window of distress tolerance (Porges, 2022). Getting back in that window of tolerance can be difficult if your distress is acute enough. Many people will try anything they can, to even temporarily bring the nervous system and brain back into balance. Many, if not most people, turn to substances, sex, emotional dysregulation, doom scrolling, shopping, unhelpful eating habits, or rigid behavior to bring balance back. While these behaviors can temporarily bring relief, none of them provide a long-term solution for mental health.
Call to Action:
Establish temporary safety so you have time to establish sustained safety. If you are in immediate danger, take whatever step you need to get out of that situation. If you are living in a household where you feel fearful for your safety, reach out to a professional such as a therapist, or police officer who can help you make a plan to stay safe. You can always return to your situation after the danger has passed. Some temporary ways to establish safety: spend time with people who help you feel regulated such as friends or close family members. Pray and meditate. Breath more deeply than usual. There are lots of resources available on breathing techniques. Physical movement, including exercise, can help you regulate as well. Try not to rely on counterproductive ways of establishing a temporary feeling of safety such as drugs, alcohol, sex, or doomscrolling.
Principle 2: Establish Sustained Safety
Once you have created a sense of temporary safety, use the time and space you have created to establish sustained safety. Neuroception is the often unconscious perception of risk and safety (Mansoor, 2025). A secure attachment can help establish a sense of felt-safety instead of felt-threat.
Call to Action:
Find a stable person who can provide guidance and delight. Perhaps you have never had anyone that really believed in you. A therapist, spiritual director, priest, coach, teacher, mentor, or friend might be able to provide a felt-sense of safety. Look for someone who is attentive to your needs and seems to have your best interests in mind. Most people can identify someone, even if that person is only loosely connected to you right now.
Principle 3: Win the war for your attention
Issue:
There is a war being waged for your attention (Martorell et al., 2024). Chances are, all the people that you want to win are losing and all the people you want to lose are winning. ADHD is a real condition but so is mass attention manipulation. Who is losing the war for your attention? Teachers, religious leaders, family members, friends, parents, kids, spouses, God, and local organizations. Who is winning the attention war? Mega-corporations, elite athletes and pop stars, influencers, technology and social media companies, politicians, and media companies. If you are like most people, you expend most of your attention worrying about people and events remote to you.
Call to Action:
Consider who you want to have your attention and who currently decides where your attention is spent. Spend some time reflecting on the precious resource that is your attention. Who deserves it and what type of legacy do you want to leave? Now consider what it will take to reclaim your attention and spend it in the most meaningful way possible. While a social media fast is a good start, you won’t win back your attention with a social media fast alone. If you choose to unplug, unsubscribe, unlike, unfollow, and optimize, you will likely discover that your life is not what you want it to be. Often, losing our attention to irrelevant forces makes us blind to the most important parts of our lives. If you unplug, you may find that you prefer the digital world to your own world. Probably your financial situation is stressful, your relationships are not what you want them to be, or your health is suffering. It is much easier to give your attention to irrelevant people and events than to address the real issues in your life.
But as Jesus says, “Do not be afraid!” (Matthew 14:27). Your attention can be restored to you and you can make a difference in your life. Who knows how much better your life will be with all that attention focused on it. Train your attention on your own life and fight against the undeserving forces that seek to capture it.
Principle 4: Become More Assertive
Issue:
Many people are very kind, which is a good thing, but it means that you pay a high price. If you are like most people I work with, you would rather keep your thoughts, legitimate needs, and emotions to yourself instead of slightly inconveniencing someone else. The last thing you want is to be a burden to other people or come across as needy. As a result, you never get your needs met, most people have no clue what you think, you don’t know who your true friends are, you lose a lot of money, and you feel emotionally repressed all the time. It is physically painful to be around people, especially during political conversations or conflict. You suffer from decent person syndrome - as I like to call it.
