Coping Archives - Kate Gegg, AM, LCSW

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.

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.

January 13, 2022March 27, 2023

One Mindfully

A simple, but transformative skill: learning how to be fully and wholly present in just one moment at a time.
Learning “one mindfully” (as we call it in the DBT world) can reduce anxiety, improve concentration, increase our ability to handle a crisis, increase our ability to connect to our authentic selves, and increase our efficiency.
The opposite of this concept is “mindlessness” (not fully being present with any activity – i.e. “going on autopilot”) or multi-tasking (attempting to do two activities at the same time).
The most common way many of us “multi-task” is something most of us would not identify as multi-tasking: Thinking about one thing while doing another.
Like the time you were in a meeting but actually preoccupied by the conflict you had the night before. Or, when you were writing an email while thinking about how to prepare for something later in the day.
When we use one-mindfully we work to be present with our whole selves, which means paying attention to the content of the moment while also paying attention to internal cues about our experience of that moment.
We set an intention for what we will focus our attention and energy on, and we work to keep ourselves focused on that intention despite urges to split our attention, or give in to distraction.
This does not mean that we cannot choose to change where spend our energy and attention or that we have to completely finish before shifting our attention; it means that when we change what we are doing (and where we are focusing) we do so with intention and awareness, even if we are right in the middle of something.
This also does not mean we cannot transition quickly between tasks (think about cooking: you are chopping the carrots, then stopping to stir the onions). We can be wholly present with one activity while another in the background does not have our attention.
This skill centers us, and requires that we recommit again and again to what we will spend our energy on in the face of distractions. It also requires that we reassess as time goes on to determine if we want to continue recommitting to that moment, or to changing where our focus will be.

Most of us struggle fairly significantly with “doing” one thing at a time. This is because many of us are “doing” one thing, but thinking about another. In this way, we’ve become accustomed to leaving the present moment for one in the past, one in the future, or one that may never happen. When we do this we reduce our ability to concentrate by dividing our attention. We also decrease the likelihood we will pick up on important cues from the environment around us; when we are distracted we are not able to be as perceptive.

In simple terms this skill is “doing” one thing at a time, but more complexly it is devoting your attention and energy to only one “thing” at a time. As Marsha Linehan says, this means, “When you are thinking, think. When you are worrying, worry. When you are planning, plan. When you are remembering, remember. Do each thing with all of your attention”. Dialectical Behavior Therapy, and Marsha Linehan, would encourage all of us to spend as much time as possible being wholly present with whatever moment we are engaged in.

Many of us are spending large chunks of our time distracted, and not present in both mind and body in whatever moment we are in. To be wholly and fully present means paying attention to your outer world (i.e. the conversation you are in) and your inner world (your internal reactions to that conversation in your thinking, feeling, and sensing). Although it sounds simple enough, it is actually a lot of input to pay attention to at any given point in time and takes some practice straddling both your inner and outer worlds simultaneously.

One-Mindfully can be a powerful grounding and centering tool because it focuses us simply on the moment we are in. A common treatment for trauma, anxiety, and depression is learning how to be in and stay in the present. Like any new skill, I encourage folks to try this first in “low stress” situations (i.e. ones that are not likely to incite a lot of activation in your inner world) before high stress situations (i.e. ones where you expect to have a lot of thoughts, intense feelings, or intense sensations).

See comments for more on this skill including ideas for how to implement it today.

Comments:

