This is Part 4 of a four-part series introducing the BCA Holistic approach to mental health.

Have you ever thought about how important levelling-up is for mental health? 

I once had a 62-year-old depressed, illiterate client, expressing low self-esteem and negative self-talk about how dumb he was believing he couldn’t read. I validated his perspective, and then proceeded to level up his self-awareness. I got out Dr Seuss’s book Green Eggs and Ham and we read it. It took a while, but he could read, just very slowly and with a great deal of effort. He hugged me at the end of that intake session, because he came in as a depressed, illiterate man and left as a less depressed, slow reader. 

Levelling-up, like emotions, is something everyone knows and does but there is no consensus on knowing or understanding exactly what it is, when or how it occurs, and why it matters. Levelling-up is growth by expanding our awareness and knowledge of the process of intentional changes that impacts and defines our beliefs, values, focus, perspective and more as we develop, manage and create our mental health.

I experienced levelling-up while writing these articles for Psychreg, because I thought levelling-up was just a bridge from one state of being to another. I didn’t realize the importance and impact deciding the when, how and which bridges we build and then choose to cross over.

Levelling-up through intentional changes is why BCA defines emotions as power and thoughts as direction. It goes beyond the psychoeducational or psychosocial learning approaches to include the skill development of DBT, the self-reflection of psychoanalysis or neuro-linguistic programming, and the reprocessing of EMDR. It is a holistic approach to understand the whole process within and beyond ourselves put into context. 

That is why, when a client levels up to see that emotions and thoughts are different and that all emotions are innate and okay to have, there is often an immediate release of internal tension and pent up energy because they no longer have to suppress, ignore, fight or reject part of themselves. It is now OK to validate and accept all of what they are feeling. Levelling-up impacts the process of mental health by impacting the process of thinking. 

If I may digress for a moment to discuss squiggles regarding the process of thinking. 

When a baby can hold a colour crayon, pencil or pen, they can draw a squiggly line. That line is an expression that has no specific meaning. It is just a squiggle. But, as the baby becomes a toddler, those squiggles evolve into shapes of circles, triangles, and squares. Squiggles can be levelled-up into shapes. Then, squiggles that have become shapes, level up into another whole new world of meaning and become… letters. But the levelling-up process of thinking doesn’t stop there, as letters are used to create words. Each level of understanding completely changes focus, perspective, process, meaning and context. That is, you could put a thousand letters together and they never become a word until you intentionally use certain letters to expand their meaning into something new that, from your experience, didn’t exist before. 

Consider this levelling up challenge – what do words become? Take a moment to mindfully ask and then answer that question. Often, the first response is, “a sentence” or “a book.” That is using the same level of thinking to solve the problem. You are just using new words to define more words. “The the do water the three zoo no.” is words that form not a sentence. Using new words to define more words doesn’t explain the process or purpose of having more words. 

So, what do words evolve into? Words level up to become ideas. An idea is words but also beyond just words. While words can never level up beyond being letters, idea can level up starting with concrete ideas, then evolving up into abstract, integrated and eventually empowered ideas.  

A practical understanding of levelling-up is essential to understanding the process of mental health and how we see, understand and connect to ourselves and the world. 

For example, at what level do you connect with Dr Seuss’s book, Green Eggs and Ham? Do you connect with the 62 pictures. Do you see 10,000+ squiggles, 3,128 letters or 728 words? Regarding words, is “Sam-I-am” one or three words? If three, then 782 words becomes 806 words. Or, if you only count different words, then the book uses 44 different words. If you level up beyond pictures or words, do you connect with the one idea of a grumpy guy who repeatedly refuses to even try green eggs and ham, but when he does, he likes them? Do you level up even more to think about how you connect with the grumpy guy’s approach to trying something new? Or, if you read the book to a child, how you and a child have a shared yet different focus, perspectives and experiences of a book. 

Levelled-up thinking changes nothing but our focus, perspective and understanding of the process of mental health. It changes how we focus and engage with others and the world. It changes how we see emotions and thoughts, which impacts our understanding of actions, development and relationships. 

Levelling-up is integral to the BCA Holistic approach to mental health, and changes the tools we can build and harness to provide mental health services. We level up to increase our effective choices and options of how to make lives and the world better. When we look closer, we discover how we level up squiggles into creating our reality.  

Dane Jorento, MSW, LICSW is a speaker available for keynotes, seminars, and workshops on mental health, emotional well-being, trauma, ADHD, self-esteem, relationships, and sexual health. His expertise includes BCA Holistic Therapy, EMDR, and DBT approaches.