Social Belonging: Key to Resilience and Mental Balance
Social belonging is part of mental resilience. Connections with others, even the smallest and most mundane ones, can influence how we deal with stressful situations and life’s challenges.
Our daily routines, which sometimes include stressful news and uncertainty about the future, can make each of us feel lonely and isolated. Choosing to be alone with negative thoughts and anxiety can intensify these feelings, and even lead to difficulty distinguishing between reality and imagination. Sharing the feelings and thoughts that are troubling you with people close to you can be a significant step towards calming and relieving difficult emotions.
Emotional sharing as a coping tool
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Coping with difficulties -
Relieving stress and loneliness -
Sharing is mutual -
Sharing as a lever for learning
- Coping with difficulties: Sharing with family and close friends is a powerful tool for dealing with challenges. The act of sharing normalizes feelings and gives them space. The perspective of others can also help identify troubling thoughts, frightening scenarios, or events that cause anxiety.
- Reducing stress and loneliness: Many studies show that open dialogue with others can reduce stress, anxiety, and loneliness. Sharing your feelings allows you to release emotional burdens and act from a place of calm and peace.
- Sharing is mutual: Listening to the stories and experiences of others can enhance a sense of belonging and connection. The act of sharing provides an objective perspective to better understand your feelings and thoughts. Empathetic listening from others fosters inclusion and contributes to self-confidence.
- Sharing as a lever for learning: Sharing enables learning from others' experiences, receiving emotional support, discovering new coping strategies, and developing more effective approaches to challenges.
Circles of support as a source of mental resilience
Mental balance represents inner peace and harmony between body and mind, forming the foundation for coping with difficulties and life changes, maintaining optimism, and achieving your full potential.
Coping with crises and mental difficulties that lead to loneliness can occur at any stage of life and may intensify during times of war. Support circles made up of friends or colleagues who provide daily support, along with a supportive community, can serve as a solid foundation for mental well-being and help prevent isolation. While it is human nature to seek help during challenging times, resilience and mental balance are also strengthened through belonging to a community and the presence of support circles in daily life.
Being surrounded by loving and supportive people increases a sense of security and wholeness. Therefore, it is important not to wait for a crisis; even during routine times, cultivate your social life, invest in social connections, and nurture family, professional, and other social circles. Regular social gatherings, shared activities, and small moments of connection contribute to building mental resilience and improve the ability to face challenges effectively. Whether meeting friends for coffee, volunteering in the community, or participating in sports activities, social connections enrich life and provide a sense of belonging and purpose.
Finding sources of support
If you do not have social support in your immediate environment, you can try to find sources of support outside of your familiar social circle. For example, women's circles, dedicated groups that focus on a specific topic, such as postpartum mothers or menopausal men, virtual groups, for example on Facebook, that focus on a specific topic that is troubling you. Belonging to a group, which allows you to see mutually how others experience and feel the same feelings and experiences and how they deal with them, can create a sense of camaraderie and understanding.
If necessary, it is important to seek professional help
In cases where the immediate environment fails to provide the necessary support, seeking treatment can be a significant step toward improving mental health. Professional treatment and social support complement each other and provide comprehensive support during a crisis.
Most people can benefit from short-term intervention, as long as it is personally tailored. This may include individual therapy of any kind or group therapy, emphasizing that it can help acquire coping tools and improve your quality of life during the crisis and afterwards.
Social Support for People with Mental Illness
People dealing with a mental disorder sometimes interpret situations in ways that are extreme, mistaken, or not objective. Belonging and connecting to the community can be complex, accompanied by concerns about revealing their identity, stigma around mental health, and fear of exposure. The cost of concealment and lack of sharing can be high, and sometimes people with mental health challenges do not seek help, which may worsen their condition.
Precisely in these cases, connecting to the community and receiving social support can make a significant difference. As a society, we can help by offering a listening ear and remembering that open dialogue helps create a safe space for others.
Professional Help in Psychosocial Rehabilitation
Rehabilitation basket services offer a variety of professional tools for addressing self-stigma, social tools for community involvement and sharing, sports and art groups, and more. These services are complemented by social mentoring services, which provide support from a personal mentor to help maximize abilities and skills in these areas.
Most people in rehabilitation who set social goals and seek to expand their social circle to benefit from support from peers succeed in doing so. Proper assistance can help convey your difficulties and complexities to those around you without harming others or yourself. Experience shows it is possible to learn to navigate social challenges in a positive way that engages your environment for support rather than pushing it away.