Often, I see this struggle to be “one mindful” in the way many of us manage our relationships with our computers during the workday. Does this sound familiar: “You’re writing an email and you get a pop-up notification that you’ve gotten a calendar invite. Without even thinking you stop writing the email, review / accept the calendar invite, and then try to return to your email. But wait, now you lost where you were and so you re-read your last sentence, get back in the mindset of the the response and boom, an instant message comes in asking you if you saw the most recent email from so-and-so about this-thing or that-thing. So you scroll to the top of your inbox and read the email, respond to the instant message but wait now you can’t find that email you just had opened. Ok, you found it. But wait what were you saying, and ok now there is only 5 minutes left before the next thing on your calendar and somehow you haven’t gotten to that response yet. Now you feel this anxious pressure to get it out, but you are also aware this isn’t the quality response you wanted to send out so now you have to decide if it’s more important to get it out quickly or thoughtfully…etc”. Multiply that experience throughout your day and your day ends with you feeling frazzled, unproductive, behind, like you’ve missed a bunch of things and like you’ve been ping-ponging around all day. And that’s because you have! All those notifications are very stimulating and they are prime ways in which we forget to insert that intentionality into our decision about where we spend our time and attention when we are with our devices. One low-stress way to start trying to introduce this skill into your life is by bringing thoughtfulness to what notifications you need on, and how you respond to those notifications when they are on. As Marsha Linehan might say, “When you are writing an email, write the email.” If you find you are tempted to be distracted by your phone turn it over or put it on silence. If you are expecting to hear from someone important while you write, work to make yourself accessible in a way that will not distract you (i.e. ask them to call you, or silence texts from other people except that one person). Setting up a routine that enables a mindful perspective can take some work, but it should help improve concentration and productivity and leave you feeling better at the end of the day.
Back when therapy was always in an office you were forced to take a one-mindful perspective with your session. You didn’t have a screen, or your phone handy and the temptations to engage with something outside the content of the session were much less accessible. If you are doing remote based therapy try and re-create the in-office experience as much as possible by eliminating the possibility of something outside of the session distracting you away from being fully in the session.
If you are someone who commonly multi-tasks or operates in a “mindless” manner, it will take time time and deliberate practice to bring a more “one-mindful” stance to how you spend your time. For tips on how to bring this concept to your life at a pace that works for you, see my post on how to sustainably make long-term changes.
This concept / skill is kind of like living your life in real time meditation, albeit a meditation where you are responsive to your environment. Like our meditative practice, your mission throughout is to regularly bringing your attention back to your chosen focal point. For an introduction to meditation, and this concept of returning to a chosen focal point, see my introduction to meditation post (which has more direct parallels to today’s post), and my post on general meditation.
Sometimes we find that we can’t control our attention. That’s ok. No one is perfect at this. Sometimes we are coping best by accepting what is not within our control, and often times what is out of our control is content of our inner worlds. (If you struggle with this concept this post on acceptance might help). This can mean the thought, feeling, sensation, or external circumstance arising is too distracting or powerful to redirect yourself from (i.e. you just got news of something upsetting and of course you can’t focus on your previous intention). At that time, it can be helpful to view that as a cue that you need to switch your attention over for a period of time, even if you don’t want to. A powerful way in which you can stop ruminating (when you can’t stop thinking about something) is to set a timer for ten minutes, and just be with the worry. After ten minutes, when the timer goes off, you may find it’s easier to redirect your attention back to a different focal point. After ten minutes of really fully devoting yourself to it (instead of having it simmer in the back of your thoughts for hours at a time where you ping pong between thinking about that and all the other things in your day) you may have found a solution, or exhausted all the different ways you can think or worry about something, but either way it’s more likely to feel less pressing. There are other skills to combat intrusive worries for another day.
Regarding the idea of perfection – it is not realistic (or even the goal) to exclusively live in a “one mindfully” stance. Sometimes we do want or need to split our attention and that’s OK. The key is to selectively and with awareness choose to do so, and to use one mindfully with more important tasks.
A little more on identifying and understanding multi-tasking. There are three ways of multi-tasking: attempting to do one activity while you think about another activity (sitting in your meeting and thinking about that conversation you had last night), attempting to think about two things at the same time (going through the grocery list while you try and plan out that email to your boss), or attempting to do two things at the same time (talking to your friend and scrolling on your phone). A one-mindful perspective would encourage you to limit each as much as possible.
If you find yourself regularly tempted to split your attention or “zone out” start trying to pay attention and get curious about it. Sometimes there is a lot we can learn about what we are trying to distance ourselves from when we pull our full attention away in these ways.
Marsha Linehan’s skills, including one-mindfully, are outlined in full in her skills training manual and associated skills training workbooks.

