Navigating Mental Health: 5 Strategies to Support our Mental Well-Being - Part 2

Hi fam, welcome to Victorious Living Stepping Forward. My name is Sheridan Correa, I'm the Wellness Program Developer and your host of this broadcast. So I am your sister in Christ also, and I am first and foremost a beloved child of God. I claim that and declare that in Jesus' name, and I'm a living testimony of the transforming power of Jesus Christ. He has freed me from mental illness, from multiple diagnosis of mental illness, dual diagnosis, substance abuse, meth, heroin, alcohol, opiates, I mean whatever, you name it, I was addicted to it, I was bound to it, I was enslaved to it, incarceration, jailbird, broken relationships, two divorces, I lost my kids, let's see, bitterness, unforgiveness, I mean just bad finances, disordered mind and relationships, sickness physically, just everything, absolutely everything. There is nowhere in my life where living a godless and sinful life was not affected and touched, okay? And so when I had my encounter with God three, not three, eight years ago, over eight years ago, and said yes to him and partnered with him and doing life with him, and through the power of the Holy Spirit, my life has been radically changed, and one of those places is my mental health, my mental well-being. So that's what we're going to talk about in this series. We're navigating our mental health, and we left off the last episode on... We went through two out of five things that I do to win the war in my mind, and I really want to read that Galatians 5-1 scripture again because it's so, so important. If we know that we have been... We believing in the Lord Jesus Christ and said yes to him and are now entering into this new life and this new relationship and trying to figure out how to walk in it and what does it mean and what does it look like to be a new creation, all those things, we have a responsibility. Once Christ has cleaned our slate and given us a new life and empowered us to step forward in that, we have a responsibility to keep ourself free and not return to the yoke of slavery to all the things. So if you are claiming Christ and you said yes and you are living and indwelling with

the Holy Spirit and his power, we have a responsibility to do stuff about it, to even see how our mental health and our well-being is, how we are partnering with that or even fighting it and self-sabotaging it because let's be real, the patterns in which we have done life involve a lot of self-sabotage. We don't even know that it's part of that, but that could be part of something that you're experiencing right now. And so you're like, how do I even do this? How do I even get to this place of soundness and health and well-being where I have clarity and understanding in my mind and in my emotions and even how I make choices? Like how does that work? So that's what we're kind of ripping apart today. And these five things that I'm going over are five things that I do daily. They are a part of my life. They are a lifestyle. It's not a diet. Jesus ain't a diet. Freedom ain't a diet. Winning the war in your mind is not a diet. It's not a one and done, all right? It's not. We have a responsibility to keep it up. It's just like exercise, all right? It's just like, hey, I want to lose 20 pounds or I want to put 20 pounds of muscle on. What do you got to do? You got to do some stuff daily in order to get to that place. And our spiritual life, our mental life is no different, is no different. But I think a lot of us are experiencing, and I read, I'm reading all your comments so I know this, we are experiencing a life of torment where we are even re-traumatizing our own selves and just staying stuck in those cycles of trauma where we are maybe leading with unforgiveness and that's part of our story, which really affects our well-being

and our health and our soundness inside of us. We are believing the lies over the truth and that affects and impacts whether we are mentally and healthy well or not. There are just so many. the different aspects of our mental health. So here, I just want to share the things that work for me and that I've tested and approved of, and they are supported by God's word, okay? Doing life godless and without God was painful, just so, so painful, and I did not experience... I didn't experience health and well-being and soundness and clarity and purpose, and I didn't experience any of that. And so now coming into the family of God, and he's my dad, and I'm like, okay, then teach me how this works, because I don't know. I don't know what I'm doing, and so he has taught me, so I'm just imparting all this to you. So the two things, just really quick, that we talked about in our last episode... Oh my gosh, where are they? Okay, so to be in community, we don't walk this. We don't walk this journey alone. We don't walk this faith journey alone. We want to get into community. We want to get in healthy community, not just any community, right? We're not just be like, oh, people, woo, and let's go over there. No, we want to belong to the right people. If we belong to the family of God, those are the type of people that we want to surround ourselves with, the ones that you are looking at and saying, I want what they have. I want to be them when I grow up. That's what I did. Like, okay, that girl's got it going on. I admire those traits and those qualities in her. That's who I...

