Behavior Change
How to track elephantine-sized emotions
Last week, I posted a blog about tracking behavior change. One way in which I get clients to assess progress, notice changes, or pay better attention to their feelings is to get them to notice and track emotions. Emotions can be intense. They can be not-very-intense but-still-stressful because they last over time. Often people minimize the impact and significance of emotions. When clients get better at regulating emotions, they get better at identifying what sets off emotions, identifying the significance of what they feel, figuring out what emotions are telling them, and finding ways to cope ahead, minimize the impact, prevent, or make use of emotions.
For instance:
Notice how big your emotion is (elephantine sized?)
Notice how intense your emotion is (how pink is pink?)
Notice your relationship with your emotion (are you stuck beneath an elephant’s foot?)
Notice if you are avoiding your emotion (are you running away from stampeding elephants?)
Notice how long it takes for the emotion to change or leave (holding on to elephantine problems can create even more problems.)
If the emotion isn’t changing, can you change your relationship to your emotion? (make peace with your cartoon elephants- an open invitation.)
What is your emotion trying to tell you? (believe me, elephants have things to say!)
Posted in Behavior Change, Cartoon elephants, Emotion Regulation | 
Tags: Acceptance, Animals, Cartoon elephants, Change, Emotion, Mindfulness, Understanding emotion | 
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On the existence of cartoon elephants
Last September (2010) and early this year (January, 2011) I posted a blog about my cartoon elephant book project: The emotion phobic user’s guide to handling cartoon elephants. I even completed an interview about it for Psych Central: http://bit.ly/98hCbI
Embarrassingly enough, I got started on the project…and then stopped. Other projects came up, I became distracted with my life and my practice, and…well…you know how the story goes. I am even going to admit here that I spent 4 months not even looking at my elephants. Can you even imagine what happens if you stop looking at your elephants? (And no comments from the peanut gallery…)
Cartoon elephants (emotions!) do, indeed, exist. Sometimes they go missing, sometimes they get confusing and messy, and sometimes they get big and overwhelming.
In the last month, I’ve been doing CPR on my cartoon elephant book project. I’ve gotten about 90% of the rough outline of my project done. One of the things that keeps me going is that I made a commitment to someone to have the rough draft completed by December 6.
Behavior change is hard. One of the things that I ask my group clients to do is track their behaviors. Knowing that they have to make a conscious effort to bring to mind the occurrence of behaviors during the week helps them figure out if behaviors are changing. Planned periodic inquiries about behavior change also helps. In my case, I know that my cartoon elephant mentor will be excited if I meet my deadline. But my mentor will also be challenging me if I don’t!
In your life:
What is the first step towards behavior change?
When will you have made the first step?
What are the consequences to not making it?
What have you tried before that has worked, and that hasn’t worked?
Who will support you in making this step?
How can you track or monitor your progress?
Finding wisdom during emotional chaos
Our emotions get activated despite our best efforts to control them. So how do we know when to trust our “gut”? After all, when we have a “bad feeling” about a situation- and we rely on our feelings to avoid painful or scary scenarios- then how do we know when to approach a situation despite our anxiety about it?
While I am not sure there is a simple answer, here are some factors to help think this through. First of all, consider the importance of your emotion. Be clear about what you actually feel. Try to get a “sense” for the feeling itself. Next, consider the information that your feeling may be giving you about your environment. What is the actual threat? What could or would happen if you acted on the feeling? What (if any) action is your feeling prompting you to take? If you avoid taking action, what might the consequences be?
Consider the extremes. If you never trusted your “gut”- ignored or avoided feelings all the time- you may be vulnerable to getting yourself into bad situations. If you always trusted your gut- you may prematurely make judgments about people or situations that are unfounded or inaccurate. You might come across as overconfident or hyper-vigilant, and find yourself unable to tolerate situations that aren’t actually threatening.
Finding clarity in chaos may take trial and error, the willingness to be corrected, openness, and curiosity. Trusting your gut may also mean speaking up, being “seen”, and risking confrontation and disagreement. Neither one may be entirely confortable! Remember, making changes involves taking risks. Often discomfort and misery drives us to seek alternative solutions by trying out new behaviors.
What is mentalization-based therapy?
Last week I had the opportunity to observe a mentalization-based group therapy. Mentalization was developed by Peter Fonagy and Anthony Bateman and is the only other treatment (besides DBT) that has strong empirical (scientific) support for treating borderline personality disorder.
