From Survival to Belonging: Reclaiming Mental Health Through Connection - Celebrating Mental Health Awareness Month

Mental Health Awareness Month

There was a time, not that long ago, when a woman could be locked away for being inconvenient. Not dangerous. Not ill in the ways we understand now.

Just… inconvenient. In the late 1800s, Nellie Bly had herself committed to a women’s asylum so she could tell the truth about what was happening inside. What she found were women silenced, dismissed, and discarded. Many of them weren’t sick. They were outspoken. They wanted out of marriages. They didn’t move fast enough, obey well enough, shrink small enough. That was enough. We like to believe that story belongs to another lifetime, something distant and resolved. But those institutions didn’t fully close until the late 1970s. Women considered “unwell” or “mentally unstable” especially women of color were still being sterilized into 1979. The timeline isn’t ancient history. It’s within reach.

So yes, we’ve come a long way. And also, we’re still walking. Mental health has always lived in that tension. It carries both the weight of what’s been done to us and the quiet, stubborn beauty of what’s possible. But what are we actually talking about when we say mental health awareness? Truly. What does that mean? Right now, we are living in a time where science is finally catching up to what many people have felt in their bones all along. The brain is not separate from the body. Our experiences don’t just live in memory, they live in our nervous system, in our posture, in the way we brace or soften, in the way we reach or pull away.

Mental Health Awareness Month, at its best, isn’t just a campaign. It’s a recognition. A collective pause to say: this is what it means to be human. And if I’m honest I don’t think it should be limited to a month. I think it should be how we move through the world every day. Because the more we begin to notice each other, really notice, the more possible real connection becomes. And that kind of connection, the kind where someone feels seen, heard, understood without having to perform for it, is something most of us have been hungry for our entire lives. We are wired for that.

Gabor Maté writes, “Human beings are wired for connection, but when the environments we live in—our families, our culture, our systems—deny that need, we don’t just feel lonely; we become disconnected from ourselves. What we call dysfunction is often a normal response to an abnormal, disconnected world.”

When you let that settle, it changes things. It means mental health awareness isn’t just about naming diagnoses or reducing stigma. It’s about understanding that who we are is shaped, continuously, by where we are and who we are with. It means that our childhood experiences don’t stay in childhood. They echo forward. Sometimes quietly. Sometimes loudly. Sometimes in ways we don’t recognize until much later. And it means that if we begin to shift how we understand those patterns, we begin to shift how we see ourselves. And each other.

 As a counselor, as someone who has lived it, I’ve come to believe this: mental health isn’t a luxury. It’s not something we earn after we get everything else right. It’s the ground we stand on. Or don’t. The World Health Organization defines mental health as a state of well-being where we can cope with life, realize our abilities, work, learn, and contribute. It names it as a basic human right. A right. And yet, so many children never receive the conditions that make that right possible. The research is clear. The Adverse Childhood Experiences Study - ( ACE’s by Fincilleti et al.) showed us that trauma in childhood isn’t rare. It’s common. And it doesn’t just stay in childhood. It moves into the body, into the nervous system, into the way a person grows up and tries to survive.

Nearly two-thirds of adults report at least one adverse childhood experience. Many have more. And those experiences are linked to everything from depression to heart disease to shortened life expectancy. But, here’s the part we often miss: what we label as “problems” later in life are often adaptations. Brilliant, exhausting adaptations. Ways the body learned to survive when it didn’t feel safe. And when we widen the lens even further, we begin to see something else. We are not just shaped by what happens directly to us, but by what has been carried before us. There is growing evidence that stress and trauma can echo across generations, living not just in story, but in the body itself. Which makes the expectation that we should all just “cope,” just “be strong,” just “get over it,” feel not only unrealistic, but deeply uninformed. It’s no wonder we are facing a mental health crisis.

Research continues to show rising rates of depression, anxiety, loneliness, self-harm, and suicide among young people, especially among girls, and young women. These increases began climbing sharply around 2010, alongside the rise of social media and a

steady decline in in-person connection. And it raises a quiet but important question: “Were we ever meant to be seen this constantly, and known this little? To be visible everywhere, but deeply understood almost nowhere?” When connection becomes performance, something essential gets lost.