I want to come from point A to point B, and so I went to those people and said, will you mentor me? Will you be on my A team? Can I learn from you? Not only in the word of God, right, and to be able to apply the word of God so that we grow also, but it is good to have that good, godly, supportive, safe people that will be with us on our journey. The second one is renewing our mind. That is our responsibility. We are to seek out truth. We are to tell ourselves the truth. We are to do this daily because we have a proclivity to negativity, and we have holes in our brain. They just leak. There's things fall out. We don't remember stuff very well, right? So we need to renew our minds daily with the word of God, with truth, with the good things that he has, and be telling and speaking those over ourselves and over other people as well. So the third thing out of the five, we got to clear out those sins. We don't want to talk about sin. We don't want to talk about all these secret things that we're doing. Yeah, we do. We need to. We need to talk about it because it will keep you... Keeping yourself in the dark will keep you sick. Secrets make you sick, not safe. The enemy in our brain, our brains even want to tell us like, no, no, no, we don't need to talk about that. We don't need to say that to those people. We don't need to confess that.

No, no, that's not really true of you. Actually, you're just, you know, fill in the blank. Like that is not... We cannot live our lives like that. Satan loves to isolate us, right? Our secrets keep us isolated because no one else knows about them or somebody does know about them. Misery loves company. And they're the same people that you'd be subscribing to your stuff. And we're not trying to do that anymore, right? But Satan loves to keep us in isolation. He loves to keep us in the dark and keep us, keep the darkness in the dark. He loves that. That's how it grows. And in isolation breeds manipulation. Okay? God is not a God of manipulation. The Word of God and truth does not manipulate us. It does not corrupt us. That is the enemy, twisting and manipulating. And he does that when we are in the dark. So we want to expose those. We don't want to hear the enemy's voice say, no, no, no, no, yeah, don't say that. You're fine. You're doing great. Nobody knows about that. You don't need to tell nobody about that. That ain't really hurting you. That's not hurting you. Actually, if you say that, other people might be hurt by that.

So we don't want to do that. No. You have it under control. You're fine. You're only doing, you're only doing like three a day instead of 10. Like you're doing great. Hey, wake up. That is not okay. That is not real. And we are perpetuating our harm. It's like we are subscribing to our own self-sabotage and self-harm program. And we are continuing to stay in these secret sins and stay not confessing and stay in this place of not exposing the things that we are struggling with. I read them in the comments on Pando, y'all, those who are. are watching on Pando and commenting, because I'm asking you to, I read those. We read those, we know what y'all be dealing with. And there's gotta be a point where you gotta raise that white flag and say, I need help, I need to tell myself no, I don't know how to do this, I need the power of God to help me stop doing this and to get these secrets out of the dark and into the light, we need help with that. Because I'll tell you by personal experience, that poisons us, that keeps us sick. And we cannot experience the mental health and the clarity and the peace and the abundant life of this when we are stuck in the dark with all them secrets and all that sin that ain't nobody know about,

that maybe even your Christian friends that you might be hanging around with that don't know about because you're living a double life. Nope, mm-mm, God don't call us to live no double life. He calls us to be one person, an authentic person, a real person of integrity and of discipline and of health and purpose and clarity and all those gorgeous words, family. So listen, secrets do not keep you safe. We cannot just lock them up because then we become locked up, right? We become incarcerated while incarcerated. That's not our Lord. That is not the life that God calls us to. You got this whole life sentence running on the inside of you because you won't release yourself, because you won't let that out. Guys, we gotta get it out, we gotta expose that. Don't believe the lie. Why do we need to talk to others and be open? Listen, our thought life and our emotional life can impair our ability to have a clear mind. We are not so right upstairs all the time. Given the impact that it can have sharing my struggles with others and receiving guidance and help and being able to process my experience with safe people, be able to move through it, that is so, so needed. It's not just gonna poof, go away.

