Distress Tolerance_Final

>> Welcome back. In this lecture, I'll explain how you can teach your clients take responsibility, managing their emotions, and learning to tolerate stressful situations in the here and now, otherwise known as distress tolerance. As we've discussed, not many people are truly comfortable expressing their emotions. As a coach, I encourage you to gently challenge your clients to become more aware and sensitive to their feelings. How do they react when bad things happen? Do they seem to overreact at the slightest problem or do they bottle up their feelings and pretend like everything's fine? Either way, living in a near constant state of upset or being habitually stoic and plowing through each day and to-do list without taking the time to release built up stress and negativity will take its toll. A big part of health and wellness is state of mind. Disease comes from dis-ease. It doesn't matter how many fruits, vegetables, and probiotics you consume on a daily basis if you're stressed out, it's just not healthy. Simply put, suffering is living in a state of poor emotional health. When we suffer from distress, what's really happening is our own resistance to what is. We do this when we label an experience as bad or not okay, and then we push against it resisting it by trying to change it. In these situations, it's far more beneficial to ask ourselves, "What if everything was okay, exactly the way it is. What then? What's possible from that place than to resist?" But for many of us, this doesn't come naturally. And for many more, it's something that, "Well, we'd like to do it," is a struggle to put into practice. What you'll learn in this lecture and in this course is that it's not about making a change once and expecting that one change to be the solution. It's that making change is about continuously making the choice to move forward as much as possible while understanding that there will naturally be some setbacks. While we're talking about stress, keep in mind that stress is relative to the person not the event. Have you ever noticed how two people can go through the same traumatic event and come out very differently? One comes out fighting, looking for the silver lining in things and framing their suffering as an opportunity for growth. While the other turns to pity, self-sabotage, and hopelessness. What's the difference between these two people that accounts for such a dramatic difference in perspective? Why do some people get knocked down only to get right back up again while others curl up into a ball on the floor? The difference between these two people is that the one who thrives sees an element of choice and how they can respond. The resilient individual is one who realizes that he or she always has the opportunity to choose how they view a situation. And by that, I don't mean that they're going to try to convince themselves that this awful thing that happened to them is good. What I mean here is choosing to find and focus on a positive aspect of a situation rather than dwell on the negative. This shift in mindset makes life feel easier and more enjoyable to live, even during those tough times. This is why client number one will see a stormy day as a reason they can't go for their morning run and therefore an excuse why they can't exercise. And client two will see it as an opportunity to switch up their routine and try out a Zumba video in their living room. We all wish more of our clients would be like client number two, but more often than not, we're met with the kind of resistance displayed by client number one. These are people who operate as if their lives are controlled by some force outside of themselves as opposed to the type of people who know they're in control of how they feel and therefore what they do. Those in the former group will rise to the challenge when things don't go as planned. They are the people who make lemonade when life gives them lemons. Simply put, They are able to cope. This is commendable. But on the flip side, instead of looking at the people who don't know what to do with the lemons as wrong or inferior, just remember that they haven't yet accessed the wisdom to look at the lemons and see the lemonade. Part of your job as a coach is to help people learn how to think differently. This doesn't mean handing them a recipe for lemonade, it means supporting them to figure it out for themselves. Well, our clients usually come to us because of health issues, what they're often dealing with is trouble coping. They have primary food issues that they don't know how to deal with, and so they turn to food and other unhealthy habits as outlets for their stress. They feel powerless over the situation at hand. So instead of putting in the work towards a real solution, they turn to something else for distraction. By pouring their feelings into a short-term fix, they create a scapegoat for their problems. And then that fix becomes the new problem. A problem that's easier for them to wrap their heads around. It's easier to preoccupy yourself with the drama of gaining and losing and regaining 10 pounds than working through the emotional trauma of an assault or a nasty divorce, for example. People who are able to cope typically have, what's known as an, internal locus of control. This means they hold the perspective that they and only they are the ones in control of their life. They attribute outcomes to their personal abilities, qualities, and efforts. In contrast, there are people with an external locus of control. And these people believed that their life and their decisions are determined by external environmental factors. To them, their lives are controlled by chance or fate, which is outside of their own influence. When things go well, they attribute it to luck, and when things don't work out, they blame someone or something for their failure. This usually leads to a victim mindset where life is happening to them and not for them. It can be very difficult, if not impossible, to make change from this place. An easy way to remember these terms is that people with an internal locus make things happen, while people with an external locus let life happen to them. Using our previous example, the person with the internal locus of control believes that it's up to them to find a creative way to exercise on a rainy day, while the person with the external locus will say that they can't exercise because the weather messed up their plans. Do you see how knowing whether your clients have an internal or external locus of control would contribute to serving them most effectively? When you work with clients, it's important to pay attention to how they perceive and describe control in their lives. Listen for cues that will tell you if their locus of control is internal or external by the way they describe their accomplishments, failures, and the events in their lives. If you have a client who frequently says things like, "I couldn't help but eat things that were off my meal plan." "The holidays are a time to indulge." Or, "It was just too tempting." You know that they view control as external. Life happens to them. If you have a client who says things like, "I ate poorly last night because I went to a holiday party hungry and unprepared." Then you'd know that this client has an internal locus of control. They are responsible for their results. The reason you want to listen for these things is because it is possible to shift one's locus of control. If you can raise your client's awareness around the fact that he or she is letting circumstances dictate their outcomes, you can empower them to start taking ownership of their actions. Then when a problem arises in their life, they can see that they have the choice to either accept, change, or sit through it. This is the foundation for distress tolerance. Okay, so now we've discussed the idea of helping your client sitting through their