Building Mental Courage

Krystal

1 Creator

Building Mental Courage Podcast is all about our mental health! My name is Krystal and I will be your host. I don't know about you, but I don't want to any longer keep quiet about the crap that has and still does affect my mental health as well as so many other people! So this podcast is putting that to an end! I will be speaking up about my mental health journey, as well as numerous topics that play a role in affecting so many other's mental health as well. My hope is that as I take you all along with me on my journey of continuing to heal mentally, that you all will also build YOUR mental courage, and we all will Speak Up Together! Episodes will be weekly on each Wednesday starting Jan. 11th, 2023, with potential bonus episodes on Saturdays! Can't wait to go on this journey with each on of you! Thank you so much for your support!!!! Connect with me on Google Forms: shorturl.at/tyAB0 as well as Instagram: shorturl.at/pTZ35 and Facebook: shorturl.at/aeHJY

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Top 10 Building Mental Courage Episodes

Goodpods has curated a list of the 10 best Building Mental Courage episodes, ranked by the number of listens and likes each episode have garnered from our listeners. If you are listening to Building Mental Courage for the first time, there's no better place to start than with one of these standout episodes. If you are a fan of the show, vote for your favorite Building Mental Courage episode by adding your comments to the episode page.

Building Mental Courage 2.0

Building Mental Courage

05/24/23 • 19 min

In this episode, I apologize to each and every listener for my unexplained absence over the last 2.5 months. I explain what was going on during the last 2.5 months, and things to expect/ look forward to going forward. I discuss the desire to look into having all my mental health diagnosis's reevaluated by a psychologists due to so many diagnosis's tend to have very similar traits which makes it very easy to get the wrong diagnosis. I plan on coming back for Season 2 bi-weekly as I don't want to over promise something that at this stage in my life, I don't know that I can adhere to. It is my hope to be consistent with uploading on Wednesdays, however my family will always come first, so if for some reason, I am not able to on Wednesday, it is my goal to upload a new episode every other week no later than the Saturday of that week. As always, I would love to connect with you, and hear from you what you would like to hear on this podcast. June 7th, I have it already planned that I will be doing a previously requested episode about how anxiety shows up differently in people. It has been a long over due request! Biggest thing is I want to be as real and authentic as I can be with you! I am not a professional and don't have every answer or all the solutions to all the problems, but I have gone through quite a bit, and I am even though I may not be fully equipped, and most definitely nervous every time I turn on my microphone, I still want to have the mental courage to show up and be there for you, to encourage you, lift your spirits up, make your day better by knowing that you aren't alone. Again, I apologize for not giving any notice of taking such a long break, however I am back! I appreciate you for your support and for listening! Hope you have a great day!

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I want to know what is going on with you and your life! Share with me your story!! It is private so only I will be able to hear it. It is my hope to be able to with this podcast, help you in any way I can! I won't use private details unless you specify that you would like for me to! Click the link below and leave me a message!
https://podinbox.com/BuildingMentalCouragePodcast
Would you like to be on the show?
Google Form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/13VydHbvo2DNiBggb7y8eZW7HlxAAWPX2xDu-kupiMYQ/edit
Want to connect with me? Send me a DM!
https://www.instagram.com/building_mental_courage/
Looking for Support:
Facebook Community:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/844618156678117

Domestic Violence Interview with Liz Sylvia - Part 2!

Building Mental Courage

02/15/23 • 39 min

Did you miss listening to Part One of the interview with Liz Sylvia?
https://buildingmentalcourage.buzzsprout.com/2084082/12109254-domestic-violence-relationships-with-liz-sylvia
In this episode, I am speaking with my dear friend again, Liz Sylvia where she shares about her personal experiences of both sexual abuse as well as physical abuse. Liz bravely uses her mental courage to discuss specific details about how one of her relationships turned violent and how she and her family have been encouraging each other to heal from the traumatic events that took place.
It is vital that not only as an adult we heal from traumatic events, but also recognize that even if a child was not completely involved, even if they just heard the interactions with someone being physically, emotionally, and/or sexually abusive, they too are affected and need to heal from the events as well!
Domestic violence is not ok, if you are or have ever experiencing any form of domestic violence, I would like to urge you to seek support and help to heal from what going through something like that does to you mentally. If I can be of any support, please feel free to reach out to me either through the Facebook Community, or Instagram linked below!
Would you like to reach out to Liz Sylvia?
Facebook : https://www.facebook.com/liz.wood.121
Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/woodyou87/

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Sticks and Stones May Break My Bones, But Your Words Cut Me Like A Knife!