We have to actually process and talk it out. We need that encouragement. We need people praying over us. We need to be held accountable for those things once we are coming out of those harmful negative patterns that are not serving us well and changing our habits and our patterns and putting on the new nature that we are supposed to be walking into. We need help doing that. So listen, if you're lusting, if you are lusting, you have a problem with lust, you need to go talk about it to somebody because keeping it in the dark and not saying anything about it is only making it worse and it's only growing it, I promise you, all right? And you're not experiencing that authentic, clear, unified place within you because your inside and outside aren't matching. If you are still using substances, if you're still using meth, heroin, K2, like whatever is going on in the prison that you find yourself with because you don't wanna be alone or you don't want to be thinking that you're the weird one. You want to just belong to any group of people because you don't, you're struggling. That's okay, but hey, eventually it's gonna catch up with you.

You gotta tell, you gotta get it out. You gotta get it out. If you are struggling, you have secrets, you're living a double life, you have things in your past that you've never, ever exposed and talked about, it is doing something to you. The most free that I've ever, ever, ever felt was going through, I call it my trauma egg, and I went through my entire life and wrote down everything that I did, everything that was done to me, dah, dah, dah, but I brought it out into the open. I exposed it, brought it into the life, had Christ say, sat with the Lord, I did this with the Lord, and say, what do you say about this now? What does this mean? What did it mean about me? And be able to throw that away. Okay, well, that's not me anymore. And be able to see my patterns of how I even responded to certain situations, emotionally, mentally, even behaviorally. And that was gold for me. And once I was able to go through all of that, nobody had a hold on me. I definitely didn't have a hold on me, that Satan didn't have a hold on me because I'm already totally forgiven.

I'm already having a clean slate. I've already been released from all my, and forgiven from all my. sins when I came into Christ, but there's still things that I had to kind of deal with and make sense of and have his light pierce through that darkness or illuminate that darkness and say, okay, this is what, this is what this is supposed to look like. Now let's redefine all of these. Let's learn from this. Let's see how that affected you and that ripple effect that it had on your life. But those secrets, those things that we are not talking about, they are doing something to us on the inside for sure. All right. If there is something that's coming even to your mind right now, like, oh my gosh, that over there, or, or, you know, wow, I forgot about that. Or, yep, I know that I need to out myself. I know that this secret, this doubleness, this double mindedness that I am experiencing and living out is not good with me. It's not well with your soul fans. So I would just encourage you to be courageous and go to the chaplain, go to those safe, supportive, godly people and get help. Talk about it. Whether it's anger, bitterness, offense, things that we are doing in the secret that nobody knows about, we got to get them out or they will destroy us. When we don't, Satan has the upper hand and shame immediately starts into corrupting corotas. And listen, if you have had MRSA, okay, I've had MRSA so many times, so many times. But MRSA is, shame is a lot like MRSA. It's like a flesh eating disease. That's how I imagine it. That is the illustration that I do. It is just underneath. Sometimes you can't see it, sometimes you can't. But it is a bacteria and a flesh eating disease that is just eating away at our souls and we have to get it out. Shame is not our friend. It's not our friend. So we have to get it out. Let me give you two scriptures. Psalm 51 7 says, if we confess our sins, he, God, is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. That unrighteousness and that sin is what is separating our God. And God is a God of health. God is a good, good, good, good and faithful father. And all he knows how to do is give life and peace and grace and mercy like that's in his nature. And so if we are not experiencing that because we are walking and living out these sin patterns, we got to clean them up. We got to clean them up and talk about them, get them out, repent, turn the other way. That's what repentance mean. It means to do a 180 and turn the other way because this way ain't going so good for us. So we got to turn face, acknowledge God, say,