Call to Action:
Being assertive does not mean that you lose your kindness (Speed et al., 2018). It is actually possible to be honest about your thoughts and feelings, AND maintain respect and kindness for others. Knowing the difference between harming someone and hurting someone can help. “Harming” is when we do something malicious to another person. Harm is intended to cause evil to the other person. “Hurting” might inflict pain on the other person, but it is a necessary pain. You might hurt me by saying something I need to hear - kind of like a surgeon must hurt a person’s body to heal a deeper ailment. Don’t be afraid to hurt someone if it is going to help you and the other person in the long term.
Principle 5: Name the Elephant in the Room
Issue:
You tend to shut down around other people. You get self-conscious and start self-analyzing. You wonder how to get out of the cycle you’ve found yourself in. Maybe you try to explain it by saying you are an introvert, but deep down, you know that does not quite hit the mark exactly.
Call to Action:
If hurt vs. harm is not enough, consider this… Being assertive in an empathic way tends to earn respect and authenticity in relationships. Pure kindness with no limits tends to create long-term resentment, emotional withdrawal, and passive-aggressive attacks. Name the elephant in the room. Did someone say something that hurt you? Say so. Is your spouse condescending? Tell him. Is your child driving you crazy? Correct her. Is your uncle creeping you out? Make a sour face. You can be subtle or direct. Maybe you feel awkward in social situations? Say that outloud to whoever is standing nearby. If you feel yourself starting to shut down or self-analyze, name the elephant in the room. The way out of many problems in life is to say what you and probably everyone else is thinking. That’s what it means to be a prophet and speak truth into a situation.
Principle 6: Maintain or earn a secure attachment style
Issue:
Some people have insecure attachment styles (Mikulincer & Shaver, 2023). An attachment style is the way you relate to the primary figure in your life. Examples of primary attachment figures can include parents, grandparents, teachers, couches, spiritual directors, boyfriend/girlfriend, or spouse. Your attachment style determines how much anxiety and avoidance exist in your relationship. For people with an anxious attachment, they have high anxiety and fear losing the relationship. They anxiously cling to their primary attachment figure. For people with an avoidant attachment style, they give the appearance of not caring about the relationship and avoid emotional closeness and conflict. People with an anxious-avoidant style, alternate between the other two insecure styles. They anxiously cling to the relationship, but also fear and avoid the relationship.
As an overly simplified example, imagine kids on a playground. The anxious ones cling to their parents as a safe haven, but do not explore the playground. The avoidant children only explore and do not run to their parents even when they are hurt or fearful. The anxious-avoidant children act like they are going to explore the playground, turn toward the parents, and then away again. They run in a tight, confused circle. Now translate this example to adult relationships and insecure attachment makes a bit more sense. Substitute “‘playground” for “cocktail party” and notice how similar patterns exist in adult relationships.
Call to Action:
People with secure attachments have low anxiety and low avoidance in their primary relationship. They feel that their needs are met by the other person and trust is high. The good news is that even if you have an insecure attachment style, you can become “earned secure.” Maintaining a secure attachment relationship takes effort on your part and on the part of your secure attachment figure.
The behavior of your attachment figure matters. This person should be attuned to your needs and emotions - often before you are. They are affirming and empathic, but most importantly they delight in you not for anything you have said or done, but simply because you are you. They are stronger, wiser, and distinct from you. They are able to contain your emotions when you feel emotionally out of control. They make meaningful eye contact, touch lovingly and appropriately, and engage in play with you.
For your part, you have to be disposed to receive what your secure attachment figure is offering. Some people find it very difficult to be loved. You have to develop a capacity to be needy and dependent. In adult relationships, this means being able to swap roles with your spouse or friend. Can you be the stronger, wiser other when they need it and can your attachment figure be the stronger, wiser other when you need it? Parent-child attachments are always one-way – the parent gives and the child receives. The adult-adult secure attachment is often two-way – the couple reciprocates. If your life is well constructed, you are embedded in a hierarchy of attachment (my phrase) in which you have dependent, independent, and interdependent relationships. There are people you depend on (wisdom figures), there are people who depend on you (children, students, etc.), and there are people you are interdependent with (peers, friends, a romantic partner).
