Month: October 2022

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Distraction

  • Many of us know of the concept of distraction, not all of us know how to do it properly. Distraction, (when used carefully, judiciously and intentionally) is an essential coping skill in times of duress.
  • Many of us feel uneasy about distraction, because we aren’t solving “the problem”, when we use it. Instead, when we distract, we are giving our brains another focal point, for a period of time, that will enable us to take a break from the intensity of whatever we are distracting from.
  • If we can truly distract, i.e. truly sink in with our whole thinking and feeling world to something aside from what is distressing us, we often come back to that same thing at a later point (even hours later) feeling more refreshed and able to handle it.
  • Think about how you feel when you wake up after you’ve been upset. Often times you feel more distance, or are able to to have “new” thoughts or feelings about the same topic, even though you haven’t “done anything” directly to solve the problem.
  • We want distraction to be intentional: really sink in with your whole self, if, in the corners of your mind you’re still thinking about “it” (whatever you’re trying to distract from), you’re not distracted. 
  • Properly distracting often includes refocusing yourself (again and again) on your distraction, or (if that doesn’t work) accepting your distraction is not stimulating enough and finding a higher intensity distraction to keep your mind off an activating topic.
  • To stay distracted: “leave” the situation. You may have to do this repeatedly. This can be done physically (literally leave an activating location), cognitively (when you notice yourself drifting into thoughts about “it” re-direct your attention), and through imagery (imagine the topic separate from you – in a box, on the other side of a wall etc).
  • We want distraction to be judicious: Use it only for brief periods of time (hours, maybe days depending on the urgency of the situation at hand). If we stay distracted from our problems we have actually shifted into avoiding them.
  • We have to police ourselves when we distract, only we know if we’ve drifted back and only we can refocus our attention. A major key to using distraction effectively is remaining invested in the need for distraction when we’ve chosen to use it as our coping skill.
  • Distraction can be anything as long as it (1) engages your whole self in a direction different than the topic you are distracting from and (2) doesn’t become a covert way of keeping yourself in the experience you are trying to distract from. More in today’s post about how to effectively distract.

Distraction is one of the key Distress Tolerance skills Marsha Linehan lays out in her Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) Training manual. There are many ways to distract:

Activities:  i.e. “doing” something else. Ideas: watch TV or a movie (be careful on the topic so it meets the criteria above), talk to a friend about something other than the topic at hand, read a book (it may be too hard to focus for some, if so, try something more stimulating), go out for a walk or run (but don’t think about the topic).

Emotions: Create different emotional experiences for yourself beyond the one that you are distracting from. To do this, you need to first identify how you are feeling and then dive into a different emotional state (perhaps through TV, conversation with others, music, books etc).

Thoughts : Try something that challenges your brain, like a crossword, mystery, or puzzle.

Contributing and Comparisons:  The idea with these two is to extend our focus to people and situations beyond us and the issue troubling us at the moment. With contributing, you do an activity that is nice for someone outside of you, to help you feel like you’ve made a positive impact on another person or situation.

With comparisons, we are reminding ourselves of the full spectrum of human experience as a way to help ground ourselves in our awareness of where we fall on that spectrum. The key with comparisons is to leave the comparison with an awareness that that things have been different for us, and could be worse (which doesn’t mean they aren’t bad now). This means you can think about others coping worse than you in that moment, others in worse situations, or compare how you feel now to a time when you felt different (to remind yourself that you too will feel different some day). We need to resist the temptation to compare to someone in an enviable situation, that will not help. 

When we use comparisons properly we often find we feel more grateful for our lives, communities, resources and strengths. We have to be very careful not to go to a shaming,  judgmental or envious place, otherwise we can invalidate ourselves (it’s worse for him, that means I shouldn’t be so upset). 

More in today’s comments.

Comments:

  1. Here’s the funny thing about selecting an appropriate distraction. Let’s say you’re mad at your partner. You can pick a movie of a different emotional valence (i.e. a funny movie, an action movie, a scary movie, etc) to create a different emotional experience within yourself. You could also choose to pick a movie about a couple in conflict. If you are able to be present with the movie about the couple in conflict in a way that has you staying focused on your anger at your partner, guess what, you’re not distracting, this has now become a “covert way” of keeping yourself in the experience you are trying to distract from. If, however, watching the movie helps you have a fresh perspective on your situation with your partner (for example you leave feeling like the conflict you and your partner have is not as difficult as what the is couple in the movie faces) guess what, you’re distracting by using comparisons. The key is to know which methods are effective for you, to experiment, and to to honor what works for you in terms of helping you create that distance and take a break from being present with your problem. Comparisons may never work for some of us (especially if we’re prone to envy), and they may be all others of us need. Honor what works for you. Effective distraction is more nuanced than it sounds.
  2. Distraction doesn’t just need to be for high intensity problems, it can also be an essential coping skill for chronic problems and ongoing struggles (prolonged illness, death, complicated divorce etc). We can thoughtfully use distraction as a tool to refresh ourselves and take a “mini vacation” from a problem we know we will need to return to.
  3. Having trouble buying into the necessity of distraction? I have a number of posts that review just why it is so essential. My post on the argument for distress tolerance covers our temptation to stay engaged in a topic and helps us buy into the need to (at times) to create distance from it. My IMPROVE post covers another distress tolerance skill, as well as reviews the rationale for distress tolerance skills like distracting.
  4. Do you find that no matter how hard you try your thoughts and feelings seem to control your attention? You may want to first Ground and then try distraction. If intense thoughts often intrude even after grounding (and you’re having remaining focused on any distraction, including a high intensity one) you are a good candidate for meditation which can increase your ability to control where your attention rests. If you’re new to meditation start here, and then progress to here.
  5. The skill “One Mindfully” is a key part of distraction. The premise behind one mindfully it is we buy into the idea that it doesn’t help to split our attention, but instead we decide what to attend to and then engage with it with our whole self (i.e. not thinking about something else, multi-tasking etc).
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Think like A Therapist

  • “How do you do it?” i.e. “How do therapists spend all day listening to the emotional duress of others?”. Our training includes tools and perspectives that enable us to listen with a buffer. Read more if you too want to learn more about not taking other’s struggles home with you.
  • One (but not the only) reason folks often struggle to tolerate painful emotions is because it triggers a “fix-it mode” in us that leaves us wanting to take action in a way that makes the situation better. The trouble is, we can’t “fix” all situations in life and emotions are not light switches that can be turned on and off.
  • So, we need perspective one: You cannot stop someone (yourself included) from feeling their feelings. Take that pressure off of yourself and the situation. We can distract or ground at times of emotional intensity, but big picture what alleviates negative feelings is learning how to tolerate, work through, release, and ride them out.
  • Learning how to have a sustainable relationship with our emotions can take time (and therapy), though we can channel our desires to “fix-it” into efforts to connect, which can help someone struggling feel better even if a problem remains. This means offering the person in duress (you included) genuine empathy, compassion, validation, and support.
  • To offer that softness we need perspective two: Trust that the emotions are valid, even if we don’t fully understand them. Fighting or denying negative emotions often interferes with the process of releasing them in ourselves, and spurs disconnection and the experience invalidation (which creates a whole other host of problems) in others.
  • Big picture: release the idea that negative feelings are “bad”, “avoidable”, “problematic” etc. For us to be happy and satisfied we need to accept that negative feelings are a part of life, and it is our job to learn to sustainably live with both our negative and positive feelings.
  • Holding these perspectives when we (or others) are struggling means our “job” becomes less about “doing” (i.e. fixing or problem solving) and more about “being” (i.e. trusting, connecting and listening). This takes pressure off the situation and often makes listening and tolerating easier and less stressful for all parties.
  • Therapists are also comforted by their trust in the therapeutic process and see pain (and safely working through it) as a necessary part of the journey to a happier and more fulfilled life. This helps anchor us in those difficult moments; we know your pain and working through it is a necessary step along the way to feeling better.
  • If you too can try and develop that trust that you (or others) will make it though, you might find you feel safer, less frantic, and more comforted at difficult times. You may need to actively remind yourself or others that you can and will feel better some day – and that you have felt better in the past, even when it felt inaccessible at the time.
  • Lastly, we therapists know that the more we work through pain points in our lives, the less other people’s pain points trigger us. This is called widening our window of tolerance, and it means we can, over time (and often with therapy) learn how to be with intense feelings in a manner that doesn’t overwhelm us.

I get asked all the time, “How do you do it? How do you sit with people’s emotional pain as your job?” “Doesn’t it exhaust you, doesn’t it burn you out?”. Today, I am attempting to answer that question, and share some of the tools us therapists use to manage our work of sitting with painful topics. While this isn’t training on how to be a therapist, if you can adopt the perspectives in this post you may find yourself more at peace with your negative feelings, and more able to stay present, supportive, and connected to others when they are struggling.

When our relationship with our emotions is working well, emotions come and go. When we struggle with our emotions it’s usually because we have some hangup in the process of finding, feeling, accepting, and releasing our emotions. Big picture, our job, as your therapist, is to help you learn how to process through your thoughts and feelings so you can eventually do that work outside of therapy (without us). For that reason, us therapists are often looking for opportunities to accompany you alongside your painful emotions so you can experience, with support, your emotions in a manner that helps you productively work through them, learn from them, and make use of them.

For this reason, your therapist is not afraid of your emotions or the intense feelings and reactions you have to your life. In fact, it’s the opposite; your therapist is actually actively looking for those “pain points” and is working to help you process through (rather than avoid them or linger over them). It’s ok to need help in this process, that’s why we therapists exist. Not everyone has the intuition, models (or both) for how to have a constructive relationship with our feelings.

If you struggle with others painful emotions, try and be curious with yourself about what may be happening, and explore whether or not you truly buy into the perspectives in this post. More often than not, our struggles tolerating others pain comes from our own difficulties with accepting that negative emotions, and learning to be at peace with their existence, is a necessary fact of life.

Comments:

  1. Today’s topic is complicated. While we aren’t “therapists” for our friends and family members, to have close relationships we do need to be able to hear people’s struggles in a manner that is sustainable for us, and that doesn’t put the burden of their problem on us. At times, in relationships, folks look to others to solve their problems for them or to take accountability they themselves don’t take. This helplessness can be a problem, quite separate from any discomfort we may hold listening to the struggle of another person. Today’s post is simply meant to help offer a handful of perspectives that might help you be more at ease when someone is sharing their struggles with you.
  2. There are other ways us therapists manage the emotional intensity of our work too (things like only seeing a certain number of clients a day, or a week, etc). When we struggle, we often seek out consultation to make sure we’re offering what our clients need from us. There are many other ways we take care of ourselves in our job. Don’t expect that holding these perspectives is all that a person would need to tolerate an emotionally difficult topic, just know that holding these perspectives helps.
  3. Remember to trust your intuition, if you are listening to someone and really feeling like they are struggling too much, or are in a major crisis – this is a time to reach out to professionals for help. We therapists don’t exclusively rely on “trust in the process”, we also call in for extra help and supports (like medications, hospitalizations, outside consultation for us to get a second opinion on our work with a client) when needed.
  4. In your own therapy (if you’re in it) be curious about temptations you have to withhold from your therapist due to concerns with “burdening” your therapist with too much. One of the points of the therapeutic relationship is to have a safe place where you feel unrestricted in your ability to share whatever pain or hardship you are enduring. If you find yourself withholding, talk to your therapist about your fears that what you’re experiencing may be “too much”. There is probably a lot of fertile ground and opportunities for healing for you to explore what “too much” is, how you know if you’re “too much” and how you perceive in others cues that you’re “too much” for them. For more on this, I have a whole post on the things we don’t say in therapy, and how that effects from treatment .
  5. I talk about the importance of going through stages of processing with your emotions. For more about how emotions “work” when they are “working well” see my posts explaining emotions and their brevity.
  6. Unclear what I mean when I say we need to learn from our feelings? See post about how emotions are like traffic signals.
  7. I mention the window of tolerance in this post, a foundational framework for understanding what a constructive relationship with our inner wold looks like.
  8. Brene Brown has a great little video on the power of connecting through empathy, and how we can help alleviate emotional struggles by being empathic with one another. In addition, if find you have a difficult time accepting the pain of others I have another post that may help you dig deeper into what’s happening as you try and tolerate another’s trauma.
  9. I talk about the connecting nature of offering validation in this post. I have another post on why validation is important.
  10. I mention that sometimes emotions are too intense to be present with, and we need tools like grounding and distraction. There are a host of distress tolerance skills that can help at times of emotions intensity. More to come in future posts.
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