"Mental Health Doesn't Exist?" What Happens When We're Taught Not to Trust Our Inner World

You know when a particular phrase seems to pop up everywhere?

Recently, for me, it has been this one:

"Mental health doesn't exist."

I've heard it from people who grew up with it as an unquestioned family belief, passed down through generations without much reflection. Some have tried to persuade me it is true, and I've also seen it online several times over the past few weeks.

Every time I hear it, I feel a mixture of sadness, curiosity and anger. It’s baffling to me.

It makes me wonder what happens when a person is taught that their inner world doesn't really exist. In many ways, I already know the answer, because these are often the people I’m lucky enough to work with, and I’m glad they’re questioning it, exploring it and becoming curious about their own experiences.

We all have thoughts, emotions, memories, relationships and nervous systems that respond to our experiences every single day.

Fear, grief, joy, shame, love, anger and anxiety are all part of being human.

Sometimes these feelings are painful, but they are also information. They can tell us what we have experienced, what matters to us and what we may need to change in order to feel safer, seek comfort from ourselves or others, or live more closely in line with our values.

Whether we call it mental health, emotional wellbeing, psychological health or our inner life, we all have it. It’s part of being human, and it needs attending to.

So when someone tells me, "Mental health doesn't exist," I wonder what happened that taught them to stop trusting themselves and their inner life.

A legacy of survival

I suspect and hope that, for many people, this belief wasn’t taught to them from a place of cruelty or a lack of care.

Previous generations often had fewer accepted ways of talking openly about emotional pain. Many people were taught that carrying on, staying quiet and not needing help in times of trauma were signs of strength. Difficult experiences were often seen as something to endure rather than something to understand, process and work through.

For some families, acknowledging distress may have felt frightening, shameful or even impossible.

But understanding where a belief comes from doesn't mean we have to accept it, and denying our emotional lives doesn't help anyone.

What happens when we stop trusting ourselves?

Children aren’t born believing that their feelings are wrong, they gradually develop beliefs about their emotions through their experiences and the responses of the people around them.

When a child is frightened, overwhelmed or heartbroken, they need someone alongside them who can help them make sense of what is happening inside.

Someone who can say:

"I can see you're scared."

"That really hurt, didn't it?"

"It makes sense that you're upset."

These are the moments that teach a child something profound:

My feelings make sense.
My experience matters.
I can bring difficult emotions to another person.

But when a child repeatedly hears:

"You're too sensitive."

"Stop making a fuss."

"Pull yourself together."

"I'll give you something to cry about."

The child learns not to trust themselves or their emotions. Instead, they begin adapting into the person who feels more acceptable, the one most likely to earn the love, approval or safety they need.

Some might become the ‘capable one’, the easy one, who never asks for anything.

Others become labelled as “difficult”, “dramatic”, “clingy” or “oversensitive”.

Many grow into adults who appear calm, competent and independent, and struggle to admit when life feels overwhelming.

Others continue to experience emotions that feel too big, too intense or too difficult to understand, and may struggle to regulate themselves. Over time, those adaptations can become deeply held beliefs:

I shouldn't struggle.
I shouldn't need anyone.
My feelings can't be trusted.
I’m too much.

In turn, emotions that remain unprocessed may contribute to physical symptoms, addictive behaviours, aggression, exhaustion or burnout.

Learning to trust our inner world again

Healing often begins when someone responds differently.

We need someone, like a therapist or trusted friend, to listen without rushing to dismiss, fix or explain away what we feel.

Someone who lets us know, in words or through their presence, that:

"What you're experiencing matters."

Through safe connection with another person, we can begin to feel more able to understand and tolerate our emotions rather than fear them.

Instead of asking:

"What's wrong with me?"

we can ask:

"What might this feeling be trying to tell me?"

Perhaps we're grieving. Perhaps a boundary has been crossed. Or perhaps we're exhausted and have been waiting a very long time to be heard.

Our emotions carry important meaning.

Holding two truths

One of the ideas that has stayed with me since my training at the Tavistock, is Melanie Klein's concept of the 'depressive position'. It was also the subject of an essay that helped me think more deeply about how we hold emotional complexity (and I got my one and only distinction for!).

Despite its name, Klein’s ‘depressive position’ is not a description of clinical depression. It describes our growing capacity to hold complexity, rather than seeing ourselves or other people as simply good or bad, right or wrong.

At its heart, it is about becoming able to hold a more complete picture.

Someone can be loving and disappointing. Someone can care about us and still hurt us. We can recognise another person's struggles while also acknowledging the impact they have had on us.

I think it fits here because we can feel upset or disappointed that someone denied our inner life and mental health, while also understanding that their response may have come from ignorance or misunderstanding.

Many people find themselves choosing one version of the story:

"My parent loved me, so I shouldn't feel hurt."

or

"My parent hurt me, so nothing good was real."

Healing often means allowing both things to exist.

My parent loved me.
And I felt misunderstood.

Both can be true.

Perhaps this is one of the deepest forms of trusting ourselves: allowing our own experience to exist, even when it feels complicated.

So... does mental health exist?

Perhaps that's why I keep coming back to that phrase. I'm fascinated by what sits underneath it.

What happens when people are taught not to trust what they think, feel or experience?

What happens when anxiety is dismissed as weakness, grief is treated as self-indulgence, or fear is met with, "Just get on with it"?

When we refuse to name or acknowledge difficult emotions and experiences, they can become more complicated and harder to understand.

Mental health does exist, just as much as physical health, whether we acknowledge it or not, whether we understand it or not and whether we've been taught to trust it or not.

As always, this isn't about blaming previous generations or suggesting that anyone got everything right or wrong. None of us are perfect.

But if we become curious about what happens when feelings are denied, we can begin to understand their impact and heal from it.

If this resonates with you, therapy can offer a space where your experiences are taken seriously rather than dismissed, where your emotions can be explored instead of ignored, and where you can begin to rebuild trust in your own inner world.

If you'd like to find out more, please get in touch to arrange an initial conversation.