What exactly is mentalization? This is my own attempt to describe what I know about it so far: We are constantly making interpretations about the intentions of other people, and we tend to be pre-occupied with their intentions towards us. When we assume the intentions of others we think we “know” what other people are wanting, thinking, or feeling. While sometimes this is perceptive and accurate, poor (or inaccurate) mentalizing can often exacerbate conflict or add stress to relationships.
Consider the following scenario: You are late to work. Consider what your reaction might be if your employer insisted that the following scenarios are true:
“You must really hate me. You do hate me, don’t you? Why don’t you tell me why you hate me so much and we can get everything off our chests. Come on. You can be honest. Tell me what your problem is with me.”
“You think you are too good for other people. What makes you think you are better than everyone else? If you think you are better than everyone here, then maybe we should give you extra work so you can keep proving to the rest of us how important you are.”
When other people do not “mentalize” accurately, it can increase defensiveness and emotional arousal. And talk about being misunderstood! When other people insist that their interpretation of your behavior is accurate (when it is not), it makes it more difficult to keep emotions on an even keel and steer clear of more conflict. Can you think of a time in which this has happened to you?
In a mentalization-based group, group members are encouraged to generate many “interpretations” of reported or observed behaviors. Some of these “interpretations” may be accurate and some may not. Some may be entirely out of this world! Attempts at accurate mentalization (“You must have been really taken aback when your boss said those things!”), may increase understanding, lower emotional arousal, and enable a person to use the group for perspective-taking and problem solving. Additional benefits include seeing things from a wide variety of viewpoints (What might have been going on with your boss that day?), considering things that have not been previously considered, increasing compassion when others misinterpret intentions, and staying level-headed when there are strong urges to engage in extreme ways of responding.
Posted in Behavior Change | Tags: Acceptance, Change, dialectics, interpretations, Meaning, Relationship, Stress | No Comments »
Why consider the function of behavior?
People sometimes behave in ways that are not understandable! Extreme and out-of-control behaviors can result in relationship ruptures and endings, strain, awkwardness, discomfort, and avoidance of talking about “what happened.”
The function of a behavior has to do with the purpose that the behavior serves for a person. Often confusing, problematic, and egregious behaviors have some benefit for a person.
Some functions of extreme behaviors may include: Emphasizing a point, communicating the importance of something, making a statement, expressing outrage or protest, being taken seriously, reducing anxiety, feeling reassured or calmed down, feeling cared about or secure about the future, feeling *something*, being independent, having a say in a situation, being included, or letting someone know that something is important or meaningful.
Understanding function often helps people to problem-solve, to communicate more effectively, to be able to validate experience, to let go of situations or relationships that won’t change, and to find compassion for self and others.
Posted in Behavior Change | Tags: Change, Function of behavior, Meaning, Relationship, Stress, Understanding emotion, validation | No Comments »
Keeping relationships you want to keep by addressing shame and building mastery
Shame is an extremely powerful emotion that gets people to avoid, withdraw, shut down, freeze up, and avoid eye contact. People that feel an immense amount of shame often experience themselves as grossly inadequate and avoid relationships at all costs.
Avoiding relationships can lead to several beliefs:
- I am incapable of having relationships
- Something is fundamentally wrong with me (that doesn’t appear to be wrong with anyone else)
- I am not likable
- The positive experiences that others seem to get from relationships isn’t available to me
- I don’t understand what sets me apart from other people
- Maintaining relationships is not possible
- I will never have the types of relationships that I want
One way of treating shame is to avoid avoiding relationships! Some people feel a great deal of shame for things that other people may not think of as shameful. Other people have done things that are very hurtful or harming to relationships and don’t know what to do about it.
Relationship repair work is a tricky business! How do you do it? The benefits of doing good repair work include reducing shame, building a sense of mastery and accomplishment when our human failings get in our way, realizing that we make mistakes, realizing that not everyone will like us, and empowering ourselves to keep trying to initiate and maintain relationships that can be potentially rewarding. Being good at repair work can help us to feel better about ourselves.
This is the first time that I am offering an online training series for people who are struggling with relationship repair. The best thing is that you don’t have to be anywhere near Boston to benefit from it! Just go to my website, click on the online training, and purchase the package. You will get three audio downloads taking you through the steps. Included is an example of relationship repair and some tips for when relationship repair doesn’t work.
Let me know how it goes!
Posted in Behavior Change, Interpersonal Effectiveness | Tags: Emotion, Loss, Relationship, Repair, Stress, Understanding emotion | No Comments »