November 24, 2021March 27, 2023

Meditation

For us to be happy in our lives, we need to be able to be alone and at peace with our inner world. There are many roads to this place, including the following path.
First, I recommend you master grounding. This helps us learn that we can recenter ourselves when we’ve gotten to an emotional edge.
When we’re confident in our ability to ground, we become confident that we can bring ourselves back from a place of intensity. This makes our thoughts, feelings, and inner world less scary because we know how to reset.
Next, I recommend foundational (sensory based) meditation for 30 seconds to two minutes a day.
The goal with this type of meditation is to begin watching your inner world without reacting to it, or it controlling your attention or behavior.
When we get skilled at this we can better tolerate our feelings, reduce our impulsivity, and more easily think and process before acting and responding.
The final step, which is outlined in today’s post, is to begin meditation without a sensory anchor. Instead, our anchor is our internal world.
Unlike foundational meditation where we come back to noticing a sensory anchor, in this type of meditation your centering point is yourself. You come back to noticing what is in your body, what feelings you feel, what urges you have, what sensations you can notice, and what thoughts flow in and out.
Just like foundational meditation, the goal is to notice what’s there, notice if you’ve drifted off into a thought chain or if you’ve tried to “clear” your mind, and to reset to a state of curiosity and attentiveness to all that is happening in your inner world.
See further explanation about this next stage of meditation, and the benefits of it, in today’s post.

Once you’ve gotten comfortable with grounding and foundational meditation (and there is no right about of time for that), you can start experimenting with free form meditation. This is when we try and be present in our inner world without an identified “anchor” other than ourselves.

In my previous post on meditation I encouraged you to pick a sensory based focal point (like noticing your fingers touching, or a beverage in your mouth), and then set a timer while actively watching your internal world to “see what comes up”. The goal of that exercise is to be present with your mind and body as it goes through each moment, neither trying to “clear” your mind nor holding on to any given internal experience that comes up.

The process for this next stage is nearly identical. Set a timer (so you don’t give in to urges to stop), but instead of picking a sensory anchor to return to, the anchor is simply your internal world itself. Your mind will drift, you may hear a noise, or have a thought or feeling that preoccupies you. That’s ok. Your job, during this exercise, is to notice that you’ve drifted or started engaging with a distraction, and then to return to what you have intentionally chosen to focus on, which is what you notice in your body, and what’s happening with your thoughts, feelings, sensations, and urges moment to moment.

Meditation gives us the ability to insert intentionality into our choices by helping us learn to observe and collect information before acting. Although we “notice” rather than “act” in meditation, we are practicing tolerating the intensity of how inaction feels. The better we get at tolerating that experience in our inner world, the more skilled we become at not feeling pulled to act (before it makes sense to) in our lives.

With time, meditation enables us to better control our attention. Instead of our attention and focus dictated by what’s “loud” (be it a feeling, thought, person, event etc), we notice “what’s happening” and how it effects us. Then, we can choose when to engage with it based on a host of factors including our emotional availability, the true urgency of the issue, and our commitments, values, priorities, and readiness.

Notes:

