Wild and unhelpful stretching

I broke my wrist in an unfortunate snowboarding accident in 2013. Everything was going great until I fell the wrong way, landed on my hand and cracked my forearm and up into the wrist joint. I was in a plaster cast for 6 weeks while the break healed, and got pretty adept at doing everything one-handed. (Thankfully it was my dominant hand that was safe!)

After I was cleared to have my cast removed and return to normal activities, I was given a sheet of paper with rehabilitation exercises to do, to strengthen my now weaker than ever wrist. I did them off and on for a few weeks, but they were boring and I honestly just kept forgetting to do them. I soldiered on, adapting to new ways of moving and using my left arm/hand to get around the pain and weakness that lingered. Eventually I got used to having to brace my wrist with my other hand sometimes, or not being able to put pressure on my hand in certain ways. It wasn’t perfect by any means, but it worked… kind of.

Now, nearly 10 years after that night on the slopes, I’m back to doing the rehabilitation exercises because the pain and weakness never really went away, I just got used to working around the injury. I tried in vain to make my wrist stronger, lifting weights and stretching my wrist into all sorts of contortions, but without a real plan or knowing what I was doing I never got very far. I hit a breaking point when I stopped being able to do some of my favourite hobbies due to the pain and limits in range of motion. I’ve been diligently doing specific wrist fracture exercises daily (and sometimes twice daily), and while it is still deeply boring, I’m starting to notice that after a week of consistently stretching and pushing the range of motion, slowly but surely the pain is decreasing and my mobility is increasing.

So why am I telling you all of this on a blog about mental health and therapy? Because this process is a lot like what many people go through when they’re struggling with their mental health. An event happens, or maybe a series of events, and we cope with it as best as we can at the time with the skills that we have. Maybe we try something new to cope, but new things are really hard as it is, let alone when there’s a challenge in front of us. So we carry on, struggling through the way we know how until the way we’ve been coping stops working. It’s usually when the ways we’ve been coping stop working that bring us to therapy. It’s no silver bullet or quick fix and trying to learn new, more helpful ways of coping with the challenges we face isn’t easy. It can take time and effort before we recognise that things are shifting and improving and even longer still before feeling a sense of relief. Having someone to guide us through this process and hold space for exploring the range of emotions that come up are like having a specific action plan through a path toward our goal makes all the difference, instead of stretching ourselves into wild and maybe unhelpful shapes on our own.