Tag Archive for 'coping skills'

Page 3 of 5

Your Say Yes to Life Monday Motivator: Self-Care During the Holidays

No Gravatar

Your spouse just told you that your in-laws are coming to your house this year.

Again.

But what is different this year than before is that your cousins have decided to caravan down with them and come to your home for the holidays too.

Furthermore, since you have a large backyard, they have decided not to kennel their two dogs, one gerbil, and three cats. No need – your house has enough room for them all!

As your spouse relates all of this to you, you feel your blood pressure starting to rise.

You try to explain, but your spouse just doesn’t seem to get it. And it is little wonder that he doesn’t – you can still remember last year, when you envied him his stressful, hectic city job that allowed him to escape the bedlam and chaos that was your home this time last year.

He didn’t see how demanding his folks really are of you. He didn’t realize how worn out and exhausted you felt at the end of every day – how spent, and drained, and just ready for the whole thing to be over.

You are dreading it at a level you didn’t even think you were capable of. The holidays haven’t even started yet, and already you are ready for them to end.

Luckily, you have been taking a group therapy course in Dialectical Behavior Training (DBT) over the past several weeks, and what you are learning is giving you a fresh perspective on how to handle the family situation this year.

First things first – practicing mindfulness, you note your reactions to your spouse’s announcement. The rage. The frustration. The resentment. The air of finality to it – you are being told, not asked, if it is okay to host his extended family this year. You bring your newfound ability for “radical acceptance” to bear on the situation – calmly, you practice simply accepting the moment for what it is, rather than what your mind thinks or wishes it to be. First, accept. Next, work to change.

That accomplished, you pull out mindfulness’ trusty sidekick, emotion regulation. Using your new skills in emotion regulation, you begin to name each emotion objectively, like a witness or observer, rather than an active (and highly emotional) participant. Yup, that really is rage. Yes, there is frustration too. And resentment. Definitely resentment. Some sadness too – when will you and your spouse ever get a chance to enjoy the holidays just relaxing together? Okay, and relief is also coming up – because this year, you have a plan to use your new DBT skills to transform events in a way that includes your need for self-care and alone-time, as well as couple time and family time, into the mix.

Next up is distress tolerance. You realize you are feeling a lot of distress due to all the emotions suddenly arising and colliding within you. You take a deep breath, relax into an awareness of a bigger picture behind your momentary stress, and then let your breath out again, dropping your shoulders and softening your facial muscles as you do so. You remind yourself that you can deal with this situation, you do have it in you to find a workable solution, and you are okay, even in the midst of some significant emotional distress.

Finally, you begin to pull it all together into interpersonal effectiveness. Now is the moment when you will assert your needs – and household ground rules – with your spouse, sharing with him how you are feeling, what you need, and what you can and cannot offer to make the holidays with his family a success this year. You decide that you will initiate a calm, objective conversation with your spouse, free from excess emotion or last year’s holiday baggage, blame, or shame.

Still very calmly, you ask your spouse if he could join you at the kitchen table for a few moments to strategize. You share with him that you did not enjoy the holidays last year and have a plan for how this year’s time with loved ones can be different. You outline what you are willing and able to do to support his in-laws’ visit, and what you need from him in terms of his participation in the family holiday preparations. Then you ask him how he feels about participating in the ways you have outlined, and whether it is something he can commit to. You ask for his feedback as well, and together, you begin to open up to one another and admit that having the whole family in to stay is stressful for you both.

In other words, as you open up, mindfully, with calmness, centeredness, focus, and objectivity, sharing what you need as well as what you wish to offer to make the family holiday season a success, you give your spouse permission to do the same.

Together, using DBT as your guide, you begin to talk through creative ways to turn last year’s holiday woe into this year’s holiday wonder.

If you are finding that you are struggling this holiday season to find the wonder in the midst of the woes, Southlake Counseling can help. Our compassionate and skilled staff has more than two decades of experience with guiding individuals in how to effectively use the DBT principles of mindfulness, emotion regulation, distress tolerance, and interpersonal effectiveness. Learn more by visiting us at www.southlakecounseling.com.

Be Well – and happy holidays!