I know that terrain well. For most of my life, I didn’t know I was living in a constant state of threat. It didn’t feel like danger in a cinematic way. It felt like urgency. Like something was always just about to fall apart. Like I needed to work harder, be better, try again, fix it. Or disappear.

I swung between those two places for years. Fighting to be seen. Then shutting down when it didn’t work. Neither place gave me a sense of worth. Neither felt like freedom. When I look back now, I can see the signs were there early. A body already bracing. A system already trying to manage more than it should have had to. At the time, it might have been called being “sensitive” or “too much.” Now we understand those patterns differently. We understand stress lives in the body, not just the mind. I spent decades trying to solve myself. I read everything I could get my hands on. I worked in a bookstore and devoured every promise of healing on the shelves. I went to workshops, meditated for hours, sat in therapy, tried to think my way into a better life. I did what the world tells you to do when you feel broken. None of it touched the place the pain was actually living. Not because those things don’t help. But because my nervous system was still convinced I wasn’t safe. And when your body believes that, your mind doesn’t get much say.

I built a life anyway. I finished school through more obstacles than I can count. I became a mother. I went back again, determined to prove something, maybe to the world, maybe to myself. There were years where survival was the only metric. And even success didn’t quiet the feeling underneath it. If anything, it made it louder. Because no degree, no achievement, no amount of pushing could override a body still stuck in survival mode.

It wasn’t until I found EMDR therapy that something shifted. Not dramatically at first. Not all at once. But enough. Enough for my system to start settling. Enough for my brain to access the parts meant for clarity, not just survival. Enough for me to feel, for the first time, that I wasn’t inherently broken. That’s the thing about living in a chronic threat response. Mental health doesn’t feel like health at all. It feels like managing. Enduring. Getting through. But, when the nervous system begins to regulate, even a little, something else comes online. Curiosity. Capacity. Choice. You begin to meet yourself differently.

Our brains are constantly trying to make sense of the world. They build meaning out of what we experience, especially early on. When those early environments feel unsafe, unpredictable, or overwhelming, the brain adapts. It says- survive first. Understand later. And it builds a life around that instruction.

We are born completely dependent. No defenses. No way to protect ourselves except through connection. We look to our caregivers to learn how to exist here. And in that exchange, we absorb messages. Be good. Be quiet. Be better. Take care of yourself.Don’t need too much. Or sometimes, nothing at all.

What’s often missing is the message every nervous system is actually looking for: You are safe, You are wanted, You matter just because you are here. Without that the system organizes around something else. Effort. Hypervigilance. Withdrawal.

Adaptation. And then we grow up thinking that’s just who we are. But it isn’t who we are. It’s what we learned.

Mental health begins long before we have language for it, It begins in the body. In the womb. In the earliest exchanges of care, or the absence of it. Those first years shape how safe the world feels, and how safe we feel inside ourselves. And here’s the part that still feels like hope to me: We are not meant to do any of this alone. We never were. Connection isn’t a bonus feature of being human. It’s the operating system. The nervous system regulates through relationships. Through presence. Through being seen and not having to perform for it. That’s why community matters. Not in a vague, idealistic way. In a biological one.

We heal in spaces where we are met.

We settle in spaces where we belong.

We begin to thrive in spaces where we are supported, consistently and without condition.

So this month, when we talk about mental health, I hope we remember both sides of the story. The harm. And the healing. I hope we remember how far we’ve come, and how much still asks for our attention. And in the middle of ordinary moments, when you have the capacity, I hope you reach toward someone. A smile. A pause. A small act of care. Because it doesn’t take a system overhaul to change a life. Sometimes it takes one regulated, present human being showing another: You’re not alone here.

And that matters more than we’ve been taught to believe.

"To your resilient, hard-won, deeply human mental health,"

Ali Astrid Moto