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It’s my belief that a flexible mind helps us to deal with chaos, loss, big life changes, small frustrations, and all that life throws our way.
A flexible mind leads to more peace. You’re not as stuck in your ways, and can adapt to change. You don’t always think you’re right but are curious about other people. You can take on new challenges with a smile. I don’t always have such a flexible mind, to be honest. I’m working on it. When I’m not flexible, I can feel it: my mind starts to feel rigid, I feel frustration, irritation, anger, disappointment. There’s a feeling of not wanting things to be the way they are, feeling of being wronged, attacked. It’s the result of being caught up in whatever story you’re telling yourself. So here’s what I’ve been working on, to develop a more flexible mind:
Not knowing. A flexible mind is one that doesn’t really know what should happen, and is not even sure what will unfold in this next moment. It is curious, like a baby exploring the world afresh. When we sit in meditation, or take each moment as it comes, we allow ourselves to not know, and to be interested in whatever arises. That’s what I’m working with, imperfectly and forgetfully, and I find it helpful.
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Author Shannon Zastrow
Why do I keep feeling this way? Why can’t I get over it already? Why can’t I make the changes stick? I’m worried that I’ll start using ... again. If you’ve ever had these thoughts flash across your mind, then you’re familiar with the struggle to sustain positive behavioral change through addiction recovery. You may believe that you need more willpower or personal strength in order to stay clean and sober. But what if the problem isn’t your personal determination at all? What if your prior efforts to heal didn’t work because you only learned a handful of coping skills for addiction when what you really needed was therapy to address the underlying issues driving your behavior? This article will clarify the difference between therapy and coping skills, discuss their roles in traditional addiction recovery programs, and explore how a more integrative approach can promote lasting recovery. What are Coping Skills for Addiction? Coping skills for addiction are the techniques we use to handle life’s challenges and navigate difficult situations. Though the term tends to have a negative connotation, the reality is that coping skills - or broadly speaking, behavior modification skills - are a necessary part of life. For example, if you’re trying to stop drinking, it makes sense to avoid your favorite pub by taking a different route home from work! This is a positive coping strategy. There are many good mental health and behavioral change strategies, including:
For example, people often employ negative coping skills in times of extreme stress. They may use drugs and alcohol, or self-harm, or work to exhaustion. These negative coping skills represent attempts to manage pain without addressing the real root cause of the suffering. What is Addiction Therapy? Addiction therapy involves sessions with a trained therapist who treats mental and emotional health issues. There are many different therapeutic treatment modalities, (approaches) and no one modality resolves every addiction issue. Different modalities work best for different issues, be they physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual. There’s no one magic bullet approach that fixes everything; on the contrary, the most effective treatment integrates several approaches in a holistic, personalized manner. 12-Step Programs and Approach to Recovery At present, most addiction rehab programs employ a 12 Steps approach. However, since therapy is not part of the 12 Steps tradition, many people don’t receive the individualized treatment they need for addiction recovery. To be sure, Alcoholics Anonymous and other 12 Step groups have created a culture of steps, rituals, slogans, meetings, and sponsorship that do help some people to replace their dysfunctional habits with positive ones. Many people have attained sobriety and sanity this way. Those who can make it work have become beacons of light for their peers. However, many other people struggle with this approach. They go to 12 Step programs because they are accessible, familiar, and popular. Yet many report that they don’t feel heard and that the moralizing lectures and repetitive meetings aren’t helpful. Addiction Therapy: The Missing Piece in Residential Rehab The 12 Steps were developed as a grassroots program, and in this capacity they’ve helped millions of people find community and sobriety. However, 12 Step programs were never intended to be an alternative to addiction therapy. As such, the amount of counseling that participants receive in 12 Step-based residential rehab varies tremendously. While some 12 Step-based rehab centers do provide significant time in therapy, many others do not. Instead, they rely on daily 12 Step meetings led by laypeople. For some, this is sufficient to effect change. Yet others are left feeling as though they’ve failed because they weren’t able to “work the program.” But what if the real problem was that the program didn’t provide support for their mental health issues? Even the 12 Step programs that do offer a professional addiction counseling tend to rely on behavior modification and coping skills alone. However, this is an incomplete approach because it doesn’t address the core mental and emotional issues present. Dual Diagnosis and Addiction Research shows that most people who struggle with addiction are also dealing with a mental health condition, such as depression, anxiety, or post-traumatic stress disorder. The technical term for this is dual diagnosis. According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), “Among the 20.2 million adults in the US who experienced a substance use disorder, 50.5%—10.2 million adults—had a co-occurring mental illness.” Proper treatment for mental illness involves professional therapy, not just coping skills. At the end of the day, the question is, Do you want to cope with your issues or heal them? Combining Coping Skills for Addiction and Therapy Dual diagnosis treatment isn’t about choosing between coping skills and therapy. Rather, it’s about combining the strengths of addiction coping skills and therapy to promote recovery. It’s about using a holistic model of healing, one that integrates all four levels of self:
Emotional wounds are like physical ones in that if you open up a wound, it is important to know how to close it back up properly! Trained therapists can help individuals to close those inner wounds with love, compassion, and expertise. In the process, people tap into the power within them and redirect it for good. They learn to stop abusing themselves and begin to make self-honoring choices. They start to counsel themselves and work through the issues that arise when they return to their normal lives. “Simply put, you believe that things or people make you unhappy, but this is not accurate. You make yourself unhappy.”