Kimberly



Published on Monday December 13, 2010 in Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT). 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

Your Say Yes to Life Monday Motivator: Turning Holiday Woes into Holiday Wonders

No Gravatar

Oh boy. The holidays are here.

Again.

You are not sure whether you have been anticipating this moment all year, or dreading it.

Or maybe a bit of both.

Nevertheless, here they are again – upon us for yet another season, and once again before we are ready for them to come. So now the question becomes not “where can I hide?” but rather “what am I going to do differently this year?”

That is what we are going to discuss in this month’s blog series “Turning Holiday Woes into Holiday Wonders.”

For our series, you have been my inspiration, because each one of the woes I have selected is one I have heard you share with me in private session year after year, right around this time.

For instance, you have shared with me how hard you find it to carve out time for self-care while feeling called to take extra special good care of others as well.

You have told me that sometimes it feels simply impossible to locate the fine line between treating yourself to holiday goodies and maintaining your physical health and nutrition.

And you have confided that you sometimes – often – find it incredibly difficult to release a whole past year’s worth of errors and triumphs only to discover an entirely new, sparkling fresh year sweeping down on you before you have had any time to prepare for its arrival.

So this month, we will examine strategies to turn each of these woes into wonders, one week at a time. To do this, we will revisit one of my favorite therapeutic approaches for recovery and life – Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, or DBT for short.

DBT is a wonderful pathway to effective daily living authored by Dr. Marsha Linehan. The focus and goal of DBT work is to stay centered, present, open, and willing to do our best in every moment.

The teaching tools that DBT uses include mindfulness, emotion regulation, distress tolerance, and interpersonal effectiveness. Each tool builds upon and integrates with the others, and when used together can produce a centered, balanced, present-focused approach to daily life during the holidays and at every moment of the year.

So before we begin our “woes to wonders” adventure together, let’s just take a quick review of each of the four key DBT tools we will be using:

  • Mindfulness training equips us to take back control over our mind’s thoughts and our reactions to those thoughts
  • Emotion Regulation teaches us to name and experience our emotions without allowing them to overtake us
  • Distress Tolerance cultivates our ability to stay present and focused for each moment of our lives regardless of what the day may bring
  • Interpersonal Effectiveness helps us to develop assertiveness skills to ask for what we want and need in safe, healthy, and affirming ways

It is easy to see how each of these tools becomes particularly essential during the heightened energy and emotion the holiday season ushers in. During the next few weeks, we will look at how to apply each of these skills to transform a traditional holiday woe into a true source of delight and wonder.

If you are finding that you are struggling this holiday season to find the wonder in the midst of the woes, Southlake Counseling can help. Our compassionate and skilled staff has more than two decades of experience with guiding individuals in how to effectively use the DBT principles of mindfulness, emotion regulation, distress tolerance, and interpersonal effectiveness. Learn more by visiting us at www.southlakecounseling.com.

Be Well – and happy holidays!

Kimberly

Published on Monday December 6, 2010 in Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT). 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Your Say Yes to Life Monday Motivator: The Help We Need…and the Help We Don’t

No Gravatar

This month, we have been discussing the process of asking for help. So far, we have broken this process down into three discrete events – noticing when we need help, asking for the help we need, and accepting that help when it arrives.

The fourth and final facet of asking for help comes as we learn to discern the help we need from the help we don’t. So in this final blog post in our “asking for help” series, we will examine what to do with offers for help we don’t need.

Imagine for a moment that you’ve been lost in the desert. You have been wandering around, looking for water. Everywhere you look, what appears to be a water source turns into yet another mirage. Finally, after days of wandering, you at last see a source of genuine water up ahead. You walk closer, closer, you break into run…..only to pull yourself up short when you realize….it’s the ocean.

You’ve found water, just not the right kind.

Accepting offers of help we don’t need is like drinking salty ocean water to quench our thirst. It is not only unproductive – it can be downright dangerous as well.

Furthermore, it is disrespectful to ourselves, because if we have made it this far in this blog series, we have earned our “asking for help” stripes, and we know when we need help and when we don’t, and what we need it for. We may even be starting to get comfortable with accepting help when it arrives.

But what do we do with help we simply don’t need? And why might we accept help we don’t need?