Principle 7: Build an appetite for feedback
Issue:
Somewhere deep in our hearts, we all have a question that haunts us (Johnson, 2022): If people knew I did/thought/felt X and Y, would they still love me? What do people really think about me? Naturally, we spend most of our lives avoiding honest feedback about ourselves and naturally, because we deprive ourselves of invaluable self-knowledge, our growth grinds to a halt. Maybe we even wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat thinking, “What if someone (insert a close person in your life), doesn’t really love me?” Most people I talk to in therapy think that everyone around has such a low opinion of them that they could never handle the truth.
Call to Action:
What if you flipped the script? What if you craved feedback as badly as a desert craves water? What if you could not live without it? What if you woke up in a cold sweat not because you worried you were secretly unloved, but instead because you worried that people would see you as someone who could not handle the truth?
Take courage and thank God for the feedback! (Heen and Lin, 2015). Feedback helps shrink your blind spots and disarm any secret life you might be leading (Oliver & Duncan, 2019). Make sure everyone in your life is aware that you want to know what they have to say, even if it is poorly delivered, inaccurate, or you are just not in the mood (Heen and Lin, 2015). Watch what happens to your life! Suddenly you will realize that people actually, genuinely love you, you are not perfect, and when you are open to feedback, you grow and get better at everything - literally everything. Start small and focus on the people you trust the most.
Principle 8: Go on a hero’s journey
Issue:
Trauma is involuntary exposure to adversity that increases chaos. Life is not perfect at all. There are many things outside of our control and there are endless ways to be hurt or damaged. As stated above, our brains and bodies want stability. Unfortunately, having stability and safety for too long can lead to stagnation, hidden dangers, and unforeseen problems. If we stay safe and hidden for too long, we can be involuntarily pushed back into adversity and our lives can plunge back into chaos. There is no such thing as permanent safety. If you are a hypervigilant person, you are aware of the way that hidden forces of evil lurk around every corner.
Call to Action:
Be prepared (Baden-Powell, n.d.). God calls us to join His Son Jesus Christ, take up your cross, and follow Him (Matthew 16:24) on the heroic journey of the cross. Your vocation is God’s calling within your own life to go on a hero’s journey within your own context. If Jesus was magically transplanted into your life, how would He live it out? Even though I am using spiritual phrasing, there is a deep psychological truth to be gained: Voluntary exposure to adversity is the key to flourishing.
What is flourishing? It is allowing yourself to be transformed into a resurrected being with Christ through the cross. Said another way, if you voluntarily expose yourself to risk, traumatic memories, responsibilities, and scary long-term commitments such as marriage, you will be transformed. You will become more resilient and your life will be more meaningful. You will experience the full range of human emotions on your own terms. Your life will mean something to others. You will be the person others look to for guidance, the renewer of your community, and a leader. Each of the layers of who you are will resonate and harmonize with the other layers of yourself.
Your story will make sense. You will know where you are in the present, how the past connects, and where you are going in the future. Your emotions, thoughts, perceptions, and interpersonal relationships will coordinate and work together. Take up your cross, commit permanently to the people in your life, and face adversity on your own terms.
There is an often misunderstood and forgotten virtue: piety. At first, piety appears to be irrational loyalty. In ancient and medieval times, piety was the premier virtue. People were loyal to God, their families, their spouses, and their political figures to the point of death. Piety sounds like a terrible idea, but think about it this way. Imagine if you are loyal to your political party and a politician you support suddenly starts making very bad decisions for your party. Piety means that you do not jump to another political party, instead, you actively work to reform your political party to its best principles. You are committed to the underlying values that your party represents and if one politician is messing your political party up, you commit to fixing it. Imagine the same thing in marriage, career, and institutions. I’m not saying you should allow yourself to remain in a dangerous or abusive situation. Instead, stay committed to the underlying values that your commitments represent and improve them as far as possible from a posture of safety.