Building Mental Courage

01/18/23 • 22 min

**Trigger Warning: This episode discusses a sensitive topic - emotional abuse as well as touches somewhat on physical abuse. **
Right off the bat, I know, the saying is supposed to say "Sticks and Stones may break my bones, but your words can't hurt me." I am here to say that although I am sure there were good intentions when someone came up with that catchy phrase, it is honestly a Big Fat LIE!! Words affects each one of us, and the abusive words and phrases unfortunately stick with us much longer than it takes to heal from bruises, cuts, or even broken bones. For a lot of people, it sticks with them for years and causes serious psychological damage. The worst part about this form of abuse is that it is there's no form of legal protection against it at this time. I understand that proving it in court may be more difficult to do, however we deserve to be protected from all forms of abuse but unfortunately we are not! Why are we ok with taking a verbal bashing to our heads and hearts? I'm not! I have experienced that enough through my previous, as well as my current marriage that I am not sure will make it or not. We have to start speaking up! We need to start demanding that we be heard! Educate our legislators of the lasting effects of emotional abuse so we can actually have laws in place to protect us from it! Emotional abuses is known to be the first sign of any physical and/or sexual abuse! We shouldn't have to allow it to escalate to something so severe before the person committing the abusive acts has consequences to face!
"The Emotionally Abused Woman" By Beverley Engel
https://www.amazon.com/Emotionally-Abused-Woman-Overcoming-Destructive/dp/0449906442/ref=sr_1_1?crid=BDYI0J2E6VB6&keywords=the+emotionally+abused+woman&qid=1673908161&sprefix=The+emotionally+abused+%2Caps%2C133&sr=8-1
Google Form:
https://forms.gle/82yTNUms5LcEJ3HW7
Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/844618156678117
Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/building_mental_courage/

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Living With Depression

Building Mental Courage

02/22/23 • 20 min

Living with depression can be very challenging. It leaves you feeling like you have no desire to do anything at all. But yet, you still stress and worry over everything even and ruminate over everything that you do or don't do. You feel overwhelmingly sad. Your energy levels feel depleted all the time. That is why it is common for someone with depression to sleep too much, or you might be the type that because you can't stop stressing and worrying all the time, you don't get enough sleep.
I personally have lived with depression since my childhood. The first time I had any kind of depression was during the time that I was in 4th grade and just diagnosed with ADHD, and was put on Ritalin. That caused serious depression for me to include suicidal thoughts and writing suicide letters. However, even after changing the medication, and getting therapy, I remember still struggling with feeling sad, and overall really just struggling with my own self confidence.
Once I became an adult and noticed that I was having depressive thoughts , and struggling with ruminating and had lack of motivation for pretty much anything, I sought for help. However getting help at that point due to at that time, I was still married to my ex-husband and he was at that point in the army meant getting put on one anti-depressant after another which for someone who is medication resistant, that didn't do any good.
When getting help, as difficult as it may be, you really need to also consider that your family, or the people who you are the closest to may also need to get help as well. I was the one who was depressed yes, but they were the ones have to live with me and my depressive mental state. Having the people you are the closest to get help as well will guard their state of mind from taking blame, and can help them understand why you are depressed and why you act the way you do. They don't have to know the exact specific details of what you share in your therapy sessions, but knowing how to cope with living with someone who has depression is not something that we just automatically know how to do instinctively. Them getting help can also help them to know better how to support you and be there for you while you are getting the help you need.
Seeking help with medication is for a lot of people a very much so dreaded topic, however the best piece of advice that I can give you is to find a psychiatrist who offers and will allow you to take a GeneSight test. It unfortunately won't tell you whether or not you will have adverse reactions or not but it will help you and your doctor understand how well you would or wouldn't absorb the active ingredients in the different classifications of mental health medications that are available. Secondly, keep a journal of the medications you take. Do Not Rely on Your Doctor.