Wayne Dyer “Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking.” Marcus Aurelius It is usually pretty easy to become a happier person. It is also quite easy to rob yourself of your own happiness. To make yourself more miserable and add a big bowl of suffering to your day. It is common thing, people do it every day all over the world. So this week I’d like to combine these two things. I want to share 7 happiness stealing habits that I have had quite a bit of trouble with in my own daily life (and I know from the emails I get that many of you do too). But I’d also like to add what you can do instead if you find yourself being stuck in one of these destructive habits. Click here to cont. This is part three in our series exploring the science behind our discomfort with change. Read part one, about the science of uncertainty, and part two, which explores how the fear of loss holds us back.
“Lizards don’t learn very much,” writes neuroscientist Marc Lewis in his book, “The Biology of Desire.” “Their repertoire of skills is innate.” By contrast, mammals have brains that “are designed for learning — they are designed to change — in sync with their environments.” We humans have evolved to adapt to cold weather, to fashion new tools, to adventure to new lands. So why is change so hard for us, when we are, apparently, so used to it? Even as we are creatures who learn, we are also creatures of habit. The American philosopher and psychologist William James described it aptly in the 19th century: “Any sequence of mental action which has been frequently repeated tends to perpetuate itself, so that we find ourselves automatically prompted to think, feel, or do what we have been before accustomed to think, feel, or do, under like circumstances.” Understanding how we form habits and why it’s so difficult to break them can be the key to making a change just a little bit easier — because while habits are incredibly helpful to our daily lives, they also make us resist doing things in new ways. It’s hard to break away from the status quoLearning a new environment, or a new way of being, is generally more taxing than sticking to the status quo. Michael Shermer, the founding publisher of Skepticmagazine and a columnist for Scientific American, told me that “it’s a heavier cognitive load to learn something new, to explore new environments” because it requires the brain to make new neural connections. Learning engages an area of the brain Lewis has written is “the seat of appraisal, judgment, and consciousness” — the prefrontal cortex. Only after a great deal of practice does a new skill become a habit, at which point it demands less analysis and attention. Lewis explains that “it becomes something you automatically spin off from your striatum” — a relatively primitive part of the brain — “with very little prefrontal involvement.” The characteristics of habit — that it is both hard won and hard to change — help us understand why, for example, it’s difficult to start driving a stick shift after years of driving cars with automatic transmission. And these same characteristics also help explain why we get stuck in more complex situations that we know are not good for us. “One of the best examples of that are abusive or codependent relationships,” Lewis said. “Why can’t we walk away from them? Because they’re deeply habitual. The synaptic patterns have been deeply carved, shall we say, by a lot of emotion and repetition.” Individual temperaments and habits of thoughtHow we approach change can also vary based on a host of other factors that may be reinforced by habits of thinking, such as our past experiences, our tendency toward anxiety or depression, our general approach to novelty and risk-taking (what scares one person can thrill someone else), and our tendency toward what therapists call “rigid” thinking about how the world “should” work. Kimberly Williams, a clinical psychologist who works with children on the autism spectrum, gifted children, and children with learning disabilities, told me some people appear to be wired to struggle with change. “Some people are just quite flexible and fluid in their thinking. A lot of the patients I get are rigid thinkers,” she says. “In order for them to change” — it could be as simple as transitioning from a video game to the bath — “they need a lot of cajoling and preparation and behavior management.” On the other side of things are people who are drawn by temperament to novelty and the thrill of the new. “I think there is a subset of intensely dopamine-dominant people for whom actually change is good because it’s tied into their dopamine reward system,” said Amy Banks, a psychiatrist and director of advanced training at the Jean Baker Miller Training Institute at Wellesley College. These people might once have been our earliest explorers, helping