pain. The following question is how exactly do they manage it? By this, I mean, what can we do to help our clients tolerate difficult and painful emotions while they're still processing the hurt. How can we best serve our clients who are currently dealing with painful emotions around a present upset in their life, something they may not be ready to shake or reframe such as a major loss, disaster or an illness? What else can we offer? Here are four strategies to help your clients tolerate distress. One, create a narrative. Narrative therapy is a form of psychotherapy in which the individual is viewed as separate from his or her problems. Clients are guided to transform their difficult experiences into written stories. As a coach, you support the process by helping them take a more objective stance. This process helps clients to organize their thoughts, attach a more rational meaning to whatever happened, and assimilate it positively into the person's identity as one tale in their book of life. Since the healing is still a work in progress, clients are encouraged to visualize and script what a happy and healthy ending might look like for them. This empowers them to choose to try to rise above whatever has happened. As coaches, we can borrow the concept of narrative therapy while staying within our cope of practice, by helping our clients to re-author their stories of pain and struggle and choose their endings. If you have a client who's struggling to vocalize their emotions and release their inner tension, you can challenge them to take on this assignment. They can do this with you in a session or as an assignment in between meetings. Once completed, you can use it as a tool to assess for judgments, resistances, and whether the story is based on belief or facts. Then, they can write a final draft that includes an ending that's rooted in acceptance. Number two, roleplay. When a client is struggling with difficult emotions as a result of some kind of interpersonal conflict or loss, it may not always be appropriate or even possible for them to confront the individual in order to process the event and achieve closure. Roleplay exercises can be incredibly helpful in these situations to help your client make sense of and process their emotions, while either preparing them for an interaction or helping them find closure. A great technique for role playing in session is called the empty chair technique from gestalt therapy. Have you heard of this classic roleplay intervention? It's much like what it sounds. Your client sits across from an empty chair and pretends that the person they need to address is sitting in it. As a coach, your only job is to sit on the sidelines and hold the safe space for your clients to unload anything and everything they're feeling towards and would want to say to that person as if they were sitting in that chair. This is more powerful than telling you what they would say because by addressing the person directly, they go through the emotional release process they'd actually experience if the person were sitting there in that chair. This is great because it gives them a safe space to unload how they feel in a supportive environment without consequence. It also provides an opportunity for clients to verbalize things they didn't have the chance to say to love once they've lost. When closure is not an option, this exercise can substitute as the next best thing. A cool twist on this is that your client can also pretend that he or she or part of him or herself is sitting in the other chair, and they can address themselves as if they were speaking to that aspect of self that's struggling. This can bring really great insights that you too can later delve into deeper if your client chooses. You'll want to set ground rules and remind your client that emotional expression is encouraged as long as it's not violent to any person or property. If you have clients that struggle with anger and rage, it's safest not to use this or any other type of triggering exercise that could put them or yourself in danger. Number three, extreme self-care. This one is pretty self-explanatory, but it's really important to mention. When the hard times hit, it's really easy for people to put everyone except themselves first or to just completely check out. When things get tough and everything feels hard, good habits and self-care routines are often the first things to go by the wayside. It's so important to check in with your clients to make sure that they're taking care of themselves regularly. I want to add that self-care needs to be defined by what that person specifically finds to be nourishing and restorative to themselves, and not another should to add to their list. It's good to help your clients continue to eat right and move their bodies, but you need to help them figure out what else they can be doing to take care of themselves. Things that feel fun and relaxing that can help lift them up out of their circumstances for even a brief time, no matter how busy they are. This might call for some creativity like bookmarking a bunch of funny video clips to watch with their morning coffee or bringing a coloring page to work to decompress for a few minutes in between projects. Number four, ride the wave. This is a concept from Dialectical Behavior Therapy. Riding the wave refers to the way that difficult emotions come and go in waves. At times, that feeling is really strong like a tidal wave that threatens to pull you under. And then other times, the feeling lessons and it's not so bad. If you learn how to ride the wave, that is, if you learn how to sit through the emotional tidal wave, you'll find that the feeling passes and it won't be so bad. It's learning to trust and experience that it always gets easier to breathe if you stay present and stop fighting the emotion. This prevents the feelings from being pushed down deep inside where they become repressed and stored as those negative tapes we've talked about. This also teaches your clients to act from a place of calmness instead of a place of inner turmoil. For people who have a tendency to act impulsively when emotions are high, they can find themselves in situations that are even worse than where they started. Teaching them to sit mindfully and then react will help them get more in touch with themselves and better handle difficult situations. So how does one learn to ride the wave? The concept may seem hard but the technique itself is simple and easy. You just breathe. For some simple breathing techniques, check out the handout Three Simple Breathing Exercises. Riding the way won't solve your problems or make them go away, but it will allow freedom from suffering by teaching clients to experience their emotions head on and stop resisting what is. So now let's recap. We went over four techniques that you can use to help your clients experience emotional healing. Underlying all of these is the ability to choose. How are your clients are choose to reframe and act on their circumstances? How would they choose to address the person or aspect of themselves they feel in conflict with? How do they choose to take care of themselves? Can they choose to sit through feeling and ride it out until it passes without stuffing it or pushing it away? Recognizing that you have the ability to choose how to respond to any situation is the foundation of all emotional healing because an internal locus of control opens you up to the possibility of using your resources to navigate your way through. If your client has an external locus of control, you can help them by teaching them to adopt a mindset where they're the one in the driver's seat. When the going gets tough, how do you deal with your emotions? Have you ever tried any of the four techniques we've outlined today? Which one would you most like to try? Pick one and share with us in the Facebook group. Thanks for watching, and take care.