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My Experiences and Knowledge of the 4 Main Trauma Responses!

Building Mental Courage

02/08/23 • 21 min

With this episode, I really struggled trying to decide which topic out of multiple that I really felt would be best for this week. At one point though, I was listening to another podcast, and it was talking about the main purpose to help people, in a meaningful way. Ultimately, that is my main goal of doing this podcast. I am not really worried about making money from this podcast, or becoming famous. I just want to help. The topic that kept resonating with me over and over, probably because I wish that I could have heard this when I was going through it myself. So this week I will be discussing my experiences and symptoms and knowledge of the 4 main trauma responses. It is typically very difficult to even catch yourself experiencing these trauma responses and recognize them as unhealthy when you are still dealing with the abuse, however that is my hope with this episode - to maybe, just maybe help you recognize them sooner rather than later. There are 6 types of trauma responses, however for the purpose of this episode I will only be covering a few of them. Fight, Flight, Freeze and Fawn. There are healthy and obviously unhealthy ways in which these responses are expressed. I will be discussing my personal experiences and knowledge of each. For myself, the prominent trauma responses that I express in an unhealthy way have been Freeze and Fawn. The freeze trauma response for me showed up when I had no interest in spending any time with friends or family and began to isolate myself. I wouldn't even spend time talking on the phone with anyone really. With both my previous marriage as well as my current marriage, there was a great deal of control issues. They wanted to know where I was, who I was with, what I was doing, how long I would be gone at ALL times. It was as if they viewed me as their child instead of their wife. As this continued, it became just easier for me to not go out and do anything with anyone. So I began to isolate myself. Now from what I have also learned, the need to be overly controlling can also be considered a trauma response. It falls under the Fight trauma response. So I don't even know if either of them were doing this intentionally or vindictively or if it was just their way of expressing some kind of trauma that they had previously experienced. Now I am not excusing their behavior but it is a known fact that behaviors are learned so they had to have learned at some point in their life from someone that doing that was actually acceptable. Another response that I expressed, and that is common when someone is being abused is loosing all sense of self trust. Second guessing every decision or not even feeling as though you can make a decision on your own. This tends to come from what is known as gaslighting. It is designed to make you feel crazy. It is in my opinion one of the hardest forms of abuse

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Healthy Boundaries

Building Mental Courage

03/08/23 • 33 min

In this episode of Building Mental Courage podcast, I discuss setting and enforcing boundaries, and how saying no to someone or something is in most cases also setting a healthy boundary. Setting boundaries makes people uncomfortable at first, however I am very quickly learning that it is essential to asserting a sense of safety and respect in all of our relationships.
If you have heard my previous episodes, you will know that my husband and I have been on the brink of divorce, and in the last episode I mentioned that we finally made the decision that we were no longer going to continue with trying to repair our marriage.
In this episode, I share with you the story of recent events in my life leading up to that decision and show that even someone like myself, who I admit have very little personal experience with setting and enforcing healthy boundaries can for their own self respect and safety set boundaries and not feel guilt when doing so.
Considering the trauma and even the recent events that I have gone through in my life, it is very obvious that I am no expert at setting and enforcing boundaries. However, a very useful tool that I found from listening to another podcast called The Beyond Bitchy Podcast is what she calls The 5 Step Boundary Clarifier. I highly recommend to anyone who needs to start setting healthy boundaries in their life to pick up this amazing free tool as it breaks it down in very helpful, and easy to understand ways.
https://beyondbitchy.com/
Now, I may or may not be be the first one to tell you that setting healthy boundaries is not going to fix all our problems. However, something else that I have been very heavily researching is healing past trauma. As most people, like myself who have experienced any kind of serious trauma, repeat it over and over because we have trauma from our past, most of the time from our childhood that we need to heal. However, that takes time, so while we are taking the necessary time to work on healing our past trauma, learning how to set and enforce healthy boundaries would help us be protected from any future pain or trauma during that process.

