When the jeans need to go…
I don’t remember the last time I’ve tried anything on in a store. With four little kids and the convenience of online shopping, it seems those days are gone. Target and Old Navy carry “longs” and typically don’t disappoint, but this last pair of jeans I ordered from Target was not good.
But let’s face it; do any of us who are 35+ know what we’re supposed to wear these days?!
They weren’t flattering and I certainly didn’t feel very confident in them. I folded them and planned on just bringing them back to Target the next time I went.
But, the very next morning I didn’t know what to wear so I ripped the tags off and decided to just keep them. They weren’t that bad I guess.
But I wore them again today and they still suck. I don’t like them at all. The problem is I’m pretty sure I’ll still wear them until someday I get another pair of light colored jeans that motivate me to transition this pair to the “2nd hand store” pile (said pile will then sit in the back of my van for far too long).
Sometimes I think we tolerate crappy things for too long. We have unhealthy routines, high levels of stress, poor boundaries, and unhealthy relationships. And sometimes we tolerate pervasive mental health symptoms. We’re busy, we’re tired, we’re worried what others might think so we just “white knuckle” it and keep moving. (I am reading Aundi Kolber’s, Try Softer book right now, I’d recommend).
When I teach about mental illness, I’ll often tell students this story about when I was taking the psychopathology class in graduate school (the class where we learn about all the mental illnesses and the criteria for diagnosing). I sat down in my seat and began reading through the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV, (we use the 5th edition now). I remember getting all hot and nervous thinking that I was in trouble. After reading the symptoms associated with all the illnesses, I thought somehow I had avoided being diagnosed with anxiety, ADHD, and maybe even a personality disorder throughout my 23 years of existence. I thought, “Why in the world do I think I get to be a therapist if I’ve never worked on all these mental illnesses I have!”
But then my professor said something important, “These symptoms must be clinically significant.”
“Clinically significant” means that we are beyond our “window of tolerance.” They are no longer just annoying problems or symptoms, but the symptoms are negatively interfering with our lives. These symptoms might be causing us to lose too much sleep, contributing to consistent fights with our spouse, or maybe we are getting in trouble at work. Maybe our symptoms are not allowing us to do the things we once enjoyed. Maybe we’re losing or gaining too much weight, having distressing and interrupting thoughts or dreams, or maybe we blow up at our kids all the time and now they are having troubles too.
Mental health symptoms are “clinically significant” if they cause consistent and intrusive problems for you. They are beyond your ability to manage or fix on your own terms or with your current set of skills. The threshold for significance varies because of our biology, our environment, our histories, our attachment orientation, social capital, resources and skills.
Tolerating significant symptoms for too long sometimes means hard consequences for ourselves, our relationships, and our future.
Closing remarks: Don’t tolerate the jeans if they suck.