Principle 9: Integrate your wounds
Issue:
Despite it all, we will always have wounds. Even Jesus after the resurrection still bears the wounds of the cross. The question is not about whether you are wounded or not–whether you have mental illness or not–the question is about what you do with it. If you are like most people, you have developed ways of keeping the pain at bay. When your inner wounds and hurt child parts show up, you find a way to put on a face or drown the negative emotions with an escape. When you feel raw, your psychological immune system comes online and tries to neutralize the threat. You might see your anger, tears, or depression as an enemy that needs to be destroyed, but despite your best efforts, the wounds come back again and again.
Call to Action:
Integrate your wounds. You earned those wounds at great personal cost and they represent invaluable lessons and life-long growth. Next time a powerful negative emotion or memory of a past mistake arises, greet it with reverence. I am pro-emotion: pro-shame, pro-anger, pro-happiness, pro-guilt, pro-anxiety, and pro-gratitude. Sit with your emotions like you would sit with a friend in a cafe. Get to know your wounds and what they mean to you. Understand what they want to communicate. Allow yourself to feel–really feel–the full range of human emotions. Your emotions are not a disease that needs to be cut out and thrown away. They are your friends and a source of invaluable information. Welcome your emotions and wounds and allow them to be integrated into your broader self.
Principle 10: Develop Systems Thinking
Issue:
Our perception is limited and we only perceive parts of the ocean of details that come through our senses. Our intelligence is designed to funnel only the most important information to us. If as we said above, your attention is a precious resource that must be guarded and cultivated, it is important not to develop tunnel vision inadvertently. The more narrow your worldview, the bigger your problems will be. Babies cry when they are hungry and adults don’t. Babies have a very narrow world view (as they should) but this means that something as insignificant as hunger pangs register as a major catastrophe. Kids cry when they spill milk. Again, their narrow worldview sees spilled milk as a major catastrophe.
Catastrophes fundamentally change systems (van der Maas, 2014). Too much phosphorus in a lake stagnates the lake. You cannot take 2% of the phosphorus out and expect the lake to become pristine again–the phosphorus levels have to return to almost nothing for the lake to be restored to its pre-catastrophe state. Depression is similar, trauma is similar, and institutions are similar. Small changes can lead to catastrophic changes at a certain threshold.
Call to Action:
Learn to think in systems. Expand your worldview and expand into your environment. Don’t allow a catastrophe at one level of who you are, consume your entire self. There is a constant temptation to cave in on yourself and shrink your worldview. Notice how you act when you are stressed: you wrap your arms around your body to protect yourself, shrink, and become smaller. Spread your arms and smile. Both of these physiological actions have a reverse effect that signals power and happiness. If one layer of you is affected, maneuver in the other areas. You might not be able to control the fact that your mood is low, but you can control your response to it. When your mood is low and frozen, move your body. Psychologists call this “behavioral activation” (Stein et al., 2021).
You are a complex system embedded in a network of complex systems. Christ is the model for how to act within complex systems. Dysfunctional or confusing behavior at one level of the system can be functional behavior at another level (van Der Maas, 2014). Virtue is the habit of acting in the right way in the context of complexity. Virtue means that you may be physically suffering (the cross), but that suffering is leading to salvation. The cross makes no sense if your worldview is confined to alleviating pain, but zoom out to a broader systems-level perspective and it makes perfect sense–dysfunction at one level of the system can lead to functioning at another. Dysfunction at one moment in time can lead to global functioning at a future time. Focus your attention, but not at the expense of seeing the big picture.
Principle 11: Live in the Eternal Now of God
Issue:
“Work will set you free” is the phrase over the gate at the Nazi concentration camp known as Auschwitz (Pieper, 2009). Many people in the modern world live by this motto. There is a general belief that if you work hard and sacrifice now, you will one day be free to do what you want. Confusingly, there is a strong emphasis on self-care as well. People often think of self-care as bubble baths, margaritas on the beach, or binging a Netflix series. We relax so that we can return to work and get to a state of freedom faster. Yet, many of us feel burnt out and exhausted when we get back from vacation. Work is a drudgery.