okay, I'm going to do life your way. Let's go. I need help doing this too. He is just and faithful to forgive us all of our sins and cleanse us to purify us from that unrighteousness and to live this life. But we have to, we have a responsibility there, right? What's our responsibility? We got to confess. We got to get it out. We have to continue to partner with him so that we could be purified and cleansed, not just a one-time bath and shower and like, woo, I'm cleansed for life. No, we got to shower all the time, every day. That's how I think about it. And so we, listen, we can't do that without God. We can't do that without confession. It's a good thing. James 5, 16 says, therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective. Listen, there is purposed language in there. Anytime you see a so that, there's purpose there. What is the purpose of me confessing my sin to another believer, to another godly person, and so that I can receive prayer and I can pray for that other person because that is supportive. That's a buttress. We need help. We need other people helping and encouraging and supporting us, especially through prayer, but so that we can be healed, so that we can be clean and clear and free because they're no longer in the dark. We're children of the light, right? Right. Okay. So there's number three. Number four is remember God's character. Having an accurate view of who God is, is critical, is essential. If you believe God is not good, you are not going to go to God for the things that you need. You're not going to go to God for truth, for peace, for that abundant life, for grace, for mercy, for forgiveness. You're not going to go to him if you think he's just angry and wants to punish you and beat you up and destroy you all the time and okay all these crazy things. life. You have to have an accurate view of God. That is everything that is critical because again, if you don't, that you ain't going to go to him, right? You're going to go seek it out from all this other crazy stuff. So, um, if you don't think that God is good or helpful, then why would you call on him or believe anything that he says is true? Why would you obey him? Why would you follow? Why would you be like, oh yeah, okay. No, because all you want is harm for my life, so I'm not going to listen to you, right? Don't we do that? We do that even in the natural world, but Jeremiah 29, 11 says that he has good plans and purposes. He has a hope and a future for us not to destroy us, not to bring us into disaster. Those are his words. And if we don't believe those words, we're not going to go to God. We're not going to go to God, but God is the source

of health and order and wellbeing and soundness. He is the source fam. When the world and the lies from the enemy are louder than God's voice. I know for me, I am tempted to think that God doesn't care about me, that God isn't good, that he's not in control and that he's not powerful enough to help me in my time of need and to rescue me again, or to speak to me when I need to hear him personally, that's not going to happen. So we must realize that our view of God either makes matters worse by falling into the hands of the enemy and start partnering with him. And it's like we change jerseys and you're like, yep, I'm on team Satan again today. Today I'm playing on team Satan because I don't believe God. I'm going to hang out over here, but we can't do that. We cannot, we, we, we cannot do that. We have to realize that we are impacted greatly by that. But our view of God can help us, you know, go to him and so that we can remain calm so that we can be regulated so that we can see things clearly as he sees them. We have to seek to know God's character by reading his word and praying for him to continually reveal himself to us. In John 7, oh my gosh, Matthew 7, it says, seek and you shall find, knock and I'll answer, right? We have a responsibility. Again, we are to go toward him and see what this is about and try to find him. And we will be, he, he will be found by us. It says in Jeremiah 29, 12 even. So listen, we have to believe that God is good and that he is with us, that he has our best interests at heart, that he has good plans and purposes for us and trust that he is in control, that he is in control. He is good and he is faithful. And if you don't know that, then go search the scriptures. Go tell somebody that, right? Go tell the chaplain, go tell somebody, tell us, write us, say, I don't believe that because, and this is why, like, we want to hear that. We want to walk with you in your faith journey. Here's a scripture for you. Psalm 145, 8 through 9 and verse 13, the Lord is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and rich in love. The Lord is good to all. He has compassion on all that he has made. All means all. That's all that all means. The Lord is trustworthy in all he promises and faithful in all he does. That is a lot of alls. That is a lot of alls. I think a lot of times we limit God because we don't believe him. We don't want to. We don't want to exercise our faith, right? We're looking for signs that this is for real instead of stepping forward and like, I'm not sure what's going to happen, but let's go. I'm going to choose to believe this because nothing else has worked. And God has, I've seen it in other people's lives that this is a reality. And so I'm going to step forward, although I don't fully understand.