Want to start the journey? First, see my post on grounding. In it there are lots of tips for skills you can use when you are outside your window of tolerance to help you return. Once you’ve gotten skilled at grounding (and this can take a very long time, so be patient with yourself) move on to foundational meditation .
When I’m teaching this to my clients I tell them the only reason I want them stopping the meditation is if their body is in danger (like a fire alarm goes off, then yes, listen and react to that!). Otherwise, if you realize all of sudden you need to go to the bathroom, ok. Cool. Keep noticing what that feels like while looking out for what else is happening in your internal world. Maybe your leg starts to fall asleep. I don’t want anyone to hurt themselves, so use your judgment, but this exercise would encourage you to notice what that feels like without reacting to it. Maybe you realize you missed an important call. Notice the feeling of panic, and wait the until the timer goes off to handle it. In your real life, of COURSE we want you responding to cues of distress from your body and your world, but we want you to do so in a thoughtful rather than a reactive way. Meditation helps you become skilled at noticing without quickly reacting, and should help you eliminate those hair trigger responses and insert more intentionality into your day to day decisions.
I often share this story when I’m teaching clients how to meditate, because I think it helps illustrate how this is both a simple and yet simultaneously hard skill to build. I took a class in graduate school that provided concrete training on many of the skills in this account, including meditation. Every class my professor would have us do a sensory based meditation. Inevitably, someone would show up late, slam a door, bang a chair around – etc. I would then stop refocusing myself in the meditation and instead think something like: “ugh, they are ruining it! How am I supposed to focus on what I’m thinking or feeling while they are being so disruptive”. I felt annoyed, frustrated, disrespected, angry, and distracted. It took me weeks to get it – that it’s my job to learn how to refocus myself, rather than their job not to distract me. It’s my job to notice what that stirs up in me, and to try and learn from it by reflecting on it after the meditation, rather than to look to them to live their lives in such a way that they don’t create noise in mine. What I experienced was a “thought and feeling” train (outlined more in the foundational meditation post) and it’s my job to notice when I’ve hopped on that, and to return to what I choose to focus on until the time is right for me to understand how and why that train was a tempting distraction for me to engage with.
When we meditate anything that is not what we intend to focus on is considered a distraction for that moment, even if at a later time it will be a focal point of our attention.
What about mindfulness based programs like headspace? My answer would be, it depends on what you are looking for and how you use them. Programs of that nature can be great for relaxation, and, I would imagine (I don’t know the platform inside and out) that there are non guided meditations accessible within it. A guided meditation can be a GREAT starting point as something to do to help quiet an active mind, even before you try the foundational meditation exercise I suggested in my post from July 19th. That being said, focusing your attention on listening to words, and following the direction of those words is ultimately an outside “distraction” that takes you away from being present with your inner world. When you are busy following directions to notice your breath, to count backwards, etc you are not alone with your inner world; you are following a guide through it. Again, this is a GREAT entry point to being present with your inner world, but I’d encourage you to go beyond a guided meditation to work on being with yourself and going at your own pace though your inner world.
Sometimes I think of this exercise like snorkeling or scuba diving. Above the surface of the water you can’t even imagine (without spending some time looking) at how much is happening underneath. While you are in the exercise it is not your job to “touch” the fish (i.e. engage with the thought), it is simply your job to observe this world, and see what crosses the path of your attention without trying to change or alter it. You are just there as an observer to take it all in. Your thoughts, feelings, urges, impulses, and sensations are each individual components of the world for you to observe with detachment and curiosity.
The goal of this particular exercise is not to relax you, instead it is to help you tolerate all of the intensity of your inner world without trying to control it. I’d encourage you to start at moments when you feel more calm, but over time try it out (even for 30 seconds) at a time when you feel something more intensely.
The beauty of meditation is that we gain control over what we pay attention to. Have an intense thought or feeling come up, but need to focus on that project? Did you have an upsetting conversation, but feel like this isn’t the right time to really think or process through it? Meditation helps us gain control over where we place our attention so that we can spend our time and our energy on our chosen focal points, and return to the intrusions at another time. This is how people learn how to walk on coals (I am NOT suggesting this!!), or manage chronic pain, they have a strong ability to move their attention away from that particular stimulus onto a chosen stimulus. Even though we practice for a short amount of time, that “muscle” builds. The strength and skill in meditation is NOT in controlling your thoughts, or never having them drift away, it’s in noticing what’s happening in your internal world and then being able to redirect your attention to your chosen focal point. Sometimes we have to do this many times over the course of a minute, this is successful meditation. The ability to redirect back to the chosen focal point is the skill.
I want to be clear: sometimes the distractions we “refocus away from” in our lives are important for us to act on at some point, rather than continue to refocus away from. Meditation can teach you to disengage, but we want to think of that as “disengage until the right time” for some topics. You will be avoiding or denying in you life if you constantly refocus away from something that needs to be addressed.
I’ve written a handful of other posts that explain the value of meditation. The first explains the value of meditation in further detail, and the second helps us understand more about how our inner world works and how to “control” it.

November 1, 2021March 27, 2023

What is an Emotion?

If you want to manage and cope with your emotions, a helpful starting point is understanding what they are, how they work, and how (beyond feeling them) they effect us.
What emotions we feel, and how intensely we feel them, is simply a combination of chemical processes in our brain and sensations in our body working as a feedback loop in response to signals from one another and our environment.
An example: You feel scared. Your brain sends that fear signal to your body. Your heart may start racing, you you may start sweating, you may instinctively raise your shoulders up by your ears. You may think to yourself, “this isn’t safe, I’m in danger”. Your brain then detects all that activity which continues prompting the emotion of fear.
Feeling emotions for extended periods of time is simply this feedback loop restarting again and again as we experience the emotion, thoughts, and associated body changes.
Each emotion has a series of specific body changes and sensations associated with it. Those body sensations are unique to each person, but there is often overlap between people in how they feel each particular emotion.
The more we can learn to notice and observe our emotions and their impact on us, the less controlled we are by them. An entry point to this (and there are others) is noticing and identifying what is happening in your body as you are feeling your emotions.
It can be a helpful exercise to think of something that made you feel a particular emotion, reconnect with that feeling, and then do a scan throughout your body to notice how the emotion effects you.
You can build up a personal catalog of identifiers for each emotion (i.e. anger makes me feel heat in my chest and tension in my jaw, guilt makes me feel a pit in my stomach and a knot in my throat etc).
There will be more to come on this topic, including why we have emotions and tips and skills for managing them.
See today’s post for a further explanation of why we need to pay attention to our bodies if we want to better manage our minds

If you’ve studied philosophy you know there is an age old question about the differences between mind and body. In this day an age, those of us familiar with neuroscience know that mind and body are actually part of the same intricate system of circuitry, feedback loops, and signals. Emotions are a complex part of this system, but simply put they consist of (neurochemical) changes in the brain that go on to have an effect on our bodies, thoughts, behavior, and even our interpretations of the environment around us.