Let’s take an example. Let’s say that last weekend you had your pre-wedding shower. This afternoon, your soon-to-be mother-in-law with the illegible handwriting offers to help you write your wedding shower thank you notes….and you don’t know how to respond. On the one hand, you don’t want to do anything to damage a new family connection that will be in your life for years to come. Yet this will double your workload, and with all you still have to do to prepare for the wedding, you can already visualize yourself spending precious free time surreptitiously re-writing dozens of thank you cards and sneaking out to the mail box to pop them in when your mother-in-law-to-be isn’t looking.

So what should you do?

You could certainly graciously decline her offer, and explain that you already have everything well in hand. But the truth is, you don’t. You do need help in plenty of other areas as you prepare for your upcoming wedding – yet clearly the task she has volunteered to help you with is not the right task for her. So how about finding something else – some other way that your new mother-in-law could be of service?

One strategy you could try follows a simple four step approach I have often suggested to clients over the years:

  1. Thank the offering individual sincerely for their offer of help
  2. Let them know you will think about it, and get back with them
  3. In the meantime (or on the spot if something comes to mind right away) decide if there is something they could do that would truly help you, and if so, let them know what it is and ask if they would be willing to offer that help instead
  4. If the answer to number three above is a simple “no”, communicate that to them with gratitude and let them know you will surely contact them if you need help with that task or others in the future.

As we learn and practice new skills for how to identify and accept the help we do need, and how to graciously redirect or decline the help we do not need, we can begin to feel truly empowered in our relationships with ourselves and others.

At Southlake Counseling, we offer a wealth of personalized individual and group support services to help individuals just like you learn to access the courage and power to navigate your need for help self-supportively and effectively. If you are struggling to say no and yes to offers of help in self-respecting, empowering ways, we encourage you to contact us at www.southlakecounseling.com.

Be Well,

Kimberly


Published on Monday November 15, 2010 in Wellness. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Your Say Yes to Life Monday Motivator: How to Accept Help

No Gravatar

In the first two blog posts in our “asking for help” series this month, we discussed how we can re-activate our felt sense of needing help, and from there learn skills to ask for the help we need.

In this third post in our series, we will discuss the actual process of how we can get comfortable with accepting help when it is offered.

We may have allowed ourselves to get so wrapped up in our awareness of not being able to ask for help, or our belief that nobody around us is willing to offer help, that we have failed to recognize that we don’t feel comfortable accepting help.

Chances are, that is just because we have long since fallen out of practice.

But regardless of the reason, if we feel uncomfortable with accepting help, we may get all the way through the process of rekindling our awareness of when we need help, learning how to effectively ask for help, and then still not be able to actually accept the help we need when it is offered!

In my experience working with individuals who want to relearn how to ask for and accept help, this final phase is actually where many of us struggle the most.

As we make our way through today’s do-it-yourself culture, for many of us it truly is uncomfortable to allow ourselves to receive help! It doesn’t feel right, or normal, or natural, or comfortable – and women in particular may worry all the way through the process about imposing too much, asking too much, or being beholden to “return the favor,”  in the process adding so much extra work to our own plate that asking for help really does start to become as unproductive as we feared it would be!

So we have to start now – before we even ask for the help we need – to get comfortable with receiving it once it arrives.

We can do this in a number of ways. I have often found that visualization seems to work well as a tool to prepare ourselves for accepting help. It seems that when we feel prepared for the outcome of our actions, we are more ready to accept the end result when it arrives. So if we can visualize ourselves accepting help before it even arrives, we are more likely to recognize ourselves in that role when we are actually standing in the receiver’s shoes, and more likely to favorably experience what it feels like to accept help.

In this way, we can also give our imagination something productive to do. Our imagination is usually all too ready to dish out vivid mental pictures of how disastrous asking for and accepting help might be. With constructive, proactive visualization strategies, we can preempt its regularly scheduled programming and put it to work visualizing positive outcomes instead!