That is what God calls us into. That is what faith is. Trust requires blindness and faith. Believing is something that you cannot see. And that doesn't make sense sometimes. All right. So we have to be courageous and believe that the word of God, everything that he says is infallible. The word of God says that he does not lie to us, that he doesn't lie to us. And so I choose to believe that. And I choose to walk toward that in my life. And the times where I haven't and said, no, that's not true. I'm going to limit you. All right. I'm not telling him that, but I'm going to, I'm going to limit you and I'm going to limit myself and I'm going to even limit and put a cap on. my blessings because now you're not good and what I'm experiencing doesn't look good or feel good. But family, we can't do that. We cannot do the Lord that disservice or even ourselves because we are impacted and it impacts our relationship and our connection with Him and with others. But the truth is that He will never leave you. He will never forsake you. He will not abandon us. He does not reject us. He is ever present right here in our time of need and in our troubles and even when we're not in troubles and when we're experiencing a mountaintop season. He's there all the time with us, walking with us, doing life with us. That's a preposition. That denotes distance. He is there with us. Emmanuel, God with us. That should mean something. I know the times in my life where I feel alone or I am feeling fearful or intimidated, I have to speak Joshua 1 9 over myself. God is with me. I be strong and courageous. He is with me wherever I go. So I will not cower and bow down to fear. I will step forward in faith in whatever that is and that helps me every single time. He is our refuge. He is our refuge. He does not get lost. He does not get lost or become distracted. He is our tower, a strong tower of safety as it says in Psalms. But that word ever present, like I said earlier, it means that he is always right here, always available, ready. He is ready. He is ready and willing and able, the word of God says. So we have to believe those things and if you don't, then get in the word of God or say that prayer that is found on, I can't remember the page number, in the magazine. Number five, last one, we need to hang on to hope. It's been said that a person can live weeks without food, days without water, seconds without air, but not a moment without hope. Man, I know that's true for my life. I'd be gasping for air. I feel like I'm drowning and I'm panicking without hope. Lies from the enemy and fear lead us to become or think that we are victims and powerless and hopeless and helpless and that all sets in and then we start living that out.

That's not mental health. That is not soundness. That is not clarity. That is illness. That is a place of confusion and a disordered mind and a disordered life. Hopelessness is rough. It will cause you to quit and give up and God does not call us to failure. He does not call us to failure. God is not a God of failure and he gives us all the supplies and the unlimited resources that we need to carry out a different life and to really walk out a new creation life. Ephesians 3 says that these unlimited resources that empower us with inner strength, inner strength up here and in our hearts, our souls, our emotions, our reasonable brain, all those things through his spirit, they are available and they don't run out. There's no expiration date. It's not like, oh my gosh, you can only have like two out of five of those because I'm kind of short on that. No, that's not God. All right. They're available and freely available. Hope comes from seeing God's perspective and perspective on life, perspective on our experiences. God, what do you say about this? How am I supposed to view this now so that I'm not stuck in this mentality of being a victim, but that I can walk in victory and experience your freedom and this kind of life and not this kind of life anymore. Amen. Hope is not wishing like, oh my gosh, I hope he asks me out or I hope that, you know, um, I hope that they have, uh, no more beans today. The menu. Oh my gosh. Prison beans are the worst, but thank you Lord for feeding us. Biblical hope is a confident expectation that knowing that God is for real, that he is for real, that he is true, that he is credible, that he is living alive and active and, and. for real, okay, that it is a reality. Truth means a reality, that it is a reality. Remember that true lasting hope is not found in our circumstances. It's not found in you sitting in your bunk right now in prison. It's not found in all the things that you're going through, but true lasting hope is found in God and in his word, in his nature, because that's predictable, that's safe. That's what gets us through the unpredictable, uncomfortableness of life and our circumstances,

surely when they are hard, okay? That's where our anchoring is found. That's where our hope is found in the nature of God, that he will show up, that he is faithful, that he is good, that we will get through this hard thing that we are experiencing. Meditate on God's promises in the Bible. Remember that he has always come through. He always, always comes through for us in his holiness. He cannot lie. In his holiness, he cannot lie. That's part of being holy. Hey, there we go. If we are called to live a holy life that it says in 2 Timothy, that's part of what's true for us too. So we gotta be honest with ourselves. We gotta be honest with the Lord, honest with ourselves and honest with others. That is part of health and wellness and soundness and wholeness. He will do, God will do what he says he will do because he is faithful. That's all he knows how to be. So you can live a life full of hope and be free and victorious. That is a reality, family. So these five things, doing them daily, having them be a part of your lifestyle, of your faith journey, of your exercise plan,

