Protecting your mental health

There is little any human being can do right when such an individual has poor mental health. For women, it is even worse because the expectations are high and expressing their feelings is sometimes seen as being rude, not submissive and lacking in virtues required of a good woman.

One major threat to a woman’s mental health is toxic relationships. A woman that is in a toxic relationship is more often than not a victim of poor mental health that often leads to bad judgment, aggressiveness, passivity and other forms of extreme emotions.

Consequently, for a woman to protect her mental health, it is important to make certain choices. The most critical choices include who to be in a relationship with or who to avoid having a relationship with. This is because the kind of partner a woman has determines how balanced she is emotionally and how she relates to people and issues around her. The type of people you involve in your life determines to a great extent the state of your mental health.

However, it is impossible to live without others because every aspect of human life revolves around interaction with others in various types and levels of relationships; the form of each relationship has great effect on how an individual perceives things and determines to a large extent his  mental and emotional health.

It is an indisputable fact that the quality of a relationship especially intimate relationship between members of either the same sex (good friends) or the opposite sex influences ones emotional and mental health. Indeed, various researches have established that there is a correlation between the state of an individual’s relationship and how good her mental health is.

Most depressed women have upon clinical examination revealed that they are going through toxic relationships, living with abusive parents or in atmospheres where tension is the norm. Bad relationships destroy emotional balance and compromise mental, physical, and emotional health. Because it has been established that the quality of relationships affect mental health, some relationships have been given labels to describe the effect they have on people involved.

It is common to hear words like abusive, violent, manipulative, parasitic, unhealthy or toxic relationships to describe the kind of harm going on in such relationships. It is however difficult to give an apt description of a toxic relationship because it is somehow relative. What is toxic to someone may be normal to another person. Simply, what makes one woman prone to depression can be a source of joy to another; but there are some common traits that weigh down virtually every normal human being though at varying degrees.

Most toxic relationships have common traits like self-centredness, possessiveness, obsessions, irrational anger and criticisms, varying degrees of negativity, emotional, physical or psychological abuses, irrational demand and general attack on a partner’s personality.

Generally, toxicity is a set of behaviors that gives negative feelings and hurts partners. A common feature of toxicity in relationships is that victims are trapped while the perpetrator is also not free as it creates a devastating cycle of negativity that gradually and constantly erodes the mental health of one or both partners.

The effect is that the victims in such toxic relationships begin to live with feelings of low self-worth, helplessness, fear, anxiety, depression, insecurity, paranoia or narcissism and are unable to get out because they often tend to accept the fate until something terrible happens.

To be continued

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