statement to yourself like “I’m trying” and that is as kind as you can be to yourself. Start wherever you can and continue to work on how you relate to yourself. You can even think about how you treat someone you really care about, especially someone who is struggling, write down how you would help them and take care of them. Then read out what you have written and imagine if you could offer this same kindness to yourself. Over time, you will be able to practice using the 3A Toolkit approach to managing your worry and will get better at it the more you practice. It is not always easy to use the helpful thinking, body calming, and relationship strategies while you are worried because you have ‘flipped your lid’ and are not able to access your thinking brain at this time. For this reason, a lot of the learning for managing worry is done later when you are once again regulated or calm. I will teach you more about this in the next chapter and you will learn a specific way of rewinding your experience and replaying it with a better ending.
CALM PLACE In addition to self-compassion, part of developing a healthy relationship with yourself includes feeling calm and safe. Worry and anxiety leave you feeling unsafe. A practice that can help develop the ability to feel more calm with your own experience is to think about a time and a place when you felt really calm, comfortable, and safe. This might be a place you visited like a beach, or another natural setting, or perhaps your own home. As you think about this place, close your eyes and consider in detail what you see. If you are not comfortable closing your eyes, let your gaze softly settle just in front of you. Imagine looking around and taking in all the details. Then turn your attention to what you can hear, noticing all the sounds that are unique to this place. Now consider what you can smell, turning your attention to all the smells that your notice when you are in this place. What about what you can taste, if that is something that you notice when you think of this place. Finally, consider what you feel and what you notice in your body as you revisit this place in your mind. Bring your full attention to where you notice the calm, comfortable, safe, and pleasant sensations in your body. When you are ready, open your eyes and return to this time and place and remember that you can return to your calm place whenever you like. You may want to practice more of this kind of visualization where you go to a positive experience and recall it using all of the sensory information available. You may also want to draw a picture of your calm place to help you recall the details.
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