humanity by discovering new lands while risking disease, starvation, and conflict in the process. In the modern context, such people experience excitement, rather than fear, upon landing in a foreign place, surrounded by strangers. Banks described the thrill of the new as offering a hit of euphoria for such adventure-seekers. The power of context in our willingness to changeBanks, who wrote a book called “Wired to Connect,” told me that, depending on one’s temperament and past experiences, (among other factors), change can trigger a fight-or-flight response and throw our higher-order thinking processes for a loop — and for good reasons, evolutionarily speaking. “Our fear centers are attached to things like surprise and novelty, and in a primitive world, all of those things are associated with potential danger, literally,” she told me. “If it’s a new situation, we’re counting on that cognitive [process] to help us think through why we’re going to be OK. But if we’ve not been there before, we don’t have that.” Even the anxiety that comes with change can itself become a habit. Of course, the context of change matters a great deal. Even if it’s ultimately for the good, it matters whether it’s a change we’ve chosen, or one that’s been foisted upon us. And it matters whether we’re taking a risk in an arena we consider ourselves to be strong in. Past experiences and how we process them can eventually turn into habits — perhaps because we avoid things that scare us, taking a catastrophic view when things don’t turn out as we hoped, or perhaps because we embrace the new, and come to think of ourselves as resilient. Someone who ended a bad relationship and landed on her feet, helped along by the support of family and friends, may hesitate less about cutting her losses the next time. “People are actually very complex” in how they approach change, says psychologist Harriet Lerner. “I would resist change in a car, or learning something technological, but I am very adventuresome in my work as a psychologist and I’m very adventuresome and brave about opening up difficult conversations with the people who are close to me,” she said. Another complexity of change is how it impacts our social lives, and whether we have the help of those we love when we’re initiating that divorce, move, adoption, or whatever it is. I’ll tackle that theme in my next post — the last in this series about the science of change. Libby Copeland is a journalist in New York who has written for Slate, The New Republic, The Washington Post, New York magazine, Smithsonian Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, Glamour and more. Previously she was a staff reporter and editor for The Washington Post for over a decade.  According to a recent study, training teens in a "growth mindset" can reduce their stress and improve their grades.
The hallways of high school often feel like battlegrounds—with potential social stressors lurking around every corner. When teens get ditched by their best friends or teased for their looks, the sharp pain of exclusion feels like it will last forever. But what if we could help teens take a different perspective? In a recent study, psychologists at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Rochester set out to see if a small shift in mindset could reduce teenagers’ social stress. And they found that with a simple, half-hour training, they could help teens cope better, keep their bodies calmer, and even do better in school. Click here to cont. Pay attention to what comes out of your mouth. The language you use affects how you experience your world, and how others experience you. Inevitably, things get "lost in translation."
If you're familiar with cognitive distortion or cognitive bias, these psychology terms teach us that there are subtle ways that our mind can convince us of something that isn't really true. These inaccurate thoughts are usually used to reinforce negative thinking or emotions, thus holding us back. We all do this, both consciously and unconsciously, and how we do it provides pointers to our underlying beliefs about ourselves, our peers, partners and colleagues, and the immediate world around us. This could spell trouble. Which of these do you do? Check the areas below and be courageous enough to ask a trusted peer for perspective. Is it a problem? Top 10 Cognitive Distortions Click here to cont.  Ever notice how frequently the word “addict” is used? Just do a Google News search on the word and you’ll be shocked just how often it’s used in a headline. Articles are plastered with mentions of drug addicts, sex addicts, gambling addicts, food addicts, shopping addicts, work addicts and internet addicts. “These people” are painted as out-of-control and often menaces to society who need to be stopped, jailed, medicated or otherwise cut off.
