11 minute read
CHAPTER 6: Relationship Strategies
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.
Advertisement
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.
CHAPTER 7 The Debrief
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 more calm, 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, when you can socially engage with others, this lets you know you are likely ready to debrief a situation. This is another reason why it can be really helpful to have someone help you with this process.
In a debrief, work through the awareness, assessment, and action areas of the 3A Toolkit. Consider what you noticed (Awareness), generate a label (Assessment) and 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 & memory strategy. After this, imagine that you rewind the experience back to when you first noticed being worried. Then go through the Awareness, Assessment, 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 a rewrite. 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 manage and 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.
It is important to consider that building healthy habits to manage stress and anxiety will take time. Here are some things to think about when getting ready to do a debrief:
• Change takes time, be patient. • Be curious and compassionate about your experience • Growth and change is supported by cycles of relational reflection and feedback.
How to create healthier habits? REWIND, REFLECT, REWRITE, REPLAY, REWIND
• When you are calm and safe, rewind to when it all started. • Approach with curiosity, like a scientist or a detective looking for clues. • Mindful and non-judgmental awareness
REFLECT (using the 3A Toolkit)
Awareness
AWARENESS CATEGORY IMPORTANT REFLECTIVE QUESTIONS
Body Calming
What do I notice about my body?
Thinking
Is it helpful?
Relationships
Interpersonal (Others)
Intrapersonal (Self)
Is this relationship supportive? How can I strengthen existing relationships and/or develop new relationships that are supportive? How are my boundaries?
How am I relating to myself? How can I be more supportive and compassionate to myself?
Assign a Label
What feeling label will you use to capture your experience (Name It To Tame It)?
Action
Using your 3A Toolkit, decide what strategies would work better next time to shrink your worry.
REWRITE (Using the 3A Toolkit)
Now put all the pieces together and write a new version of the experience or event but this time with you putting the 3A Toolkit into practice and imagining you are able to shrink your anxiety.
REPLAY
Rewind what happened to the beginning, but this time replay it and imagine or visualize the new ending.
Let’s try out the debrief using the prompts above. Choose a recent experience when you felt anxious and consider the following:
AWARENESS ASSIGN A LABEL ACTION
Thinking
• “This is going to be a disaster” • Your thoughts are jumbled and not helpful • Notice these thoughts are not helpful
Body Activation
• Heart is racing, trouble catching your breath • Assess level of activation
Label It
“That’s just my anxiety”
Helpful Thinking
• Messages of safety e.g. “This feeling will pass”, “I am safe”, “there are no tigers here” • Helpful thinking with a focus on: Present moment Capability What you can influence e.g. “I prepared well for the presentation and will do the best I can”
RELATIONSHIPS
• Intrapersonal, treating yourself with judgement and criticism e.g. “I’m such an idiot, what is wrong with me”
• Interpersonal, e.g. Consider who is able to support you
Body Calming
For low to medium level of activation try using your breath to lengthen your exhale and slow your breathing down. For higher levels of activation, use slow movement such as walking
Relationships
Treat yourself with compassion, kindness and support “I am doing my best”
Once you have figured out what is important in the Awareness, Assessment, and Action categories for the debrief, rewind the anxious experience in your mind and run through it again as if it was a movie. This time, use the new learning from your debrief to visualize a different way of responding to your anxiety that will generate a new outcome. Practice rewinding and replaying this experience with the new learning from your 3A Toolkit several times until it feels comfortable. You can use this 3A Toolkit approach for the debrief every time you feel like you felt more anxious than you wanted to, or want to respond to stress differently. There is a lot of potential for new learning in regards to reflecting on your experience in this way and essentially writing a new ending.
Some people find it helpful to draw what happened. If this is you, I have included a template for drawing a comic strip version of a debrief followed by an example of what this looks like when it is complete.
3A TOOLKIT COMIC DEBRIEF
I know my____________________________________ is acting up when:
AWARENESS How do I know worry?Is too big?
ASSIGN A LABEL What am I feeling?
Then I said, “That’s just my___________________________________”
ACTION How do I shrink the feeling?
I know I can shrink my _______________________________ by :
HELPFUL THINKING BODY CALMING
3A TOOLKIT COMIC DEBRIEF
I know my worry is acting up when:
AWARENESS How do I know worry?Is too big?
I keep thinking something terrible will happen during my presentation and I will make a fool of myself. I feel nauseous and like my stomach is in knots. My heart is pounding and my hands are sweaty.
ASSIGN A LABEL What am I feeling?
Then I said, “That’s just my worry.”
I feel worried (Name It to Tame It)
I know I can shrink my worry by :
ACTION How do I shrink the feeling? HELPFUL THINKING BODY CALMING
“I am safe” “My worry is making up stories again”
“I have practiced a lot and know the presentation material really well” Deep breaths
“I will do my best” “People want me to do well” “I will survive even if I make a mistake Butterfl y hug
CHAPTER 8 From Avoidance to Approach
AVOIDANCE
A big component of anxiety is avoidance. It makes sense that you would want to avoid something that feels terrible, like anxiety does. Avoiding situations where you tend to be highly anxious, leaves you feeling like your world is getting smaller, but it does lead to a short term relief. The big challenge with avoidance over time though, is that you end up making the anxiety stronger. In a way, it is like you confirmed the theory the anxiety had about something being dangerous by avoiding it. For example, imagine that you are anxious about public speaking so you avoid all public speaking. You feel better in the short term as you don’t have to face an uncomfortable and challenging situation, but you strengthen your anxiety over time. It is almost as if your anxiety had a theory that public speaking is scary and dangerous and you will be unsafe if you do it. By avoiding public speaking, you told your anxiety, “see, it was really scary and I am only safe if I avoid this”. This in turn makes your anxiety stronger for next time.
APPROACH
The antidote is to approach the situations that tend to elicit an anxious response. So, continuing with the public speaking example, you will need to practice public speaking. The key to being able to do this is to start with a situation that is only mildly uncomfortable and work your way up to bigger challenges. You can only do this if you have strategies to manage and shrink your anxious response. This is why we are only talking about avoidance, approach, and challenges at the end of the workbook. A couple of things will really help you be able to engage in approach behaviour. You will need to be able to build a challenge ladder and imagine future success.
CHALLENGE LADDERS
Building a challenge ladder is a kind of exposure to challenging situations. Essentially, you choose a situation that is only mildly anxiety inducing to start with and build up to a challenge that is more difficult over time. The main point here is to move from avoidance of all situations that tend to fuel your anxiety to being able to approach them as this is an essential part of being able to manage your anxiety.
On the next page, I will show you an example of what a completed challenge ladder might look like for the person who struggles with public speaking. I will also include a blank ladder so you can fill in your own. You won’t necessarily climb up the ladder in a linear manner, there will likely be some up and down. That is normal, just keep considering what is your next challenge that will keep you moving up the ladder. Also remember, that your 3A Toolkit will help you manage your anxious response so you can keep moving up the ladder.