Understanding how to manage our emotions becomes easier once we understand that they exist in a feedback loop with our bodies. We can enter that loop and begin the process of taming, settling, regulating, and managing our emotions by becoming familiar with how each emotion effects our body.

Try and bring curiosity to your body when you realize you are feeling an emotion. What do you notice? Pay attention to temperature, tension, pressure, tightness, etc. You may need to scan around to different parts of your body to gather all the information about what’s happening. As a bonus, the process of stepping back and observing yourself will likely help lower the intensity of the emotion you are experiencing.

If you’re not used to directing your attention to your body you may be surprised at how much is happening in it. If you find you feel numb and can’t feel your body that’s a cue you’re out of your window of tolerance and need to ground (see comments). You may also find you don’t feel some emotions even though you know they exist. Try accessing a lower intensity version of those emotions, for example if you are someone that can’t connect with feelings of anger, try connecting with frustration, or irritability – and notice how that effects your body.

Over time, that increased awareness of our body can help us detect emotions before they get too big (increasing our odds of wrangling them back in), and offers us the opportunity to intervene in the feedback loop with strategies to manage our emotions. More on those strategies in a future post, but for now work paying attention to your personal feedback loop and its effect on your body.

Comments:

This post contains a fusion of information from (1) Marsha Linehan’s Skills training manual for DBT, and her theory of emotions (pages 87, 88, and 137 of the manual), (2) Bessel Van Der Kolk’s “The body keeps the score”, (3) Daniel Siegel’s “Mindsight” and (4) David Wallin’s “Attachment in Psychotherapy”.
As David Wallin explains, “Asking our patients to label what they feel…invites them to observe that experience rather than simply identify with it and feel overwhelmed. Enhanced bodily awareness and the growing sense that feelings can be painful without being intolerable sets the stage” for healing. This quote is from page 81 of David Wallin’s Attachment and Psychotherapy, a book meant for therapists but readable for not-therapists who are interested in learning more. Full citation: Wallin, D. J. (2007). Attachment in psychotherapy. New York: Guilford Press.
Scientists rely on this fact, that our emotions are neural processes, to make advances in medicine and to better understand human behavior and functioning. They’ll use scans /testing devices in research studies to help them determine what emotion a person is feeling based on which part of the brain shows the most activity. “In the early 1990s novel brain-imaging techniques opened up undreamed-of capacities to gain a sophisticated understanding about the way the brain processes information…PET and later… fMRI scans enabled scientists to visualize how different parts of the brain are activated when people are engaged in certain tasks or when they remember events from the past. For the first time we could watch the brain as it processed memories, sensations , and emotions and begin to map the circuits of mind and consciousness” – Page 39 of Bessel Van Der Kolk’s “The Body Keeps the Score”. Full citation: van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.4
Want to know more about the connections between how your brain, your emotions, and your thoughts work? See my previous post Your Brain as an Association Machine for more information.
I mention the feedback loop between our brains and our body in this post. Did you know most emotions last only a few seconds to minutes? If you’re feeling something for an extended period of time the feedback loop is restarting, which means there is an opportunity for you to intervene. Learn more about the brevity of emotions here.
Not sure you buy into the idea that you want to feel all your emotions? Or maybe you only want to feel some of them? Check out this post that explains the value in negative emotions.
Think you’re not someone who is effected by your emotions? Think again – we’ve all got them, and they can effect us even when we push them away or don’t feel them.
I mention Grounding and The Window of Tolerance in this post. If you find you need to ground a lot while trying to be in your body it’s a cue that you would benefit from therapy. It will help you widen your window of tolerance.

