Tag: belgium

Befriending my sadness

Over the past few weeks, I have frequently been overwhelmed by sadness, sometimes to the point of emotional paralysis, and always with the feeling that behind it there was an ocean of tears I could not cry. When I did find tears, that didn’t necessarily help either more than temporarily.

I have been following for a few months now breathwork sessions with a guy called Geoff near Brussels (who I certainly recommend if you live near here) and last night this resulted in a new realization for me, which I’d like to share with you. It is that I cling so much on to this primal sadness because, actually, I really love it. And I really love it, because it is the way I comforted and loved myself when the small person I was met frustration, incomprehension and suffering. It felt good to be in that sad place, I felt alive there, it was a place where I knew myself and I knew the truth. I embraced my sadness like a teddy bear.

As I felt the sadness leaving my body during the session, I felt a real sense of loss, a presence that had been comforting me for so long that now was saying goodbye. That sense of loss moved me to tears. And yet I know that, if for some reason I want that sadness, I can always call it back …

But the sadness occupied such a default position as my easiest and most accessible “best friend” that that was where I always went for comfort. I feel that no person could compete. It was always harder to step out, trust and ask to be held than to go inside to this familiar primal place.

The problem is that that place, for all its warmth and comfort, is indissociably linked with feelings of low self-worth. It is very, very self-limiting and it always carries reinforces a sentiment of failure. When I am in that sad place, whatever I have objectively achieved in my life and towards my goals of healing always seems like nothing, and the path ahead an insurmountable mountain.

That is, however, not true.

I do not know if it is time to befriend my sadness or really to say goodbye, but I know that the sadness is mine and real, and honor it; and I know that the lies are not.

Mental health in Belgium

Oh boy, Belgium is the number one per-capita consumer of sleeping pills in the WORLD! And not by a little bit (see p.8 (271) of the report here). 76.5 statistical DDDs per thousand inhabitants means nearly 8% of the population is taking these each day. That may well also hide a difference between Flanders and Wallonia: the figure for France is 66 pro mil whilst for Holland it is only 23 (I say “only”, but that still places them at 15th place in the world). This figure is, or should be, completely shocking.

There are, admittedly, two factors that may contribute to this, but neither of them is reassuring. The first is the underlying state of mental health. This is turn says a lot about how Belgians treat their children 🙁 The second is the facility with which chemical substances are used to repress anxiety, rather than humanistic therapeutic methods which actually help to resolve neurosis and trauma. Such therapy is very hard to find here, much more so than in Germany or Holland. Admittedly it might be that in some other countries, prescription of these substances is more tightly controlled (on either public health or economic grounds) and that some people procure them on the black market, I have no idea. But the figure of 76.5 pro mil is in any case shockingly high.

On top of this, Belgium occupies the 6th place in the rankings for consumption of anxiolytics, with 84 pro mil. The main class of anxiolytic drugs are also benzodiazepines, it is only the molecule and dosage that vary according to the use. So these numbers are to add together. That’s 16% of the population, which must be well over 20% of the adult population (though for all I know they may well also be prescribed to children, especially as of the onset of puberty).

Moreover, exogenous sources of stress in this country are extremely low by the standards of developed countries. Many workplaces are positively soporific, job security (for those who have one) is very high, reported violent crime is rather low – it’s not exactly London, New York or even Paris. It’s a laid-back provincial backwater where living standards are high.

So that’s a hell of a lot of dark family secrets. It’s time to wake up and start admitting it.