all right, spiritually and mentally and behaviorally, emotionally, all these things. We have to do different things if we want a different result, right? Nothing changes if nothing changes. And so if we're still experiencing illness and the same torment and things like that, there are things that you can do to step forward in this journey toward health and wellbeing that can aid you and bring you into a, bring you into the authentic design, divine design that God has for you in your life and step away, step out of this life, all right? So if that's you, will you leave a comment and just say, I'm ready? Let's go, I'm ready. I will, I declare that I am a child of God. I declare that I am no longer an orphan. I declare that I have power, that I have soundness already. I declare and aligning myself with clarity and understanding and grace and peace and love and the power of the Holy Spirit to walk this out. I declare a sound and ordered mind right now. Declare those things, those are yours. Those are yours, all you gotta do is take them. All we gotta do is step forward in our faith to receive them, okay? Listen, we do not have to be afraid anymore.

The spirit of fear is not what God gives us, okay? The world and Satan and our circumstances and even ourselves, our experiences, they want us to be afraid. They breed fear. Like I said, manipulation, all these other things. Fear is one of Satan's best weapons that he uses to keep us in bondage, that he uses to keep us incarcerated. And he does not want us to step into our rightful places, but child of God, he does not want us to fulfill our purposes in our lives. He doesn't. He will do anything and everything to thwart that, to put a kink in it and a wrench in it to where that's not true of your life. But you have to continue to believe, to step forward in the reality and the truth that you were created by God for a purpose, on purpose. God does not make mistakes, all right? So step forward and grab ahold of these things that are yours, that are freely, freely yours for the taking, for the applying to experience a more sound and healthy mind and life, all right? Listen, he has formed and fashioned you with his own hands. Okay, I wanna read this over you. Psalm 139, 13 through 16. This is just a picture, okay, a word picture and truth about God's design for our lives. God, you made all the delicate inner parts of my body.

knit me together in my mother's womb. Thank you, God, for making me so wonderfully complex. Your workmanship, God, it is marvelous how well I know it. God, you watched me as I was being formed in utter seclusion, as I was being woven together in the darkness of my mother's womb. God, you saw me before I was born. Every day of my life has already been recorded in your book. Every moment was laid out before a single day has passed. This is personal. This is personal. God has personal plans for your life. He knows every hair on your head. You are the apple of his eye. Family, we have to believe God. We have to believe truth. We have to renew our mind with the truth and continue to tell ourselves the truth. Continue to seek and find what is true and what is good and what is right for our lives and step forward and live it out. Not just believe it, but be living it out too. All right? Don't be caught. Here's a warning. Don't be caught in just being those who are listening and be like, yeah, woo, good word, but I ain't doing nothing about it. I'm not sure even how to apply that or that's too hard and I'm trying to take the easy road, the easy wide road where I can just be passive and lazy and not really co-partner and give of myself, deny myself, put off my old nature and put on my new nature. Let's not be found doing that. Let's not be found sleeping. Let's not be found being lulled to sleep by the lies and numbing and escaping the reality of, hey, this can be true of you. And it does require effort and discipline and self-control and all the things, but the power of God is right here with us. Those are the things that are empowering us in our weakness to become His strength. All right? Like it says in 1 Corinthians, when I am weak, you are strong. And that means that declaring and confessing like, hey, Lord, I need help. I don't know what I'm doing. I'm going to raise this white flag and surrender and give over myself and deny self from now on and live and do life your way. And I promise you, I promise you, I promise you that your life would change. Your transformation story will be a reality, but we cannot give up. We must endure all the way to the end, not just till you get out. And then you're like, woo, thanks, Lord. Peace out. I'm going to go over here and do all the things that I used to do. That's not what God calls us to do. This is a lifetime lifestyle. All right. I love y'all so much. And so I want to introduce, next time you're going to be seeing this guy's face right here. This is my husband, Nick, and I'm going to have him on an episode with me. We're going to talk about our personal journeys through mental health and what God has done in our lives. The times that we failed, but we got back up again and tried again. The times where it has worked really well and we've experienced

the transforming power of God and the help and the comfort of the Holy Spirit in that place too. So be on the lookout for that in a couple of weeks and love you so much. We'll talk soon. Okay. Bye. Or email us through our website at vlmag.org. We are happy to provide our Victorious Living magazine free of charge in bulk with or without staples.