What is Care?
To care about someone is a combination of several things. Being around, asking how their day went and gifting are good methods to express the importance of someone in our lives. There are different aspects we must keep working on each day to build a healthy caring relationship, and unfortunately, there’s no instruction manual for it.
Each one interprets the world differently, therefore we must put effort into paying attention to people’s needs and want. Therefore, we should aim at a healthy relationship while keeping in mind that mistakes will happen. In order to develop a strong bond, we must be open-minded to try leaving barriers as envy and pride behind.
It might seem easy to bond with people and care about them, though, it is much harder to make them believe you. Lack of trust and self-esteem are obstacles in the process of building many relationships today. The media brings unbending beauty ideals and demonstrations of how good a life should be that are implicitly imposed on our subconscious and gets in the way of demonstrating caring.
Sadly, the choices we must make may be hard to understand from their perspective, but we must understand the difference between what we like and what we need. Parents need to stipulate curfews for their children when they are young, which does not mean that they do not want their children to have fun, but that they need to care for them so that dangerous outcomes are avoided. In a relationship due to study or work the lovers may need to stay apart to take care of their own professional and academic life, which does not indicate that they want to stay away from each other but only that they must to take care of themselves first.
Such subjects are delicate to be dealt with, however, I felt like the classes pointed me in the right direction to better understand the issues that common things, for instance, stress, might generate. I also found valuable to understand that different aspects of life might develop depression in us and choosing what to think about and how to look at the same scenario might help escape from the self-destructive abstract thought.
Real life can be harsh, and people generally forget to rest or take some time for themselves causing minor problems to grow. As the time passes people develop the need to minimize the time spent when it is not needed, resulting in compressing obligations at small amounts of time, for instance, students who have jobs and study at the same time, and eventually get into internships to find a job in the area eventually. This is a common reality nowadays due to the experience requirements that companies are constantly improving. In addition, society unconsciously keeps making pressure on those people who are not prepared to deal with this kind of demand harming their mental health.
Depression is considered a newly analyzed disease and nowadays we have several opportunities to help to deal with it but still, not many people take it seriously. It is a complicated path to accept having anxiety or depression and trusting someone to help you deal with it is scary.
To open to a psychologist means you must talk without being sure that it is going to help with someone you don’t know that well. As Jessica Castonguay states in the article “Seeking Help for Depression: Applying the Health Belief Model to Illness Narratives”: “Indeed, the main barrier preventing help-seeking was fear of the unknown treatment process: self-efficacy was low due to uncertainty regarding one’s ability to navigate the process, and it was only when symptoms became excessively severe that individuals were certain they needed treatment” (301).
Works Cited
Castonguay, Jessica, et al. “Seeking Help for Depression: Applying the Health Belief Model to Illness Narratives.” Southern Communication Journal, vol. 81, no. 5, Nov. 2016, pp. 289–303.