Therapy grounded in real inner work and genuine human connection.
Do you remember the last time you flipped out over something that doesn’t seem like a big deal in retrospect? We all do it sometimes. “Losing it” looks different for different people. For some people it looks like becoming super defensive. It can look like …
Feelings don’t exactly have a good reputation in terms of being accurate, so I know they might be hard to trust. How can you trust your feelings? The best place to start (bear with me for 2 seconds) is by understanding a basic tenet of …
The freedoms are kind of awesome. But the responsibilities are the ones that make all the “no adulting” memes so popular.
We all know people who we think “should be an adult by now” because of age or life events, but they still struggle to handle things in a mature way. I don’t mean that you have to be responsible and mature all the time.
The truth of the matter is human beings are inherently flawed, that is part of the design. And, we are all human beings raised by human beings. To take it further, we live in an imperfect world.
That means you are going to have experiences that hurt you, where you are scarred, where you develop survival strategies so you can protect your psyche, your heart, manage pain and survive physically and emotionally. That is how it goes.
I don’t know a single parent who woke up in the morning thinking: “I’m gonna do damage to my kid today”.
Parents are dealing with so many things including their own programming, cultural norms and generational beliefs, life circumstances, ect and they are doing the best with what they have.
When you are a dependent of your parents, then you pretty much have to go with the program. You have to survive according to the rules and circumstances in your family. And that can have the full range of loving moments that build healthy resilience all the way to abuse and neglect.
Developmentally, once you are able to be independent of your parents, meaning you come to an age where you can literally survive on your own, that is the first opportunity to make the emotional shifts toward being an adult.
That includes vocational, social, financial, physical, emotional and psychological stuff. Regardless of your history or the cards you were dealt in early life. We are assuming here that you are a normally functioning adult who is not dealing with severe mental or physical disabilities.
That doesn’t mean you don’t get to be angry, frustrated, sad, hurt, disappointed about what happened in your past. Not at all. You get to have all your feelings about it. In fact, it is best if you do.
I’m not saying this because you need to man up or not be a baby.
When you shift the blame away or chose to minimize, ignore or stay unconscious, you don’t hold power or choice.
And, as an adult, you have power and choice in a way that you did not have a child or as a dependent. As soon as you are accountable and you take responsibility for the “cards” you have been dealt, you are at the helm. It is just a way better position for you.
That means, you start to become aware of how you handle fear, anger, stress. How do you solve problems and communicate in your relationships? Start to look at the places where you are challenged and realize why. What in your past might be influencing how you handle things?
You get to choose. If it is not working for you, start to look at ways other people handle things that might work better for you. Read books. Surround yourself with people who seem to have that emotional maturity of knowing when and how to handle things. Go see a therapist to help you see the influences of your past. A therapist can help you improve on what you were taught or heal some of the scars.
If you get the basics down of how to be self aware, how to deal with your feelings and how to communicate, you are on it. You have some basic adulting skills that will put you ahead of the curve.
The way human beings experience emotion makes it seem like the feelings are about someone or something else. Like, it would be normal to think or say that your partner made you angry. Right? It might take a couple of mental cartwheels and somersaults to get your …
Everyone is talking about Mindfulness. To the point where you might not want to care about it. You probably see annoying memes about the present moment. I get it. Sometimes I scroll by and just want to hate it. But, the reason mindfulness is huge …
No one likes feeling stressed, everyone wants to get rid of stress. I get it.
It’s possible. I know it seems impossible, but I’m going to tell you exactly how.
The point is, we don’t want to eliminate stress all together because then you would be eliminating your body’s warning system that you need to call in extra support.
You are most likely sending signals to yourself that you are overwhelmed before it actually consciously registers.
DO THIS: Quickly think back to a time in your life when you were stressed and what you tend to do (behaviors), think or feel during those times. Remember, thoughts, feelings and behaviors are the channels your internal GPS uses to communicate with you.
Here are mine.
Behaviors: I let the dishes build up, I want late night treats (yogurt almonds are my latest favorite), I procrastinate going to bed, I watch more TV than normal.
Thoughts: “I don’t want to do this anymore”
Feelings: I feel irritated, pressured and rushed. If it is really bad, I feel like I hate everything and don’t care about anything.
If you pay attention to when these signals show up, you will be able to catch stress levels creeping up sooner.
Once you reflect for a minute, you will likely be able to identify it right away. The next part of this step is: what kind of stress is it?
TO DO: Remind yourself it is time limited, that you can make it through time limited stress. We tend to forget it is time limited when we are in it. Focus on the basics: sleep, food, water, breathing, exercising, keeping your mind right. Don’t try to look at making progress on long term issues/projects.
TO DO: Incentivize. Give yourself something to look forward to at the end of the stressful time. Build in breaks or incentives along the way if you can. It would be good to schedule a massage or make sure you are getting in something to take care of yourself along the way too.
TO DO: You are taking things to a new level. That means you need new coping strategies or to re-introduce ones that have worked in the past during stressful times.
TO DO: Are you at a plateau? Check your long game. Sometimes you are stressing because you want to take things to the next level, but that desire hasn’t made it to your conscious awareness yet. Time to look at long term goals.
TO DO: Communicate and plan in advance for breaks/incentives/strategies.
TO DO: This is the hardest. Once you get through the feelings that come up during and right afterward (don’t be afraid to get help to process the feelings), try to look for meaning. That creates perspective. Once we understand the purpose of something in our lives, we tend to feel more settled about it.
Because your thoughts, feelings and behaviors are all connected to your internal world, if you change one, the others will shift as well.
If we take my example of how I respond to stress above, you can see the changes I could make in italics.
Behaviors: I let the dishes build up, I want late night treats (yogurt almonds are my latest favorite), I procrastinate going to bed, I watch more TV.
SHIFT: Make a point to wash dishes once at the end of the day, get to bed on time, make sure I am implementing a strategy from step #2 above depending on the stressor such as schedule a massage for myself.
Thoughts: “I don’t want to do this anymore”.
SHIFT: Remind myself of the goal, the reason for the stress so I can stay motivated. Remind myself that it is a short time that I have to tolerate this. Remind myself that I have the option to set up something to take care of myself while this stressful time is happening.
Feelings: I feel irritated, pressured and rushed. If it is really bad, I feel like I hate everything and don’t care about anything.
SHIFT: Remind myself that these feelings are just because I am stressed, not an overall evaluation of my life. I let it be OK that I don’t care about anything. Vent to someone, let the feelings out.
It doesn’t make things “all better now”. It is about alerting you to the fact that the first signs of stress are ones that you can use to your advantage by realizing you need to do just a little bit of triage before you start going off the rails. A little bit of stress and struggle never hurt anyone, the part that is crushing is when it is too late in the game.
Early on, human beings develop programs for dealing with things in life. You don’t realize what programs are running until they are exposed, which usually means they are causing problems. When you develop these programs, there is not a lot of conscious discernment going on. …
In spin class, there is a teacher that always says in the beginning: “I coach on levels of intensity: easy, moderate, hard, breathless”. The intensity for unpleasant feelings is similar: easy, moderate, hard, breathless. While there is the range of all human emotion that we …