So this week, as you are building on what you have learned about recognizing when you need help, and asking for that help, also make sure to visualize yourself accepting that help when it comes. Visualize how you will express your gratitude (to avoid adding stress to the process, be sure to choose something simple, like saying a genuine “thank you” or sending a sweet short note). Imagine the process of how you will show the other person what you need, including giving them any instructions they might need in order to provide help. Think of what you will do with the energy and time you freed up by not trying to arm wrestle the problem to the floor all by yourself.

Then give yourself a hug and a warm smile full of gratitude for being willing to accept the gift of help when it is offered! This is a courageous act, and you deserve your own gratitude for stepping out of your comfort zone to notice when you need help, ask for that help, and accept it when it is offered.

If you notice you are struggling with accepting help, and you feel uncomfortable allowing yourself to accept help even when it is offered, please consider contacting Southlake Counseling. In more than two decades I have personally assisted hundreds of people to learn how to accept the help both easefully and gracefully. If they can do it, you can too. Southlake Counseling’s staff of caring, highly trained professionals can help you begin to say no to the exhaustion and frustration of withholding help from yourself, and YES to joyfully embracing the help you need and deserve. Visit us today at www.southlakecounseling.com

Be Well,

Kimberly


Published on Monday November 8, 2010 in Wellness. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Your Say Yes to Life Monday Motivator: How to Know When We Need Help

No Gravatar

In the more than two decades I have spent assisting courageous individuals who come to me seeking help for how to transcend challenges and embrace opportunities, I have noticed over and over again how hard our culture makes it for us to ask for help.

We may think that it is hard to accept help when it is offered, and that is often true as well. But that difficulty is nothing compared to how hard many of us find it to reach out and ask for help when we need it.

In fact, I have also noticed that the difficulty only sometimes lies with an actual inability to ask for help. For many of those I have met in the course of my life and work, the true challenge seems to be even knowing for sure when help is needed!

So I thought we would spend some time this month discussing how we know when we need help and how we can ask for help when we need it.

When we were little, we probably asked for help by crying. We had a limited emotional vocabulary, and tears were one of the few reliable ways we could communicate a felt need – even if we did not have a clear understanding of what that need was. We just knew we needed….something….we cried….and someone noticed and offered assistance. If necessary, we figured out what kind of assistance was needed together, but the presence of the tears was enough evidence in and of themselves that help was in order, and enough to send it running our way.

As we got older, however, it became less socially acceptable to literally “cry out” our need for help. As our tears went underground, our ability to sense our felt need for help went with it.  We learned that there was a cutoff age by which we could unselfconsciously ask for help without fear of ridicule, rejection, or censure. Once that cutoff age had been reached, we were deemed “old enough” to figure out how to help ourselves and we were on our own.

It was at this point that we most likely withdrew permission from ourselves to ask for help, or accept it when it was offered, or both.

However, even if it has been awhile since we have used it, we have never lost this ability to sense when we need help. Rather, we are just out of practice with tuning in.

This week, spend some time tuning in again to that innate felt sense of when you need help. As you do this, suspend any learned adult requirement that you must question your own felt sense of needing help, regardless of whether your need is small (lifting a heavy bag out of the car) or big (addressing a difficult relationship or work situation).

If necessary, pretend you are small again, and your felt sense of needing help is pure and trusted. Allow it to come up. Notice if it is preceded by a sudden feeling of sadness, anger, fear, or other emotion. Notice how you feel as you begin to translate a wave of previously inexplicable sudden feeling into a need for help. Do you feel fear? Resistance? Reluctance? Relief?

Being able to tune in to when you need help is the first step to being able to ask for help – we simply cannot ask for what we do not know we need. Knowing we need help is also the first step towards trusting ourselves enough to ask for it – if we cannot admit to ourselves that we need help, then we cannot allow ourselves to accept it, even when it is freely offered!

If you notice you are struggling to tune back in to your felt sense of needing help, or you are struggling against admitting to yourself that you are worth receiving the help you know you need, Southlake Counseling can help. Our professional staff is compassionate and experienced in helping individuals of every age and from every walk of life to relearn how to ask for and accept help. To find out more about how you can begin to say no to “going it alone” and YES to accepting and embracing help, visit us at today at www.southlakecounseling.com.

Be Well,

Kimberly


Published on Monday October 25, 2010 in Wellness. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .