Coping Archives - Kate Gegg, AM, LCSW

May 2, 2024May 2, 2024

Rethinking Grief

We lose people, not our relationships with them.
Whether it’s to death, relocation, changes in life circumstances – we all lose people, and with any loss comes a version of grief.
It can bring profound comfort to hold on to the awareness that even though we lose future interactions with a person once they are no longer in our lives, the relationship can and does go on to live inside of us.
One of the most beautiful things about our ability to hold on to a relationship internally, even after its external presence has ended, is that we can continue to learn, grow, and be comforted by it.
With our internally driven relationship we can come to reflect on past experiences with the person in a new way, and at times see a person and their past choices differently.
For example, if you lost a parent, you may come to a have a different sense of what could have motivated them if / when you become a parent yourself.
Once someone is no longer in our lives, the relationship shifts from being externally driven to being internally driven. We have to learn to carry the person and relationship differently when someone no longer has an external presence in our lives.
Thinking of a relationship and a person as “internally” existing in you is often much more comforting than thinking of them as being “gone”.
Grief is loss and sadness, but it is also learning; learning how to live without someone’s external presence, learning to remember that they will no longer be there around the corner, and adjusting to that new reality.

Grief is incredibly wrenching, painful, and (somewhat) unpredictable for us all. One of the most uniformly difficult parts of tolerating grief is how chaotic it can feel; one minute you’re “fine”, the next minute you’ve had a reminder of your loss that feels like a gut punch. Those “reminders” are our indication that we are still in the process of learning to live without someone’s external presence in our lives.

We can find additional comfort when grieving by focusing on growing an internal relationship with the person we’ve lost. For example, ask yourself how the person would have responded to a situation you’re in, what advice they would have given you, or what they would have thought about a situation in your life or community. Give yourself permission to be honest; we are most comforted when we can bring back our genuine sense of who the person was to us.

For many of us, the loss of important people is complicated by their intermittent presence in our lives. When we’re not always with someone (like if they lived in a different house), it can be natural to “forget” they are no longer with us, only to “remember” when we’ve been reminded. Sensory reminders (like a smell or a sound that reminds you of them) can hit especially hard. This “forgetting” doesn’t mean the person wasn’t important, it means that our intermittent exposure to them prior to our loss of them makes the “adjusting” and learning more complex and difficult; even when they’re gone it doesn’t necessarily feel like it, because they weren’t always around to begin with.

Grief, like all learning, takes time. Maria Popova wrote a wonderful summary of the book “The Grieving Brain” by Mary Frances O’Connor, PhD, in which both writers talk about grief as a two part process that involves loss and learning (link in comments). There is, inevitably, a powerlessness that comes with grief. That powerlessness can be painful to tolerate because it reminds us of the limits of our control, our mortality (etc). These authors provide an explanation of grief can that can be hugely comforting because it diminishes our sense of chaos and powerlessness by helping us understand the complexity of the grieving process.

Comments:

The more respect we can have for the process of learning, and the more acceptance we can bring to our grief, the less it will sting us. See posts on learning and acceptance for more help with this.

May 22, 2023November 8, 2023

Social Media

Assumptions, envy, mindlessness, comparisons, isolation, inadequacy, guilt, and obligation are at the root of so many of our struggles with social media.
Many of us spend hours every week on these platforms, and for that reason it’s important that we create a relationship with our social media that we feel benefits and serves us.
It may seem silly to think about spending time managing your social media, but the fact is you give your time and your attention to these platforms, and they can effect how you feel about yourself and your relationships. What we view on social media impacts us as we go throughout our lives off social media.
A peaceful relationship with social media is one where you are intentional about which accounts you follow, and one where you give yourself permission to interface with these platforms in a way that works for you, rather than in a way that heightens the problematic dynamics listed in the first bullet point.
While I’ll get into more specifics in today’s post, the answer to addressing many of these problematic dynamics starts with creating a more mindful and intentional relationship with your social media consumption, and a more accepting relationship with yourself and your limits.
First, consider why you use social media. When you log in, is it to take a break? Keep in touch with friends? Celebrity gossip? To learn something? Then look at your actual patterns of usage and the accounts you follow to see if they are in line with your intentions for the platform. If not, you’ll need to reconcile the disconnect.
Next, work to get curious about how social media (and the accounts you follow) impact your mood, energy, feelings about yourself and others, and concentration. For this exercise (and the prior one) to be useful, you will have to accept the conclusions you draw, even if they’re not the conclusions you want.
Ambivalence – i.e. your conflicting but co-occuring feelings about a topic – is a common factor in a struggle with social media. You can love someone and really dislike how they use these platforms. You can want to learn about a topic and feel overwhelmed with information about it from the account(s) you follow.
Ultimately, you have to make a decision about which accounts serve you, and how you want to consume them (if at all). For personal relationships, you’ll need to do this in a way that holds respect for the relationships you have with those people off social media as well. This could mean muting rather than unfollowing, or having a kind conversation.
In this day and age there are many tools to help you moderate your social media consumption including muting accounts you want to keep following (but don’t want to see content from without you deciding when it’s a good time for you to see it) and favoriting accounts that you really value and never want to miss content from.

Social media makes it easy to “fill in the gaps” between what we see and what we don’t with our imagination. Not all of us do this, but when we do, we’re making assumptions, and we can get stuck in traps of envy, comparisons and feelings of inadequacy. We’re more at risk of making assumptions about people or relationships we don’t have direct access to (like celebrities or that high school classmate you don’t actually talk to anymore) because we don’t have actual information (often gathered off social media) about their real lived experiences beyond the picture (aka the positive and negative stuff going on in their life).

Envy, like an assumption, is often more activated when we don’t have a “full sense” of what’s going on in someone’s life. Combine that with how curated social media is, and our envy can run rampant. Envy isn’t necessarily bad (it can help us get in touch with what we want), but it becomes a problem when we’re so fixated on what someone else has that it diminishes our sense of appreciation for what we have. Problematic envy can have a competitive or aggressive element to it (where we want to dominate or take something from someone else).

For many of us, social media is filled with “rules” about when we should post (someone’s birthday? An event?), what the content should be (only happy stuff!), who we should follow (causes you care about? “follow back” / keep following someone?). The challenge with these “rules” is they fill our relationships with social media with obligation and guilt, both of which pull us away from what actually works for us, our limits, and how we want to spend our time.

Even when we follow accounts we “want” to spent our time and attention on, sometimes we’re inundated with information, which can leave us overwhelmed and out of touch with what we actually have capacity for.

There’s not a single solution to managing social media, but any positive relationship with it has to involve being honest with yourself about how it effects you, and setting up your access to it in a way that honors and accepts your limits and priorities.

Comments:

Today’s post tries and help you think beyond the options of “signing off for good” or just living with social media as is, even though you kind of hate it. For many people, staying away and signing off for good is the right path for them, and that’s great. Today’s post is not meant to discourage leaving social media, it’s meant to help you think through the right path for you.
I know I am not the first person to tell you that you can unfollow or mute people, many of us hear this all the time, but still struggle in our relationships with social media nonetheless. I think this happens because we aren’t necessarily giving ourselves permission to accept what works for us, and because we feel limited in what our options are (i.e. “it’s awkward if I unfollow, but I don’t want to see this”). Today’s post is aimed to get you thinking about what works for you, and then get you wondering how you can set up your social media to optimize that.
Managing your social media is not a one-time-event. It’s an ongoing mindfulness exercise where we reflect on what we need, what’s working for us, what’s not working for us, and we make changes accordingly.
Acceptance (of yourself, of your limits, of what works for you, of your actual usage of social media, of the differences between your actual self and your ideal self etc) is a key part to having a successful relationship with social media.
I could (and may) do a whole post on assumptions and how they create problems for us. The entire list of issues assumptions create wouldn’t fit in one post, though there is another notable one to consider if you struggle with social media, and that’s that our assumptions can be a sign to us that we’re feeling disconnected from a person we used to feel closer to. When this happens, we can feel isolated.
James Densley of The Violence Project has a great 10 minute free lecture about social media and how it can effect us. He gave the talk with reference to the links between mass shootings and social media, but much of the content of the talk is applicable beyond violence prevention, and it’s a great sociological perspective on social media and its impact on us.
If you’re not sure how to “mute” or “favorite” in instagram, do a search online for how to do so on your device. Muting silences an account without unfollowing it, meaning it offers a private way to set a boundary therein limiting what you see (without another person knowing).
I will likely do a post about curiosity in the future, but in short – curiosity is another one that gets folks in trouble on social media. We can look “it” up, so we do look “it” up, which doesn’t mean it’s in our best interest (or leaves us feeling good) to look “it” up. This can apply to people currently or formerly in our personal lives, celebrities – etc. If you fall into social media rabbit holes you may need to work on challenging / resisting your curiosity.
If you’re following more accounts than you can keep up with, and that’s stressing you out, you may want to consider the balance between your “Shoulds” and your “Wants”. What you feel pressure to keep up with might be different than what you can keep up with.
I talk about how envy isn’t necessarily bad. It’s true! We have all of our emotions for a reason.

April 13, 2023April 20, 2023

Umbrella Emotions

When we have an “umbrella emotion” (as we therapists call it) we have one dominant emotional reaction (lets say anger), that preoccupies us, but under the umbrella of anger may exist other emotions (like shame, guilt, fear – etc) that need to be addressed and resolved for us to feel at peace with a situation.
The reason it’s called an umbrella emotion is because the emotion we are most intensely in touch with is “hiding” other emotions under it, often ones we have difficulty accessing and feeling our way through – much in the same way we hide under an umbrella to shield ourselves from the rain.
When this emotional nesting happens we are not able to be in touch (consciously) with all that we are feeling, and as such we are less able to work through it. We can get trapped in our emotional experiences for extended periods of time, or we can’t make sense of them, or perhaps we avoid thinking about them because they feel like “too much”.
If you’re feeling “stuck” around releasing an emotion or situation, a helpful coping strategy is to go on an investigative mission within yourself to see what other emotions you may be feeling in addition to the dominant one you notice most. We usually don’t know what’s hiding under our umbrella until we go searching for it.
To do this scan well, we first need to have developed a personal lexicon of our emotions. This means knowing how each emotion feels to us when it’s present within our bodies, the types of events that often trigger each emotion, and the kinds of thoughts that often accompany it.
At a time when you’re feeling relatively even, take a moment to identify how Anger, Disgust, Envy, Fear, Happiness, Jealousy, Love, Sadness, Shame, and Guilt present themselves in you. Spend 30-60 seconds working to churn up each emotion in yourself and notice what you feel in your body and the kinds of thoughts (or memories) that arise.
You’ll likely find as you do an internal inventory that some emotions are easy for you to “map”, and others feel much more distant. It’s likely those “easy” ones are – at times – serving as umbrella emotions to those feelings that are harder to access (and may be hiding).
Once you’ve built your lexicon, you’re ready to use the coping skill at a time when you feel stuck. First, work to disengage (as much as you can) from the dominant emotion (you may need to ground or distract to do this). Then scan internally for evidence (AKA the thoughts and sensations you notice) that other emotions may be present within you.
When we’ve found our umbrella emotion and whatever’s under it, it can be a huge relief (i.e. I had no idea I was feeling so guilty because I was so preoccupied with my anger, but now that I’ve found my guilt I feel like I can let go of the situation much more easily). It’s not uncommon to have an intense release when we find what’s been hiding.
The more we can be in touch with our emotions, the more we can learn from them, regulate them, and be in control of our behavior when we feel them. More in today’s post and comments.

It’s not uncommon for our emotions to cluster and hide within one another, making them difficult to identify, sort through, process, and manage. Today’s skill is a form of emotion regulation, managing our emotions through identifying them. It helps to hold awareness that sometimes emotions hide, and so we have to search for and identify them before we are truly able to regulate them.

Why would our emotions hide? Our ability to feel and manage our emotions is hugely informed by prior experiences. Emotions that were welcomed when we developed will be easier for us to access, tolerate, and regulate. Emotions that were not welcome may get twisted and we may have to work to learn how to feel them, so they don’t come out exclusively on overdrive or jumbled up with other feelings.

That doesn’t sound like you? Sometimes we have beliefs about our feelings (fear is weakness, anger is destructive, etc). If we hold beliefs that some emotions are superior to others, we’ll have an easier time accessing those preferred emotions, and a harder time accessing those we’ve evaluated as problematic. Perhaps anger is easy for you to access because it helps you feel strong, protected, and tough – but guilt is less easy to access because it makes you feel vulnerable and weak. Getting in touch with all of these beliefs will help you build your personal internal lexicon, and help you better recognize and cope with your emotions.

Our emotions are most likely to get us into trouble when we aren’t fully in touch with them in our day to day life because they’re at risk of building up and exploding out of us, or we’re at risk of impulsively (and at times dangerously) responding to them.

IMPORTANT: When you are building your lexicon and getting in touch with different emotions you may get deeply overwhelmed or triggered if you tap into an emotion you have a highly negative relationship (or history) with. If this happens, you’ll likely need to self-soothe, ground, and distract to get back into your window of tolerance. Links to those skills are in the comments below, and if you’re concerned this will happen to you, wait to do this exercise with a trained professional (therapist /psychiatrist).

Comments:

Safety first: some folks (Especially folks who have a trauma history) may get overwhelmed (or leave their window of tolerance) working to build their lexicon. If you are concerned this might be you, then START with working on learning how to ground, distract, soothe yourself, and identify when you’re out of your window of tolerance. Please know, if this is you, you are demonstrating a sign that you may need professional help tolerating the process of getting in touch with your feelings, which is essential for your well-being and mental health.
The 10 emotions I listed are not the only ten emotions we are able to feel, however, they cover a lot of the bases. Feel free to add additional emotions to the list for your personal lexicon.
This skill is an extension of skills taught in Marsha Linehan’s Dialectical Behavior Therapy Emotion Regulation Module in her DBT curriculum. Within her skills training workbook there is a lot of information about each of these emotions and how they often present.
A lot of folks have a hard time telling envy and jealousy apart. A client actually gave me this incredibly simple framework that I will share with you all: Envy is related to something we don’t have but we want to have, Jealousy is related to having something we are concerned with losing.
A lot of folks have a hard time with the difference between guilt and shame. Shame is a feeling we feel that’s a reflection of our core sense of our self (I am bad). It may or may not be related to an event, but it’s a sense of our character. Guilt is a feeling that’s arises as a reflection of our belief that we did something wrong (but not that we holistically are bad).
I state in the post ” Emotions that were welcomed when we developed will be easier for us to access, tolerate, and regulate.” Please note that emotions can be “unwelcome” by others or by ourselves (For example: I’m afraid of my anger so I don’t want to feel it, but my parents didn’t have an issue with it – or – whenever I got angry I got in trouble so I learned it’s best not to feel or express it etc).
Not buying into the idea that feeling our emotions is useful? I have a post for you to help you accept the need for your emotions.
If you are saying to yourself (like many of my clients have previously said to me) “well I don’t ever feel that emotion”, then I am telling you (kindly) that you are cut off from it, because we all experience all of these emotions, it’s just a matter of how in touch we are with the fact that we’re feeling them. This doesn’t mean we all feel all of these all the time, or we should feel them in equal amounts, it just means that we all have the ability to feel them and do feel them when the situation calls for it. What I am suspect of is when someone says, “that doesn’t apply to me, I don’t feel _____”, I am not suspect of, “I rarely feel it, but yeah, I can map it in my body and get that I’m vulnerable to feeling it, even if do only rarely”. For example, we may not often feel envy which is different from “that doesn’t apply to me”.
Are you having trouble staying present in yourself for the scan of your body and thoughts? If so, you may need to work on building up your capacity to tolerate being mindful with yourself. I have a whole series of posts that can help. Start with this post, on foundational meditation and then move on to this post which will help you build your tolerance for directly observing your internal world Not sure you buy into the idea of meditation? Start here.
Struggle with beliefs around anger being “bad” or inherently problematic? I have a whole post on why we need it.
See my post on the basics of emotions (like what they are, and how they show up in us) if you’re feeling confused about emotions in general. This will be especially helpful for anyone struggling to develop their personal lexicon. I have an additional post on how to understand the process of feeling and releasing an emotion. I also have a post about how emotions that we struggle to tolerate experiencing can impact us.
Sometimes emotions under our umbrella are “secondary” emotions, or emotions we’ve had in response to an initial emotion. For more on what this is and how it works see my post from 10/3/21, first photo “Our emotions, when they are heightened, can feel like a freight train, plowing through and interrupting everything in their tracks”.
There is an excellent book, for children, that helps them build their emotional lexicon from the very start. Color Monster comes as a popup and as a board book.
If you’re wanting more for yourself (or for kids) about understand the function of emotions and how they work, Disney / Pixar’s “Inside Out” is a phenomenal resource.

March 16, 2023March 29, 2023

Pessimism

Pessimism is a coping strategy that protects us against the vulnerability of having hope.
Feeling hopeful leaves us open to potential disappointment or rejection. If we are fearful or avoidant of these experiences we are more inclined to rely on pessimism to protect us from experiencing them.
Our pessimism can blind us; it can limit our sense of the possibilities for ourselves and our future.
Many of us get stuck in a pessimistic stance without realizing it. To work towards recognizing pessimism in yourself, look out for rigidity; if it feels like you can’t imagine something would work, or something could change, or if it doesn’t feel worth trying, you may be approaching with pessimism.
While it’s okay to “start” with pessimism (if we are so inclined), it’s not recommended to end there. Instead, work towards integrating the counterbalance to pessimism, which is being realistic.
When we work towards being realistic we can see the possibility that the pessimistic outlook has some merit to it, but we can also hold hope and awareness that other outcomes are possible.
You’ll notice I’m not naming “optimism” as the counterbalance to pessimism. Optimism too is a strategy, one that can keep us hopeful, but can also limit our ability to see realistic barriers that might encroach on any given situation.
In its extreme, optimism can be a form of denial, while pessimism can be a state of hopelessness. It is helpful to try and step into you “optimistic” self to think through a scenario, as well as your “pessimistic” self. This can counter-balance rigidity and help pull you closer to a realistic stance.
It’s helpful to identify if a pessimistic stance comes intuitively to you as a first line response to an idea or potential pursuit so you can work on making use of it, and then counterbalancing it with a more realistic approach.
Ultimately, having a more realistic approach will not shield you from the vulnerability that comes with feeling hopeful or taking a chance, but it will enable you to make choices about when you are willing to enter a situation that involves risks (including the emotional risks of feeling rejected or disappointed).

For many of us, we have a pessimistic outlook as a way of insulating ourselves from the vulnerability we’d to feel if we allowed ourselves to hope. This is a tempting strategy to employ if we’ve been hurt, rejected, or disappointed in the past, and we can come to lean on our pessimism as a protective barrier between us and (potentially) feeling those feelings again.

Pessimism can be helpful because it enables us to think to through barriers to achieving a desired goal or outcome. It limits us when it interferes with our ability to assess an individual scenario based around its unique likelihood of coming to fruition. Pessimism also creates problems when it interferes with our ability to identify how valuable (and risk worthy) a pursuit is to us as individuals. When we rely on pessimism, our priority is often to shut down an idea or pursuit, often because we want to avoid a negative outcome (including feeling negative feelings).

An overly pessimistic stance can lead to feeling helpless and un-empowered. Pessimism can stop us in our tracks before we get started, and it can interfere with our ability to see genuine possibilities for ourselves and our future. It’s hard to act on your dreams (even ones that may be possible) if you’re a pessimist.

The antidote to pessimism is holding a realistic stance, one that holds awareness of why a situation might not work out *and* that there are other possible outcomes. When we’re realistic we can weigh the likelihood of success against our personal priorities and risk thresholds. To be clear, you can have a negative outlook on a situation and not be taking a pessimistic stance. Sometimes a situation is a long shot, or won’t work out, and you are realistically assessing the factors at play when you decide not to pursue it.

If you inclined towards pessimism, use it as a starting point and allow yourself to get in touch with the reasons why something may not work. Then, work to explore the potential for alternate possibilities and outcomes. At that point you can decide, based on your own personal thresholds, whether it’s worth it to you to take the emotional, social, financial, relational (etc) risk.

Comments:

If you are someone who relates to the notion that you want to protect yourself from negative emotions, I’d encourage you to read my prior posts on how all emotions (including negative ones) are useful and essential. The first covers how negative feelings are actually incredibly important tools to help us find long term happiness, and the second helps us better understand (and accept the need for) our anger.
The idea that pessimism serves a purpose is very linked to the concept of secondary gains, which are the positive aspects of something that is otherwise problematic in our lives.

November 9, 2022March 27, 2023

“It’s easier for everyone else”

This kind of of thinking, that life is easier for others and more difficult for us, is tempting at a time when we are hopeless or struggling to manage. The thought is often unhelpful, un-motivating, and channels our inner sense of helplessness. Here are a few counter-thoughts to hold onto that may help you approach these moments differently:
(1) Often times when we think “it’s easier” for others what we actually mean is “it’s intuitive” for others. Intuition develops with practice, modeling, and training (over time). Seen through this lens, over time and with practice, something new (and perhaps more helpful) could become intuitive to you too.
(2) Just because someone knows how to take care of themselves doesn’t mean they’ve had an “easy” journey to that point. Instead, it simply means they’ve found what works for them. Often times people who have the ability to cope have taken a path of learning and growth from prior struggles.
- This learning often means reflecting on whether or not our chosen (or perhaps automatic) coping methods truly help us, and holding a willingness to try new ways that may not be intuitive or comfortable to us (until we practice them again and again). The more we can learn and accept what serves us (and avoid what doesn’t) the “easier” coping becomes
(3) Sometimes when we get stuck on “it’s easier for them” what we’re really stuck on is a struggle with fairness; it isn’t that they are “coping better” its that they’ve got less to cope with. When we get preoccupied with “fairness” we are often fixated on factors outside of us, and we cannot resolve our personal pain from that orientation.
- Though we can always work to make to world more fair, we have to take care of ourselves in the interim. When we can take our experiences with unfairness head on, and can focus on what a lack of fairness has meant for us on a personal level (including our losses and pain) we can work to resolve pain around “unfairness” and its impact on us.
(4) Not everyone has the same triggers and sensitivities. What floors one person may feel manageable (i.e. “easy to cope with”) to another. Remember that what we struggle with is often a reflection of our prior experiences, with unresolved experiences tending to cause more pain than ones we have been able to work through and come to terms with.
(5) We don’t all feel our feelings with the same range and intensity. Some of us have much stronger and more intense experiences of all our emotions based on how our bodies process them. This means some of us may find ourselves in deeper emotional states than those around us; this is a more intense experience in life with positives and drawbacks.
(6) We can only see what people show us. Even if we’re highly skilled at reading people, we still can’t see it all. It may look “easier” because someone is invested in it “looking” easier, which doesn’t mean it is.

Regardless of how “easy” or “hard” life is, the truth is, coping comes more intuitively to some of us than others, and life does not evenly distribute objectively difficult times. Put simply, when we think about how “hard” or “easy” life is for us (or others), we are thinking in judgmental terms (i.e. we are using statements to evaluate rather than describe what we notice and observe). I have a whole series on how judgments limit us (see comments for how to find those prior posts), but big picture, today’s post illustrates just how much information we lose about what’s actually effecting us on a personal level when we rely on judgments instead of working towards describing, owning, and understanding a topic at hand.

In today’s post I offer six different ways to challenge how we can think more descriptively through how “hard” or “easy” our lives feel, and there are infinite other ways to deconstruct the judgment of “it’s easier for others”. The less we rely on judgmental statements (which often include easy, hard, right, wrong, good, bad, should, shouldn’t) the closer we can get to understanding, working through, and addressing what’s really upsetting for us.

If you found today’s deconstructions didn’t quite fit for you, think about how else you might say “they have it easier” without using the evaluative statements listed above. Once you can get to the heart of what you’re *really* upset about, you can then address whatever that is.

Next, your job becomes to resist to the temptation to rely on that familiar stance of “it’s easier for them” at a moment when you are struggling. This means challenging ourselves to be present in a different way and pointing your thoughts and energy in the direction that helps you deconstruct the judgment rather than burrow into it.

What may be tempting (or intuitive) to you, is to stay in the familiar “it’s easier for them” mindset, but we have to be responsible for turning our focus and attention elsewhere if we want to build new ways of coping. Eventually, pulling away from the judgement and going into our experiences may become intuitive, but it takes work, practice, intentionality, and time.

Comments:

Are you realizing you might lean on judgmental thinking? Learn more about how to recognize judgmental thoughts, dive deeper into understanding how they limit us, and get guidance on deconstructing a judgment from these linked prior posts.
One of the hangups I list (about fairness) is actually a different kind of hangup all on it’s own, called a “cognitive distortion” that will someday have its own post. If you related strongly to struggling around issues of “fairness” you may find it helpful to review this article that explains what a cognitive distortion is, and how to recognize and challenge it. You may also benefit from working to challenge “shoulds” (Like it should be just as easy for me as it is for her, life should be more fair etc). Big picture, issues of fairness are incredibly complex, and, if fairness is a value we hold, we are often best served to make our decisions through the lens of that value rather than to expect the world to abide by fairness as a “rule” or “law”. This relates somewhat to another post I have on how “fairness” can effect us, which may also be helpful to dive into.
Today’s post, in addition to include the “non-judgmentally” mindfulness still, also includes applications of the “effectively” mindfulness skill and the “willing” and “Turning the Mind” distress tolerance skill from Marsha Linehans DBT Skill’s training manual (Full Citation: Linehan, M. M. (2014). DBT (R) skills training handouts and worksheets, second edition (2nd ed.). Guilford Publications.).

October 26, 2022March 27, 2023

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).

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:

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.
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.
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.
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 .
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.
Unclear what I mean when I say we need to learn from our feelings? See post about how emotions are like traffic signals.
I mention the window of tolerance in this post, a foundational framework for understanding what a constructive relationship with our inner wold looks like.
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.
I talk about the connecting nature of offering validation in this post. I have another post on why validation is important.
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.

April 15, 2022March 27, 2023

Why We Need Coping Skills

It’s not uncommon for many people, mental health professionals included, to think of coping skills as “a crutch”.
Many folks get stuck because they hold beliefs that they (or their patients) “should be able to feel their feelings as they are”, rather than accept that people may need to learn how to tolerate their emotional world through the use of moderators (like coping skills) that make emotions tolerable enough for us to be present with and then make use of.
We all have varying levels of skill at interfacing with our emotional world constructively. Those of us that didn’t have strong models for accepting, managing, and constructively expressing emotions are more likely to need to learn coping skills. Those of us that had them modeled for us are likely to find the tactics and concepts intuitive.
When we are not as skilled at naturally accessing our emotions in a constructive manner we may feel overwhelmed by them or numb and unable to be in touch with them. This is where the intentional use of coping skills tailored to you and your individual strengths and needs come in.
Those that struggle with flooding / emotional overwhelm may need distraction and present centered coping mechanisms (like grounding or meditation). Those that struggle with finding and feeling their emotions may need embodiment based coping skills like body scans, or deep breathing which help you connect more sustainably to yourself.
Even if you have strong emotional regulation skills (whether they were learned or came to you intuitively) there are also conceptual coping skills that are useful for everyone to learn and practice that help improve relationships with others, your relationship with yourself, and your communication.
There are many conceptual coping skills (see comments for ones I have covered in this account). An example: approaching a situation from a nonjudgmental stance. Instead we work to be descriptive and in doing so reduce the likelihood that judgments get in the way of our ability to get to the core of our reactions, preferences, values, and needs.
Other conceptual coping skills include acceptance, (where we work to acknowledge the limits of our control, and the reality – as it really is – in front of us) and willingness (which means openness and readiness to interface with your situation in in a manner that has your short and long term goals in mind).
Many of us get stuck because our life long way of doing things, feeling our feelings, problem solving, and addressing conflict feel like a core part of us – just who we are and how we are. But, if we can be open to expanding our approach, and integrating coping skills we can change lifelong patterns that haven’t served us.

One of the things I encourage in my practice, as well as in this account, is being able to live in harmony with your inner world, which does require an ability to tolerate your feelings and respond to them in a constructive manner. However, many of us get stuck because we don’t know how to feel our feelings without ruminating (I.e. keeping them activated in a cyclical manner without working though them); or some version of numbness (where we can’t feel our feelings and experience ourselves as cut off from them).

When we struggle to have a harmonious relationship with our feelings we can get pushed out of our window of tolerance to a place where our thinking world and our emotional world cannot work together. At those times, it is difficult to step back and get to a reflective place where we can notice, make sense of, feel AND think through what may be happening in an integrated manner.

A lot of therapists and self-help books encourage you to “feel your feelings”, which yes! We need to do. But we need to do so constructively and in a manner that helps of make use of them. Our emotional worlds can be chaotic and overwhelming; coping skills are tools that help us manage, navigate, and make use of our emotions in a constructive manner so they don’t overpower us.

There are in the moment coping skills like deep breathing or body scans that help to alleviate the intensity of emotion, or help us get in touch with our emotions. There are also conceptual coping skills that are windows through which we are work to see our lives, relationships, responsibilities and goals. When we use conceptual coping skills we are shifting our mindset so we can respond to the moment with what the moment needs, and what we need to bring about long and short-term success.

Often, once we’ve developed a regular practice with coping skills we actually have an increased tolerance for our capacity to feel our emotions at depth; this is because we know and trust we can feel deeply without being overrun. Our therapies, relationships, capacity for vulnerability and communication are all positively effected because we can fully feel our feelings, think and reflect in an integrated manner.

Comments:

*For the mental health professionals out there*: you may recognize this post as talking about the division we so often see between the cognitive / behaviorally oriented treatments and psychodynamically / relationally oriented treatments. I hear time and again how there is this divide in the field, often with skepticism about the validity of the treatment the other party offers. From my perspective, folks who are seeing limited progress from the relationally or psychodynamically based approaches may need some of the coping skills I describe in this account that fall into the behavioral or cognitive category. The coping skills provided by those interventions can create internal safety for our clients, which eventually enable them to lean more fully in to the psychodynamically and relationally oriented treatments which often require a level of collaboration and openness that may not be accessible without having some core distress tolerance, emotional regulation, and cognitive challenging skills. Similarly, clients who have solely done skill building work may eventually benefit from the insight oriented and relationally based work of a more psychodynamic and relational oriented therapy; having the tools to tolerate their inner world may enable them to not just use skills, but to work to begin to relate and connect to others (and them selves) in new and more effective patterns. It is not uncommon for me to work with psychodynamically oriented clinicians and see their “stuck” patients for skill building. Similarly, for my clients who I work with from a more relational or psychodynamic perspective, sometimes our work needs to shift into skill building to tolerate the depth of the insight oriented work. It doesn’t need to be either/or!
*For folks in therapy that feel stuck*: Talk to your therapist about the style of therapy they are doing with you! Do you feel like you can’t think / feel / reflect at the same time? You might need something more concrete from your therapist to get you adequate coping skills to handle what arises in your life. Alternately, do you feel you have great coping skills, but haven’t seen the kind of pattern change you would like? Talk to your therapist about looking at patterns and doing insight oriented work to help break old patterns that are no longer serving you.
I briefly mention “non-judgmentally” in this post. I have three extensive posts on this. If you (and most of us do) struggle with judgments please read further on how to take a nonjudgmental stance, how to deconstruct judgments, and the problems judgements create for us .
More here on a conceptual coping skill on finding balance in relationships, and effectively considering ourselves and others (at the same time).
For Communication coping skills to reduce conflict see this post on taking a pause from conflict; this post on patterns to avoid in your relationship and in conflict.
For help with the conceptual coping skill of acceptance see, more here.
For help with tolerating very difficult times see a collection of coping skills under the acronym IMPROVE.
For help with learning how to be in the present (which is useful if you are prone to flooding or disconnecting) see posts on being one-minded; meditation, and for newbies to meditation I’d encourage you to start with introductory meditation for mental health.
This post contains a fusion of perspectives from attachment theory (which prioritizes finding safety), DBT (which emphasizes the role of therapist as both supporter and teacher), and mindfulness based therapy. For more reading on any of these topics see Daniel Siegel’s mindsight (which goes into more depth on the impact of leaving the window of tolerance), Marsha Linehan’s textbook on DBT (this book is VERY dense and is a textbook used in graduate level classes), and David Wallin’s Attachment in Psychotherapy which is meant for clinicians but is more accessible to a non-clinician audience than the Linehan book.

March 10, 2022March 27, 2023

Anger

We may not like it, but we need anger, and we have the capacity to experience it for a reason.
For so many of us our anger has created problems for us; we can’t connect to it because we don’t trust it, or when we feel it we do so in ways that we (or others) experience as out of control.
Anger is a signal that something (internally, externally, or both) isn’t working for us and needs to change. It can motivate us and help us protect ourselves from being harmed by situations, experiences, or people.
When we are not accepting of our anger we are at risk of repeatedly falling into situations that are hurtful to us; we need our anger as a cue to us that something isn’t working.
The key to having a productive relationship with our anger is noticing and responding to it in a way that doesn’t create problems for us or our relationships.
Part of having a harmonious relationship with your anger is learning to sit with it, be curious about it, and identify what it is signaling to you about your needs, limits, expectations, environment, and relationships.
When you feel anger, it becomes your job to identify what isn’t working about a situation, and address that situation in a manner that holds respect for you; your values, limits, and well being; and the emotional (and physical) well being of those around you.
We can be quick to confuse our “trigger” (what set off the anger) with the cause (which might actually be about an expectation, our limits, our needs, etc). The fact that we feel anger means something isn’t working, BUT that something isn’t always the “thing” we get angry at.
Because anger narrows our focus and intensifies our drive to act it can be counterintuitive to zoom out and sit with the big picture, but often that’s exactly what we need to do.
The more we can embrace the need for anger, and accept that it serves a functional purpose, the less we fight it when it arises, and the the more able we are to tame it, and express it in ways that protect us and our relationships.

Many of us have an uncomfortable relationship with our anger. It feels threatening, overwhelming, and potentially damaging to relationships. If you’ve followed this account for sometime you know that I am an advocate of building a harmonious relationship with your inner world, which includes all of your feelings – even anger.

In moments of an immediate threat our anger can help us protect what is ours; we can get physically aggressive or we can yell and intimidate. When we want to maintain positive relationships with others, however, our relationship with our anger needs to shift; we still want to feel it to receive cues about our needs and limits, but we need to be careful about how we express it. This does not mean that we “don’t want to feel angry”, what it means is we need to have our anger AND be thoughtful about what we do from there.

Anger, like all emotions, serves a functional purpose about the intersection of our needs and our environment. When we feel anger we are receiving a cue about feeling exploited, threatened, unsafe, or wronged. It can help to think of your anger as a signal that a limit has been passed, that a boundary is needed, that something needs to change, or that we feel unsafe.

To have a productive relationship with our anger we need to learn to sit with it, be curious about what’s causing it, and then address that cause in a manner that’s consistent with our long term goals and values. Anger has a heat and an energy about it that can make us want to act quickly. It can be intense, but we need to work towards learning to slow down, unpack it, and act on it with care.

This is where the thoughtful reflection and awareness about the function of anger is essential. Your anger has arisen to try and keep you safe. Trust that, then ask yourself what feels threatening and why; what expectation has been violated and how universal is that expectation; what is your anger telling you about the gap between what you need what you are getting; what is making you feel unsafe, exploited, or unseen and how can you address it? Try and be open to both internal and external causes of your anger

Comments:

Like all emotions, our ability to feel and manage our anger is informed by prior experiences. Emotions that were welcomed when we developed will be easier for us to access, tolerate, and regulate (i.e. turn the volume down on). Emotions that were not welcome may get twisted and we may have to work to learn how to feel them, or they may only come out in big ways, or jumbled up with other feelings. If anger wasn’t tolerated in your development, or if it only erupted in ways that were hurtful to relationships, chances are you too have internalized that “anger is bad” or “problematic” or “to be avoided” etc. It’s not uncommon for someone to tell me they don’t feel anger, or they perceive it as bad. In my experience, this generally means anger exists within this person’s inner world, and they need help learning how to feel and tolerate it. Without that tolerance, the anger can shift into guilt, shame, anxiety, or depression. For more on how our development shapes our ability to access and tolerate certain thoughts and feelings see my post on how our brains work as an association machine.
I mention that anger has a heat about it in the post, it most certainly does, and if we don’t have adequate emotion regulation skills or distress tolerance skills one of the only ways we know how to cope with it is to push it down (i.e. pretend it’s not there) or let it build up and erupt. For more on how emotions effect us even when “we don’t feel them” see my post on emotional blocking and its impact. For more on distress tolerance skills see this post on in the moment coping mechanisms, and this one too , and this post on why we need distress tolerance skills. There will be more emotion regulation and distress tolerance skills to come, but one huge way to improve your tolerance of your emotions (and decrease your impulsivity to release them in a burst) is to take up a meditation practice. And of course, any very intense emotion can be quickly tamed with grounding skills (though they work best when you practice them in low intensity situations first).
For those of us that have a history of not feeling heard in relationships, we are more prone to express our anger in a way that is “larger”, as an attempt to control situations through intimidation, or as an attempt to be taken seriously and heard. Part of grappling with changing how you express anger, may be grappling with the secondary gains you experience about the ways your expression of anger helps you feel heard, empowered, and in control. Read more more here on secondary gains and how to work through them.
Anger and conflict is inevitable in relationships. For tips on how to manage moments of anger in relationships in a constructive manner see posts on problematic dynamics to avoid, the importance of taking time in conflict, and this post on fair fighting.
I mention in the post that all of our feelings are signals about the intersection of our needs and our environment. It’s true. For more on how we can learn from our emotions see this post on emotions as traffic signals.
Moments of anger can push us out of our window of tolerance (and leave us vulnerable to overly internalizing or externalizing. Read here for more on how to recognize when we (or others) are internalizing or externalizing .
Do you have a hard time with your anger? Perhaps it feels unjustified or not ok. See my post on acceptance for help working to trust it.
I talk in the post about how our “short term” selves often want to release our anger, at the expense of our “long term selves”. For more on this concept and how to grapple with these different priorities see my post on our long and short term selves.

February 13, 2022April 26, 2023

IMPROVE

It does not make you inferior if a situation is more than you can handle; it makes you a person who knows your limits.
Sometimes, it is absolutely appropriate and necessary to temporarily bury feelings, hide them, or push them away. When we do this we are getting through the moment, and taking on only as much as we have capacity for.
We use distress tolerance skills as short term tools to help us manage when the intensity of our emotions is at a 9 or 10 out of 10. At those times we are at risk of coping in a manner that eases our duress for the moment, but creates problems for us down the road.
Think: substance use to numb ourselves, lashing out (verbally or physically) at others to release emotions, having an internal experience of our emotions that is so intense we can’t process what’s happening around us effectively, self-harm, or causing harm to others out of our own duress.
If you’ve ever looked back and thought, “I wasn’t in my right mind when I made that decision” chances are you could have used a distress tolerance skill to help you through.
Distress tolerance skills are not for the weak or people who “can’t handle it”, they are for any and all of us when a situation pushes us to our edge.
Remember, with distress tolerance skills we are not changing the moment, we are helping you get through the moment in a manner that will not create further problems for you once this moment has passed.
Distress tolerance skills have the added bonus of helping you “reset” so you can cope and come back online with you faculties intact, enabling you to manage the stressors ahead of you.
Using distress tolerance skills is often about getting out of black and white (all or nothing) thinking; “if I can’t make the problem go away, there is nothing I can do” is not constructive. You can improve your experience and increase your capacity to handle what is coming if you give yourself permission to use distress tolerance skills.
There is no right amount of time needed for you to be in a mode where distress tolerance skills are necessary, but generally speaking if you’re in a distress tolerance mode for more than 24 hours you may be navigating into the territory of avoidance, which creates a whole host of other problems in your life.
In today’s post I cover the skill “IMPROVE” from Marsha Linehan’s Dialectical Behavior Therapy textbook. Not every part of this will work for every person, consider this skill (and others I offer) as a buffet for you to pick and choose from for you to cope with your specific situation or stressors.

I – Imagery. If you can’t leave the situation in real life, you can temporarily use fantasy to create a new environment to be in. This skill can help us escape internal or external duress (i.e. imagining a more pleasant scenario), or, if it feels accessible, you can use it as a way of boosting yourself up (i.e. imagining yourself coping well).

M – Meaning. Terrible things happen. One way in which we can survive them is by making meaning out of them. This is often too big a task to do in the present, but what you can do is have faith in your ability to find meaning eventually. This can look like, “I don’t know how this will ever make sense to me, but I believe that I will find a way to learn, grow, and be a better person because of this”.

P – Prayer. If you are religious than this probably already makes sense. If not, think of prayer less literally as “asking god”, and more figuratively as a surrendering yourself to forces outside of your control. Prayer usually includes accepting what is happening and our limited ability to change it all while asking for help from some yet to be determined place (like from others, a future version of ourselves, our community etc).

R – Relaxing. Remember, our brains and bodies are connected in a giant feedback loop. If you are stressed, anxious, and upset your body is likely carrying that tension physically which signals to your brain the need to be on high alert (which can further heighten tension). You can interrupt the feedback loop by relaxing your body which will decrease your experience of the stress.

O – One thing in the moment. This is reviewed extensively here. This skill centers us and can reduce our experience of chaos.

V – Vacation (temporarily) from responsibilities. Also known as, a break, denial, avoidance, or time to regroup. For this to work you really have to clear your mind of the problem and focus on something else.

E – Encouragement. Our internal world can be brutal. Try shifting your internal voice to approach yourself like you would a friend or a child (with encouragement, kindness, a focus on capacity and strength, and without all the harshness that may be present for you at a difficult time).

Comments:

I write a lot in this account about the benefits of being present with your whole self throughout your day, which includes your body, emotions, thoughts, feelings, values, priorities, and the environment around you. While I absolutely stand by that recommendation, like nearly everything I’ve written about, this is not an all or nothing recommendation and the helpfulness of being present in this manner exists on a spectrum; there are times in all of our lives when we need to recognize our limits and our inability to be truly present in the moment. This post will help you identify where your limits are and, hint, often they are not where you want them to be. This post explains the rationale for distress tolerance skills. In it I cover the importance of having “distress tolerance skills” (as Marsha Linehan of DBT calls them) in your coping tool belt. I also cover how our brains respond to intense negative emotions in the comments.
Some of us may not identify with having our emotions at a 9 or 10 out of 10, but we do identify with repeatedly having those moments where we wish we hadn’t handled something in some way, or with feeling the opposite of intense emotions – nothing at all. The IMPROVE skills may be helpful for you too in those times, as well as grounding, another version of a “reset” for our brains that helps bring us back to the present and improve impulse control. Grounding skills are a version of vacation from responsibilities combined with one thing in the moment.
Another way to think about when to use distress tolerance skills is when you are outside of your window of tolerance.
When we force ourselves through a moment that is more intense than we know how to handle, without taking care of our emotional needs we are not only not using distress tolerance skills, we are at risk for experiencing the situation as traumatic. Read here for more on what makes something “traumatic”.
Your ability to use these skills heightens with a mindfulness practice, which helps us increase our ability to control what we place our attention on. See my prior posts on the rationale for mindfulness skills, for an introduction to meditation and its purpose, for sensory based meditation and for free form meditation.
Struggling with feeling like you shouldn’t “need” to do this or use these skills? See my post on Acceptance for help with this.
Are the concepts in IMPROVE new to you? That’s ok. The best way to help them become habits is to have realistic expectations for how to incorporate them into your life. See my post on how to make long term sustainable change.
A note on prayer. There are different types of prayer, why me prayers, asking for help prayers, acceptance prayers. In my experience “why me” prayers further our experience of helplessness where as acceptance and asking for help prayers are often more helpful in coping with an unfair or difficult moment.
Understanding how emotions work will help you better understand the “R” – Relax – skill. See post from November 1st, 2021 for more details on how our emotions work. As Marsha Linehan says of relaxing, “Often people tense their bodies as if by keeping them tense, they can actually make the situation change. They try to control the situation by controlling their bodies. The goal here is to accept reality with the body” by relaxing it. The quote is from page 99 of Linehan’s Skills Training Manual for Treating Borderline personality disorder, 1st edition. Full Citation: Linehan, M. M. (1993). Skills training manual for treating borderline personality disorder. Guilford Press.
Further insight into the benefits of “one thing in the moment” “O” skill, from Marsha Linehan’s manual: “Focusing on one thing in the moment can be very helpful in the middle of a crisis; it can provide time to settle down. The secret of this skill is to remember the the only pain one has to survive is ‘just this moment’. We all often suffer much more than is required by calling to mind past suffering and ruminating about future suffering we may have to endure” The quote is from page 100 of Linehan’s Skills Training Manual for Treating Borderline Personality Disorder, 1st edition. Full Citation: Linehan, M. M. (1993). Skills training manual for treating borderline personality disorder. Guilford Press.