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ADHD Tips From My Own Trial and Error!

Building Mental Courage

06/21/23 • 23 min

ADHD Tips:
1. Use your calendar on your phone for your appointments, and set a reminder for the day before so you are able to get a notification reminding you the day prior.
Make your To-Do List the evening before so you have a sense of direction first thing in the morning and will help you know ahead of time how busy of a day you will have the night before.
While making your To-Do List, reference your calendar again just in case you forgot already after getting the notification about your appointments.
2. If you find yourself lacking the motivation to do something on your To-Do List, see if there is a way that you can multi-task while completing it- i.e. listen to an audio book for school if you are in school, or even listen to a podcast of music while working.
Also, another option would be to give yourself intervals of work and breaks. I would suggest starting at 15 minutes hyper focusing on getting the work done, and then taking a 15 minute break. Use a timer so you don't loose track of time. If you need to start as low as 5 minutes, just make sure that you are really focused during that time, and you will be surprised at how much you can get accomplished.
3. When it comes to organization, try to eliminate that from your mind at least temporarily and instead try focusing on Decluttering! If you don't have the space for everything you have, no matter how much you try to clean and organize, it will still be cluttered and it won't turn out the way you really want it to be. Dana K. White has a podcast called "A Slob Comes Clean" as well as a YouTube channel, and multiple books she has written that goes into great detail and I would highly recommend checking her out. I will link her podcast here:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a-slob-comes-clean/id703720000
Lastly, again with organizing, I have found that keeping track of your scheduling on your calendar has also helped me recognize the busier days that I tend to have routinely versus the days during the week that are a bit slower and has less that I have to do, use that to your knowledge to help plan or schedule your time more wisely as well as to not overwhelm yourself when you are making your To-Do List.

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Let's talk about Government Assistance!

Building Mental Courage

02/01/23 • 18 min

Welcome Back to Building Mental Courage Podcast. This episode I am dialing it back quite a bit and talking about a topic that is not as sensitive as previous episodes, but still important. This episode will be all about my thoughts, opinions and suggestions regarding Government assistance. Government assistance is an important topic whether you receive that assistance or not. If you are receiving it, then your mental state of mind is being affected by feeling relieved that you are able to receive the assistance. If you are not receiving assistance, but yet you are just barely over the limit and struggling to get by, to put food on the table, or pay for medical expenses, etc.. then your mental state of mind is being affected in a negative way as you are trying but yet still struggling. Or if you don't need the assistance, and are financially stable, you probably still have an opinion on whether or not your tax dollars should or should not be contributing to these programs.
Currently, our government assistance programs strictly use Federal Poverty levels to determine whether or not a family qualifies for benefits or not. However, it is a very well known fact that the cost of living from one state to another can very drastically vary. My family learned this the hard way when we lived in Florida and even though our income was just barely over the Federal Poverty level for our family size, the cost of living there was drastically higher that we had nothing left after paying for rent, utilities, water, gas to get back and forth to work, etc. Having to take time off work to go stand in lines at food banks just so we could have food to feed our children was so counter productive, and so detrimental to our mental state of mind. Call it pride if you want, but to work as hard as you can, and to be able to clearly see on paper that the basic living essentials prior to buying any food, or paying for any medical copays for doctors visits, or medications took up all of our income. When a family is trying, and can clearly prove that their income does not permit them the ability to provide medical, dental, vision, and/or food for their family, then why is the government kicking them down for actually trying. It would seem as though there should be a separate program for those families.
I will admit that I don't believe that a family should year after year after year rely solely on government assistance. At some point they need to learn to live within their means. However, there also needs to be education to teach these families how to manage their finances. There needs to be resources that will help these families become stable and maintain that stability. It's not taught in high school, and they wonder why so many families struggle to get by.
Everything needs to be accounted for, down to the last penny when i

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My 5 Steps to Having Mental Courage!

