Chapter 6: The Debrief—Rewind, Reflect, Rewrite and Replay “The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.” — Socrates
It will take time to learn to manage your anxiety well, and lots of practice. While you are developing your own personal 3A Toolkit that helps you to do this, you will still have moments when your anxiety feels too big. Little to no learning can occur at times of high activation or dysregulation, as the lower brain systems (mammal and reptile brain) are essentially in charge and a person has little access to their ‘thinking’ brain. However, a great deal of learning can occur once you have returned to a more calm and regulated state. Once you are calmer, you can debrief the anxiety episode and consider what you would do differently next time. It is really helpful to involve a supportive adult to help you with this also. How long it will take you to return to being calm and alert will vary considerably. Because we know that it is not possible to be connected (relationally) and highly dysregulated at the same time, your ability to socially engage with others lets you know you are likely ready to debrief a situation. This is another reason why it can be really beneficial to have someone help you with this process. In a debrief, work through the awareness, assign a label, and action areas of the 3A Toolkit. Consider what you noticed (Awareness), generate a label (Assign a Label), and determine what you would do differently next time (Action) in terms of the four categories of strategies. As I mentioned already, you always need a helpful thinking and body calming strategy. If your worry still needs additional strategies, then try a relationship or emotion and memory strategy. After this, imagine that you rewind the experience back to when you first noticed being worried. Then go through the Awareness, Assign a Label, and Action phases, but this time with the new ending where you imagine you have successfully shrunk your worry. Really notice how much more regulated you feel when you do this and notice and feel how different this is from when worry takes over. When you activate a memory like this, it is malleable and susceptible to revision, creating the opportunity to modify the memory in a positive way (Tryon & McKay, 2008). This is an incredible opportunity for learning what it will be like to be able to manage your worry well. So, even if you are not able to always shrink your worry as it is happening, you always have the opportunity to do a rewind and debrief later. Try and do a debrief often as this really is an excellent way to improve your ability to manage your worry. You may notice that you often feel a bit activated or worried just by thinking about an experience when you were worried. This is really normal and part of the avoidance that is a huge part of worry. With this in mind, perhaps choose an experience of worry that is mild or not that intense for your first debrief practice. Just by remembering the experience of worry, you will sometimes feel like you are overwhelmed. This is why it works so well to use the debrief to write a new ending and consider a different outcome for the worry and also why it is important to start with a small and manageable experience in the beginning.
52
© 2020, MEG KAPIL, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
