Tag Archive for 'shame'

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Your Say Yes to Life Monday Motivator: Treating Yourself During the Holidays

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When you think of the word “holidays,” the vision that comes to mind is of treats.

Specifically, holiday treats.

Specifically, those marshmallow chocolate sprinkled things your mother always makes….the ones with the mint centers and gooey tops.

And the peppermint ice cream with hot fudge that your family always has as a Christmas evening tradition. And the spicy-sweet popcorn mix with extra real butter for the night you watch “Twas the Night before Christmas” with all the kids. And the annual community-wide block party with the neighbor’s homemade fudge, and the home-fried doughnuts, and the…..

Your mouth is watering already. You have been SO good all year long…. for just such a season as this. While you can already see the New Year (and the New Year’s diet) looming, that dread can be put off for a month or so yet. You tell yourself that you will tackle the diet when you get to it.

To be honest, you are aware that you tend to indulge to excess during the holidays, to the point where you have an extra set of clothes waiting in the wings – all a size larger – and you dread New Year’s Day, when you have to squirm your way into something extra-tight to go to your annual family get together.

You’re just not sure what to do about it. Just the thought – not to mention the sight – of all those holiday treats, and you seem to lose all self control.

But this year, you have a new bag of tricks up your sleeve. You have been studying Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), and your group leader has told you that using the four principles of DBT might help you.

Your goal is to maintain better self-control during the holidays, but balance that with a less restrictive, treat-aversive attitude throughout the rest of the year. Your group leader thinks that with some balance year-round, and a bit more willingness to indulge in treats here and there throughout the rest of the year, you won’t be as prone to excess when the holidays roll around.

You sure hope she is right!

You start by practicing mindfulness. As your table fills up with holiday goodies each night, you simply observe, with radical acceptance of what is, that they are maintaining a presence there. You feel that familiar craving deep in your abdomen. You witness yourself imagining how each treat will taste.

From there, you notice the frustration arising within you. You want all of the treats! Now! You feel stress – which ones should you start with? How many of each? What if you overindulge again and feel guilty like you did last year? You use your new emotion regulation technique to name each emotion as it arises – not engaging, but simply naming. Frustration. Fear. Anger. Sadness. Regret. Guilt. Shame.

As the emotions present themselves and you give them names, you are simultaneously practicing distress tolerance – the ability to stand in the presence of strong emotions without allowing them to overtake you. You accept that these are today’s events, like them or not, accept them or not. You choose to learn from (if not like) them, and to accept them by reminding yourself that you are stronger and wiser than any temporary disturbance that you may happen upon in the course of a day.

Finally, you use your newfound interpersonal regulation skills to remind yourself that food treats are not the only way you can reward and treat yourself. You can brew yourself a lovely warm cup of tea. You can invite a loved one for a brisk walk and watch the snowflakes fall while the moon shines above. You can pop in a good movie that you love to laugh at. You can draw a bath…or turn in early to get a few extra winks of sleep. You can read a favorite book or snuggle with your spouse.

In this way, you begin to relate to yourself as a whole being rather than as an emotion-driven stomach, and slowly, those cravings in your abdomen begin to unclench you and leave you in peace….turning a longstanding holiday woe into a true miraculous 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 20, 2010 in Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT). 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

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

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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: , , , , .

Wednesday’s Weekly Inspiration: It is only a mistake if you don’t learn something from it.

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Human beings make mistakes.

Yes, that means you too.

We all make mistakes. What separates success from failure in recovery and life has nothing to do with the amount of mistakes you make and everything to do with what you learn from each mistake.

So today, when you make a mistake (and you most likely will), instead of berating yourself, ask yourself, “Self, what can I learn from this?” You can even journal about it and set aside a few minutes tonight to read back through all the knowledge you have gained in one single day!

And here’s one more radical idea – just if you are feeling really brave – how about choosing to THANK each mistake for the lesson it brings! You can say, “Thank you, mistake, for being such a good teacher. I appreciate the chance to learn and grow that you have offered me.”

Today’s affirmation: Making mistakes means I am brave enough to learn something new, and I celebrate myself for that!

Published on Wednesday August 18, 2010 in Self-esteem. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

The Shame About Shame in Mental Health Recovery

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Shame. Just thinking the word brings a powerful experience of shame into our awareness.

We don’t even need to read the definition to know that shame is “a painful emotion caused by a strong sense of guilt, embarrassment, unworthiness, or disgrace” because we can feel it….feel its effects instantly. Like kryptonite, shame seeps into our being, sapping our sense of personal empowerment, our enthusiasm for life, our zest for self-discovery….and our dreams of recovery. In the wake of shame, we are left in the grips of a profound and enervating hopelessness that erases any recollection of why we ever thought we were worth recovering for in the first place.  

If you have personal mental health recovery experience, you have felt shame. You have most likely also been shamed by others who, in their ignorant but well-meaning attempts to motivate you to get better, have issued un-helpful advice like “just eat more!” and “snap out of it!”, and berated you for your seeming inability to “just get over” your issues with food, weight, body image, self-esteem, anxiety, depression……

This is exactly why it is so critical to say no to shame and say yes to knowledge as the first step to making real, lasting progress towards your recovery goals.

The more you learn, the less shame you feel. The more you learn, the less shaming you will tolerate from others, and the more you will be willing to educate yourself and others on the truth of mental illness. Most importantly, the more you learn, the more you can do to work towards your own recovery. Knowledge is a win-win for you and for everyone who cares about you – and where shame, like mental illness, kills, knowledge saves lives.

So here is what you need to know NOW to begin to replace shame with the factual knowledge that leads to lasting recovery.

Mental illnesses (including but not limited to eating disorders, anxiety, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and body dysmorphic disorder) are at their core biological brain disorders.

These illnesses arise in large part due to genetic predisposition, and become greatly exacerbated in the presence of environmental triggers including but not limited to innate emotional vulnerability, experiences with personal trauma, grief, loss, unavoidable sudden change, and repeated exposure to our media’s focus on finding perfection in body image, career, love relationships, material possessions, and lifestyle.

Mental illness affects females and males of all ages, socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds – which is why there is no place in recovery work for the presence of shame. With the statistics* we have, chances are there is someone in your life who also struggles with mental illness…and the only reason you do not know of their battles, or they of yours, is due to shame.

Consider this example. We know so much more today than we did even five years ago about treating cancer, diabetes, and ADHD. Today, we would not dream of shaming a cancer patient for not being able to “just get rid of” the presence of cancerous cells in his body. We wouldn’t even think of shaming a diabetic for her inability to “just regulate” her insulin levels. Not a one of us would consider refusing further help or support or compassion to a child with ADHD because he can’t “just sit still already”!

So why do we persist in shaming ourselves – or in allowing ourselves to be shamed – for needing help and expert medical guidance to overcome the effects of the biological brain disregulation that is at the root of mental illness?

It is time to get smart about our disease. It is time to say yes to knowledge…so we can say no to shame, and yes to life!

Be Well.

Kimberly

*Eating disorders are responsible for the deaths of twelve times more females between the ages of 11 and 25 than any other mental illness-related disorder
*Depression affects an estimated 9% of the population in the United States
*Approximately 18% of adults suffer from anxiety; anxiety is the most common mental disorder in teens

Published on Monday October 19, 2009 in Mood Disorders. 0 Comments Tags: , , .