Building Mental Courage

01/11/23 • 25 min

Welcome to the very first episode of Building Mental Courage Podcast! My name is Krystal, and I will be your host. This podcast is going to be all about building up ourselves despite the issues we might have with our mental health. Learning how to manage our day to day lives better over time, and building up the courage that we need to speak up about the flaws that go on in our society that contribute in a negative way to not only our mental health, but also our friends, and loved ones. This is going to be a safe trusted space, and with that, I will fair warn you, that in this episode I share with you all my very first experience with sexual abuse, and how since then going through something like that can reshape you, and rewire your brain to think differently. I know this not because of degrees, or certifications, but because of my own personal life experiences, which I will also pretty regularly share with you so we can connect and heal together from our past traumatic experiences.
What is Mental Courage?
I define Mental Courage is Not hiding! Whether that be hiding the fact that I have mental health issues, as well as not hiding behind my mental health issues to avoid difficult situations. Standing strong knowing that my mental health conditions doesn't define me as a person, and being confident in knowing that just because I have mental health problems, that doesn't give someone the right to dismiss what I have to say or think.
I would love to know how you would define Mental Courage!
Throughout my healing journey, I have and still continue to see a therapist, and I have come up with a list of things that I have started implementing to make sure that as much as possible I can be okay.
Before you are in a elevated mental state of mind, or fight or flight:
1. Know your own unique set of tools that help you take care of yourself. Whether that be the standard textbook style list of tools, something completely unique to yourself, or a mixture of them all. Keep a running list of your tools as over time, they may change.
2. Know your Support Team and Make Sure They KNOW what kind of support you need from them. If you don't tell them, they may think they are supporting you, but in reality it may not be helpful at all.
3. Take Notes! We tend to be our own worst critics with or without mental health diagnoses. Add on mental health concerns, then typically we also tend to experience short term memory impairments. Take notes, journal, take notes of important details so you don't forget those details later on, and have yet another reason to feel embarrassed and defeated, then in turn beat ourselves up for not remembering.
4. PRACTICE!! Practice Using Your Tools when you are in a calmer state of mind so it becomes more like second nature.
5. Know Your Not Alone!

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Trailer

Building Mental Courage

11/15/22 • 3 min

My name is Krystal Watson, and I am so excited to announce the launching of my upcoming podcast, Building Mental Courage where I will be discussing mental health, my journey as I continue to strive for healing, and encouraging all of you to build your mental courage and speak up launching January 11th, 2023!! Feel free to check out the trailer! I would love for you to subscribe so you can be notified when I upload episodes! Connect with me! I would love to hear from you!
Google Form: https://forms.gle/82yTNUms5LcEJ3HW7
Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/invites/contact/?i=1wqspm6wi90gj&utm_content=pw2xfjt
Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/groups/844618156678117/

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FAQ

How many episodes does Building Mental Courage have?

Building Mental Courage currently has 13 episodes available.

What topics does Building Mental Courage cover?

The podcast is about Courage, Health & Fitness, Healing, Society & Culture, Thrive, Mental Health, Mental, Growth, Podcasts, Support, Trauma, Journey and Health.

What is the most popular episode on Building Mental Courage?

The episode title 'My 5 Steps to Having Mental Courage!' is the most popular.

What is the average episode length on Building Mental Courage?

The average episode length on Building Mental Courage is 23 minutes.

How often are episodes of Building Mental Courage released?

Episodes of Building Mental Courage are typically released every 7 days.

When was the first episode of Building Mental Courage?

The first episode of Building Mental Courage was released on Nov 15, 2022.

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Building Mental Courage

Krystal

Top 10 Building Mental Courage Episodes

FAQ

How many episodes does Building Mental Courage have?

What topics does Building Mental Courage cover?

What is the most popular episode on Building Mental Courage?

What is the average episode length on Building Mental Courage?

How often are episodes of Building Mental Courage released?

When was the first episode of Building Mental Courage?

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