But what if those diseased people weren’t sick at all? What if you suddenly realized you were one of them? Well, that’s what happened to me. In preparation for this podcast, I realized I’m an addict. I’m an addict who comes from other addicts, who has passed it onto my kids, too. I’m constantly looking for a way to not be with myself, a way to avoid the pain I have of not having meaningful bonds. In this chat with physician and best-selling author, Gabor Maté, we talk about the shocking truth about what causes addiction and the things we can do to address the problem. What’s cool about Gabor is that he avoids quick-fix thinking when he tackles things like addiction, ADHD, sickness and the human spirit overall. Rather, he shines lights on the often uncomfortable truths that live at the root of these things. Click here to cont. Addiction, whether to substances or behaviours, can wreak havoc on people's lives. But the addicted mind is complex, and we know from history that there's no easy fix. Now, one physician is attempting to heal the 'hungry ghost' of addiction by looking at addicts' childhood environment. Lynne Malcolm and Olivia Willis report.
Click here to cont. Change is hard. We take it for granted that this is true, but we don’t always fully understand why it’s the case. The Unstuck team asked reporter Libby Copeland to investigate the science behind why we resist change. This is part one in a four-part series in which she shares what she learned.
* * * So many of us struggle to change careers, to leave a bad relationship, to go back to school. In my social circle, I can think of just two friends who are notably good at change; the rest (myself included) tend to freeze up when we consider breaking with the past in a significant way. Neuroscientist Dean Burnett’s new book, “Idiot Brain,” addresses the ways our brains trip us up. I asked him why humans might be wired to resist making changes even when we say we want them. “In an evolutionary sense, the brain doesn’t like uncertainty. Anything uncertain is potentially a threat,” Burnett says. In talking to experts in areas including psychology, neuroscience, and behavioral economics, I found four distinct categories that tend to hold us back from making changes. I’ll cover each in a separate post, starting with the prospect of uncertainty: why we appear wired to pay a lot of attention to it — and sometimes to dread it. Tap here to con't One of the most common mistakes is focusing on whether they are strong enough to change, rather than on specific methods of coping. “It’s like trying to ride a bike. You make mistakes and learn, and you don’t give up if you don’t immediately find your balance. If the bicycle is missing a wheel or is otherwise broken, then it requires fixing - simply willing it to work is not going to help you ride” - Alan Marlatt.
You can use this process as your OWN recovery…..as you are working toward recovering a healthy relationship with your loved one and a happier and healthier life for yourself. You can use the Stages of Change to appreciate how complicated change is for your loved one and maybe it can give you a better understanding of where your loved one is in the change process. Let’s go back to the analogy of learning riding a bike. Did you ride in a perfectly straight, steady line the first time you rode a bicycle?....or were you wobbly at first? Did you ride without EVER falling? Or did it take you a white to learn how much of your attention was really required to keep that bike straight and steady? Were you able to somehow see each and every hole on the path and skillfully maneuver around them from the very first time you started riding? Or did it take you a while to learn which of the paths in your neighborhood had potholes? So, ask yourself: Is it reasonable to expect your Loved One to quit using one day and become perfectly healthy and happy overnight? The Stages of Change apply to you as well. Is it reasonable to expect that you will read “Beyond Addiction" and attend these meetings and find that you begin enjoying a perfectly balanced life, immediately? Is it reasonable to expect that you will begin having "perfect conversations" with your Loved One, immediately? Is it reasonable to expect to find the definitive response to your Loved One’s using behavior that really gets his attention and makes him realize that he needs to change? Or is it more likely that you won't master these things the first time you try .... That you also will go through a period of learning, by trial and error, what works well and what doesn't work? Understanding Stages of Change can help us manage our expectations which should lead to less volatile emotions. Somehow when we're prepared for the possibility of something happening, we're not quite so caught by surprise...we can keep a cooler head and be in a better position to act in a helpful manner. Recognize that if YOU want to feel differently (and we are here for YOU, not your Loved One), if you want things to be different, YOU will have to change some things in your life. BUT....with persistent attention and effort, things will get better. No one here will tell you that there is anything easy about recovery, but they will tell you that it's "worth it"! Source: SMART Recovery |
AuthorTimothy Harrington is passionate about helping family members of the addicted loved one awaken to their own power and purpose. Archives
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