Nurture and Heal, the Only 2 Ways To Achieve and Preserve Mental Health

Nurture and heal are the combined solutions for today’s mental health crisis.

In physical and mental health, we accentuate the latter to the former’s detriment. We need both to nurture and heal the body and mind. In fact, the lack of nurturing in mental health is a significant cause of our mental illness crisis in your nation and worldwide. For a baby, mother’s milk is the best physical food; what is the best mental food?
(Transform Your Mind, Upgrade Your Life – Chapter 24)

Nurture, The Foundation of Mental Health

Why is the nurture in nurture and heal so important, even more so than heal, even if we emphasize the latter? Nurturing is where everything starts. When we take nurturing seriously, we diminish healing by truckloads.  Here’s the definition of nurture from the Cambridge Dictionary.

To take care of, feed, and protect someone or something, especially young children or plants, and help him, her, or it to develop:

Nurturing mental health during the early years of a child’s life is crucial, as it lays the foundation for emotional, psychological, and social well-being throughout life. The first few years of childhood are a critical period of mental and cognitive development, during which a child’s environment, relationships, and experiences significantly influence their future mental health, cognitive abilities, and behavior.

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Early childhood mental health refers to the child’s ability to experience and regulate emotions, form close relationships, and explore their environment in ways that promote learning and development. Fostering good mental health during this period can help prevent mental health issues later in life and enhance a child’s overall development.

Experiences during early childhood—positive or negative—are instrumental in forming mental pathways that affect behavior, learning, and emotional regulation. This is the nurture and heal that leads to proper development of consciousness and mind. The initial teaching a child to have a purpose (like keeping their room tidy), conduct (like obeying Dad and Mom), reasoning between good and bad, socialization with family and friends, and ruling, self control of their emotions and behavior, whether alone or with friends.

Positive experiences, such as loving care, consistent emotional support, and cognitive stimulation, contribute to healthy mental development, leading to resilience, social skills, and emotional regulation. Conversely, adverse experiences, such as neglect, abuse, or chronic stress, can disrupt normal mental health, potentially leading to issues such as anxiety, depression, or behavioral problems later in life.

While short-term stress can help children learn how to cope with challenges, chronic or toxic stress—such as exposure to violence, severe neglect, or family dysfunction—can have detrimental effects on one’s mental perspective. Prolonged exposure to toxic stress can interfere with the development of key areas of the mind like decision-making, self-control, and processing emotions. This can lead to difficulties in managing feelings, forming healthy relationships, and handling stress as children grow older.

Nurturing mental health during the early years benefits the child and has broader societal implications. Children who develop strong emotional regulation, social competence, and resilience are likelier to grow into healthy, productive adults who contribute positively to society.

Parental Responsibility in Nurture and Heal

Parents, caregivers, educators, and communities all play a role in fostering healthy mental development, ensuring that children grow into emotionally healthy and capable adults who contribute positively to society. The benefits of supporting early childhood mental health extend far beyond the individual, with ripple effects that touch families, communities, and the economy.

The family environment plays a crucial role in shaping an individual’s mental health, especially during childhood and adolescence. While it may not be the only factor influencing mental well-being, the family is one of the most essential foundations for emotional and psychological development. Parents, siblings, and extended family members create a nurturing or harmful atmosphere that impacts mental health in profound ways. Understanding the specific roles of fathers, mothers, and siblings, along with strategies to foster mental health stability in future generations, is critical for ensuring long-term mental well-being.

In these troubled times, social roles and responsibilities are taking a beating. Somewhere, somehow, someone or an organization needs to take on the role of helping girls and boys, young women and men, learn their God-given role in society. We seem to have all sorts of professional courses to earn money, but what about how to live as individuals, families, and as a society, according to the Book of Proverbs? Babies, young children, and adolescents are not the problem; their caregivers, namely their progenitors, are. With 50% divorce rates, domestic violence, and abandonment, mental illness is, unfortunately, a given. To win the battle of nurture and heal, we must turn this situation around.

The Major Problem with Nurturing

Individually and collectively, if we really want our family and nation to return to normality, the best hope is to work with the next generation, our children. This presupposes a shockwave of awakening from parents. Parents and caregivers are responsible for the next generation.  On the other hand, the way to destroy families and the nation is to upheave parental responsibility. Here’s a Bible example of Balaam, a prophet of God. Read the full story in Numbers 22-24 at UnlockBibleMeaning.com. He was a prophet who got too close to the enemy for the sake of monetary gain. God stopped him from prophesying against Israel, so Balaam found another way to bring the nation to its ruin.

Balaam threw a wrench/spanner in the works. Look at the Greek meaning. There are a lot of these stumbling blocks going on today; think about fornication.

The concepts of a scandal and bend refer to something that exists on a spectrum or a gradual sequence of increasingly bending the rules, leading to scandals without clear-cut boundaries between different points. When applying this to the long-term effects of being exposed to violent aggression, sexualized video games, movies, videos, strained gender relationships, dark media content, and certain rock and rap music, be it the tempo or lyrics, this affects mental health. Things get increasingly bent out of shape, more and more fake, with influencers and stars trying to outdo each other, vying for our attention; the environment in which we swim can slowly drown the weaker swimmers.

In Balaam’s narrative, Israel collapsed. Will we follow the same poor example? The result is evident if we continue to nurture and heal as we’re doing.

Healing in Nurture and Heal

King David was subject to mood swings. Here’s a well-known prayer to which I’d like to draw your attention. There are fundamental principles that need to be put in place to accelerate access to mental health.

The way to restore mental health is to follow the path of righteousness.  Note that restore means to return; the idea is to return to norms that align with Proverbs’ righteousness.

In the context of Bible Proverbs Therapy, David’s plea to restore my soul means striving to align one’s life with the Proverb principles in the areas of your life’s Purpose, Conduct, Reasoning, Socialization, and Rulership. The twelve practical lessons to apply that follow will show you how to restore yourself.

Notice where God leads David and all of us who so desire to enable and accomplish this recovery, returning home to a saner frame of mind: green pastures and still waters. There’s nothing like being in nature to hasten the restoration of mental health. But this is also figurative and refers to the appropriate environment for healing, Surrounded by a motivating Purpose, an atmosphere inducive of correct conduct, rational reasoning, supporting relationships, and the ability to learn to run your life responsibly.

It is only within the framework of nurture and heal, both in accord with Proverbs’ wisdom, that we’ll establish the family and national setting and conditions to develop and rehabilitate lucid mental health.

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