October 17, 2021March 27, 2023

Displacement

Our feelings are harder to access in environments where they are not welcome. This can be with certain people who we feel shut us down, and it can also be with our internal world if we believe certain feelings are bad, unproductive, or unacceptable.
When we can’t access and process through our feelings directly we may find ourselves prone to using displacement. When we “displace” we focus our energy, attention, and conversation around something other than the core issue at hand.
Displacement can be an indirect way of addressing an emotionally charged / intense topic or a topic we can’t find an accessible entry point into discussing or feeling our way through.
Example: you’ve had a bad day at work and take out your anger on your family once you’re home. Perhaps you’re feeling angry about work, and simultaneously feeling like you can’t change that environment / express yourself there and maintain professionalism (i.e. you can’t find an accessible entry point at work to handle your concerns in a direct way).
Although you don’t want to be irritable at home, you may (consciously or unconsciously) rationalize to yourself that your family is “stuck with you” and so you release your frustrations at home. In this scenario the person has displaced their anger at work onto their family members and in an environment where they feel their negative emotions are more tolerated.
Sometimes displacement of this nature can happen even when we don’t consciously *feel* angry. So yes, this means you can have a feeling, not register that you are having it, and then direct a release of it toward some other topic or person in your life.
The trouble with displacement is we focus our attention, energy, and conversation around the focal point, at times without acknowledgement or awareness of the underlying issue(s) at hand.
Unfortunately, even if we can “resolve” the displaced issue (in this example the conflict with our family), we haven’t resolved the core issue (work) and the recipient(s) of our displacement often leave the interaction(s) feeling like the other has been unreasonable.
If we are regularly displacing in our lives we run the risk of resentment in relationships, having the same fight repeatedly, believing our internal world is unreasonable, and feeling confused by or untrustworthy of our reactions.
More in today’s post and comments about how displacement can creep into relationships and decrease our ability to solve problems in our lives. Also, tips for how to find displacement and what to do about it.

When we “displace” we focus our thoughts, communications and/or reactions to a “stand-in” person / object / situation as opposed to the actual person / situation we are having a reaction to. When someone says they feel treated like a punching bag, often they are describing being the recipient of someone else’s displaced feelings.

Displacement can happen in lots of ways, imagine you and your spouse are in a fight about how the dishes are loaded in the dishwasher. More often then not those types of fights are a displacement of a different, larger, and more emotionally overwhelming topic. Instead of facing that topic head on, we can displace onto something more accessible and concrete, like how the dishes are loaded. In this scenario the intense emotions about a larger dynamic (could be anything, perhaps how heard one party feels) are displaced onto a smaller dynamic (how the dishes are loaded) that comes to represent the larger one.

Sometimes we can displace as a way of protecting ourselves from feelings we don’t want to have or believe we shouldn’t be having. At those times we can be fully wedded the the notion that we are having reactions to “the dishes” rather than some larger problem we don’t want to be true of our relationship or in our lives.

Other times when we displace, we may feel aware that the strength of our reaction doesn’t totally make sense. A helpful way to get to core of an issue when you suspect displacement is at play in yourself or others is to ask (in a collaborative, non-judgmental, and accepting manner):

Can you articulate why there is so much emotion or heat around this topic?
Does it feel like this type of thing happens in other ways we may not be discussing?
What else happened today or recently that this reminds me of that I might also be having a reaction to?
Does it feel like we might really be talking about something or someone else here?

Until we can get to the core of the issues we face we are at risk of having the same underlying concern or conflict around “stand-in” topics. With curiosity and introspection we can work to understand and know ourselves better to catch displacement in the act, and get to addressing core underlying concerns.