Call to Action:
Live in the Eternal Now of God (Pope John Paul II, Dies Domini, 1998). Leisure is the basis of freedom and culture. Work will not set you free. Playful creativity and mindfulness of the here-and-now will set you free. Time is an illusion and if we enter into the eternal rest of God, our lives on this side of eternity will be a seamless experience into the next side of eternity.
The ancient Greeks had a very different concept of work and leisure than the Nazis (and we moderns) did. They saw leisure as primary and work as secondary – instead of “we have leisure so that we might work” they believed that “we work so that we might have leisure.” Leisure is not bubble baths, Netflix, and margaritas…although those things are nice. Leisure is playful mastery in the present moment. It is when our minds are elevated and in a flow state. Vacations are much more renewing if we do something difficult that we are good at – fishing, sailing a boat, playing with friends, deep conversations. Our brains and bodies respond better to earned dopamine than free dopamine like screens, alcohol, and inactivity. That bubble bath is a lot better if you have spent a day moving your body and engaging socially.
Beyond this earthly understanding of leisure, God invites us to an even deeper understanding. God created the heavens and the earth in 6 days according to Genesis. On the 7th day He rested. The 7th day is Saturday. God completed His creation on a mysterious 8th day - Sunday. Christ died on the cross and was resurrected on Sunday. Sunday is the first day of creation, and it is the 8th day of creation. When Christ says, “it is complete” He is not just talking about dying on the cross, He is talking about the completion of creation itself. God is outside of time and He invites us to join Him in his eternal rest “on earth as it is in heaven.” Work becomes play, mental illness becomes a redeemed wound, catastrophe becomes renewal, the cross becomes resurrection, dysfunction becomes flourishing, and a call to a hero’s journey becomes an adventure. Heaven is not far off in the clouds – it is here right now for those who have eyes to see it. Practice gratitude, stay in the zone, make life play, and worship God and you too can live in the eternal now of God.
References
Heen, S., & Lin, E. (2015). Thank God for the Feedback: Using Feedback to Fuel Your Personal, Professional and Spiritual Growth. Speck Books
Johnson, S. (2022). The hold me tight workbook: a couple's guide for a lifetime of love. Hachette UK.
Pope John Paul II. (1998). Dies Domini: On Keeping the Lord's Day Holy. Apostolic Letter, The Vatican, 5.
Mansoor, I. (2025). Exploring the Interplay Between Attachment Styles and Neuroception: Insights from Polyvagal Theory. International Journal of Social Sciences Bulletin, 3(10), 328-336.
Martorell, J. R., Tirado, F., & Gálvez, A. (2024). Attention wars, psychopower and platform environments: An autoethnographic study on BeReal. Emotion, Space and Society, 52, 101026.
Mikulincer, M., & Shaver, P. R. (2023). Attachment theory expanded. Guilford Publications.
Oliver, S., & Duncan, S. (2019). Looking through the Johari window. Research for All, 3(1).
Pieper, J. (2009). Leisure: The basis of culture. Ignatius Press.
Porges, S. W. (2022). Polyvagal theory: A science of safety. Frontiers in integrative neuroscience, 16, 871227.
Speed, B. C., Goldstein, B. L., & Goldfried, M. R. (2018). Assertiveness training: A forgotten evidence‐based treatment. Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice, 25(1), 20.
Stein, A. T., Carl, E., Cuijpers, P., Karyotaki, E., & Smits, J. A. J. (2021). Looking beyond depression: a meta-analysis of the effect of behavioral activation on depression, anxiety, and activation. Psychological Medicine, 51(9), 1491–1504. doi:10.1017/S0033291720000239
Van der Kolk, B. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. New York, 3, 14-211.
van der Maas, H. The Complex System Approach to Psychology. In The Edge of Knowing (pp. 54-60). WBooks.