Notes

One of the reasons that therapy is effective is that a skilled therapist provides a space for someone to feel their feelings without judgment. The relationship becomes a safe place to release your emotions, and it’s not uncommon for patients to find themselves surprised by what comes out in a session. If this has happened to you in treatment this is often a great sign that you feel safe in your relationship with your therapist and they are helping you access, process through, and release what is already there and needs room to come out.
Once we’ve gotten good at recognizing the signs of displacement in ourselves and can recognize when we’re displacing from one topic to another the displaced topic itself can become a helpful entry point into conversation. For example, “I’m noticing myself feeling angry about the dishes but as I think about it, I’m realizing it’s not just the dishes, it’s more that the dishes are one example of how I feel like I ask you to do something and it doesn’t happen. I think we really need to talk about this because I can tell I’m getting resentful”.
Affairs in relationships can happen for many reasons, but one avenue for thinking about them (and there are many others) is through the notion of displacement. If you are having an affair one of many questions you can ask to build introspection and awareness is what need aren’t you getting met from your partner or your life that you have displaced into this other relationship?
I mention in the post that sometimes we can feel like our reactions don’t totally make sense for the situation we are in. Sometimes this is because we are displacing, but all feelings are valid even if they are about numerous situations at the same time. See this post on the cumulative nature of emotions as well as this post on how our brains make associations for a deeper dive into that topic.
I mention in the post that our feelings are harder to access in environments where they are not welcome including our internal world if we believe certain feelings are bad, unproductive, or unacceptable. See more here for how to approach your internal world in a way that won’t shut it down .
I mention in the post that we can have an emotion and not register we are having it. It’s true. For more about how this works see this post on emotional blocking.
Alcoholics Anonymous groups talk about displacement too, though they use the phrase “Coming out Sideways” to discuss how emotions or reactions can come out “sideways” to a focal point other than the core issue, problem, concern, or person.
Our insight into our use of displacement can vary even if we are otherwise self-aware and reflective. We can be very self-aware in some categories of our life and in some relationships, as less so in others. Further, we can displace more around certain types of issues than others. Our insight can vary based on a variety of factors including whether we’re in our window of tolerance, or when we’re operating outside of our limits.

June 14, 2021March 27, 2023

Why Meditation

We can work towards having control over our inner world by increasing our ability to control what we pay attention to
For many of us a powerful thought, reaction, or feeling can arise and completely take us over
This is often disruptive, exhausting, and time consuming. We can feel like the thought or feeling is in control of us.
We can dramatically increase our ability to take the intensity out of our thoughts and feelings which gives us more control over our inner experience, actions, and reactions
To do this, we want work to control what we pay attention to, rather than trying to control what comes up for us.
With meditation we can strengthen our ability to select where we place our attention and energy, rather than having our thoughts or feelings decide for us
We can also learn to tolerate our thoughts and feelings without having intense reactions to them
This is NOT learning to “block” feelings, experiences, or thoughts by “tuning them out”.
This is also NOT sitting with a blank mind or a relaxation exercise.
There will be more instruction to come on how to do this, but the goal is to increase your ability to have thoughts, feelings, and take in experiences while still remaining in the driver’s seat of your life.

We can’t control what happens to us, and “what happens to us” includes our thoughts and feelings. We can develop strategies for how to manage them, but ultimately the thought or feeling that arises for us is as much out of our control as the actions of the person down the street.

One of the most powerful things we can learn to do to help us manage our mental health is to strengthen our ability to control where we place our attention, and to increase our ability to tolerate our thoughts and feelings. The more skilled we are at this, the better we are able to manage difficult internal thoughts and feelings when they arise, and the more control we can have over our actions and reactions.

Most of us do not have an intentional relationship with our internal world. We feel a strong emotion, or have a strong reaction and that takes over our attention. Our internal world can then distract us from our external world – making it difficult to focus on an activity, project, person, or event.

There will always be overwhelming moments in life. Most of us can’t learn to take all the power and intensity out of those moments, even with meditation. Sometimes, we will still be distracted by intensity in our internal world, or events that disturb us in our lives. However, we can dramatically reduce our susceptibility to the intensity of these experiences by increasing our ability to control where we place our attention.

With meditation we learn to develop a spotlight around whatever we’ve chosen to focus our attention on. Like a spotlight, the stronger our ability to control our attention, the more we can focus on what we’ve chosen to focus on, and the less energy and attention is given to what we’ve chosen not to pay attention to.

The specific skill that I’ve seen enable many of my clients (and others) is a particular kind of meditation where we are working on observing our thoughts, feelings, and sensations without reacting to them. This skill, like a muscle, requires practice. The good news is it can take as little as 30 seconds a day for you to dramatically increase your ability to control your attention.

Future post to cover HOW to do this.

Notes:

1`. Chelsea Handler’s book, life will be the death of me, covers her journey through therapy and how her use of mindfulness (and therapy) changed her life.

2. I want to be clear: meditation is not intended to numb you, or desensitize you from painful experiences in your life or events in your community. We are not sticking our heads in the sand and “ignoring”. When we control our attention the goal is not to “block things out” (that would be avoidance). There will be more posts to come on how to do this!

3. Jon Kabat-Zinn ‘s book “wherever you go there you are” is an excellent introduction into mindfulness and meditation