Mindfulness Part II: An exercise in letting go of control to experience peace

This is the second post in a series on Mindfulness. Mindfulness refers to many things but here I am referring to a specific set of skills, called mindfulness skills that have been tested in research trials and shown to improve wellbeing if practised. This post looks at an exercise about letting go of the controlling part of our awareness to access a state of peace. I’ll firstly go over how to identify the controller part in our thinking then discuss the exercise.

What Is The Controller?

The Controller is the set of thoughts that are aimed at making effort and changing things. It can be difficult to identify these thoughts as most people don’t “hear” these types of thoughts so you may need to ask yourself repeatedly: “Am I trying to get somewhere else right now?” or “Do I believe that this moment is not ok?” If the answer is yes, the Controller is probably active.

Thoughts about planning for the future are Controller thoughts. For example: thinking about what you are going to buy for dinner or how you are going to manage an upcoming meeting, or any other aspect of the future means your mind is trying to figure out what you need to do in order to feel ok. Your mind thinks that ‘feeling ok’ is in the future and that you will feel good later on if you are prepared and know what to do. This may be partly true; however, it also means that there is much less ability to enjoy peace in the present moment. You can plan if you want to but if you want to find peace right now, learn to let go of the controller.

Thoughts about the past are also Controller thoughts. For example: thinking about times when things didn’t go well or going over events from the past. This can occur for many reasons but often there is a critical theme in Controller thoughts where our minds repeatedly remind us about our mistakes. Perhaps the control comes from the mind’s desire to learn from these. Who knows? Regardless, these thoughts are distractions from being able to enjoy the peace in the present moment. Sometimes letting go of thoughts about the past can bring up emotions. We can feel fear, frustration or other feelings when we make a decision to let go. However, it’s easier to let go of a thought then feel the emotion than it is to keep ruminating because ruminating will add more and more fuel to the emotion and keep us stuck

Now you know a bit about identifying the controlling aspects of thinking, here are the steps to let go:

Exercise: Letting Go of the Controller

Sit comfortably with your eyes closed. Practice controlled breathing (http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8ABF9C2342A85A0A). When you start to feel relaxed then allow your breathing to go at it’s own pace.

Imagine that you are standing in a large field holding a bunch of balloons. Look around you in the scene and describe what you see. Each time you have a ‘descriptive thought’ like “A line of trees” or “Some low bushes” then imagine putting each thought into a balloon and letting it go.

Now bring your attention inward and describe your emotions, physical sensations, urges and thoughts. Each time you have an ‘internal experience’ like “an urge to scratch my nose” or “a tingling in my knee” or “a thought about the past” then imagine putting each thought into a balloon and letting it go.

Now bring your intention to letting go of all of your internal experiences. You can do this by asking yourself:

“Am I trying to control anything right now?”

“Am I allowing everything to be as it is?”

“Is there any part of me that is making effort?”

It’s normal for more thoughts, urges, sensations, and emotions to arise. Each time they do, place them onto a balloon and let them go. As you do this, you might notice that things become more peaceful. When this occurs, you can investigate and be curious about what it is like when you let go by asking yourself:

“What happens when there is no strategy?”

“What is it like when I allow everything to be as it is?”

You might notice that when you let go of control, when you place each experience onto a balloon and pay it no more attention, that there is a sense of spaciousness that comes into awareness. Allow yourself to feel that openness. There is nothing to understand there – just open to the space that is in that moment.

There is always an opportunity to keep letting go at deeper and deeper levels. Just watch what happens, without any commentary, without trying to figure it out, keep it or learn from it. Each moment you let go of your internal experience is an opportunity to experience stillness. Stay as long as you want.

Where Can I Find Out More About This?

There are lots of great guided meditations on YouTube. The style of meditation is called self-enquiry. I quite like this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQGRSddbU0I&list=PL-CBEJ7_BksVqmxcP0TkxycwwzPFFh99U

A New Series on Mindfulness: the LABL Exercise

I will come back to the series on Anger as I have had some recent requests to do a series on Mindfulness. This post will look at an exercise called the LABL exercise that many people have found useful for dealing with feelings. This is one of my absolute favourite mindfulness exercises.

Why is it useful?
Often when we are feeling bad our minds can start working overtime. Many of us deal with feelings by try to mentally figure out a way to stop feeling so bad. However, research shows that when we are in a negative emotional state that our thoughts become restricted to mostly negative thoughts. So it's like trying to get out of a hole by digging. Thinking can as an attempt to problem solve the situation can create hundreds of "What if...?" thoughts rather than a viable solution. "What if I fail?" "What if this doesn't improve?" "What if they don't like me?" and so on.

Often our emotions are like the heat that heats up our minds and creates a 'cognitive popcorn' effect where we can't stop thinking and feel worse and worse from the stress. The LABL exercise can help get you out of your head by bringing your awareness into your body. I am constantly amazed at the breakthroughs that can occur for people when they train themselves into meeting the feeling in their body rather than analysing it in their heads.

There is a link to download a guided version of this exercise but here are the steps if you want to do it on your own:

1. Label what you are feeling. For example: “This is sadness” or “This is shame”. If you are
feeling several emotions then label the strongest emotion. If you don’t notice any emotion, then look for experiences like numbness, emptiness or neutrality and label it that.

2. Acknowledge the physical sensations. Where do you feel this emotion in your body?
Emotions are usually felt in the area between the throat and the pelvis since there are multiple nerve endings associated with emotions in this area. Sometimes they are in the arms, hands or felt as a pressure around your head. If you notice the emotion in several areas, try to focus just on the area where the sensations are strongest. Can you feel the perimeter of the emotion or the space that it takes up in your body? Can you notice how the physical sensations of the emotion change from moment to moment?

3. Breathe into the emotion and experience it fully. Imagine that your breath moves into
the area where the emotion is. Each time that you breathe in, focus on becoming a little bit more willing to experience the emotion. This step is about working towards 100% willingness to feel the emotion. This can be tough to begin with. It can help to just try to feel a little bit of it (like 5% of it) and work up. Saying things to yourself like: “It’s safe to feel this emotion”, “I am willing to feel this” or “I am in control of how much I want to feel of this” can help.
4. Let go. In this step you can let go of the emotion. Some people like to take some deep
breaths and imagine breathing the emotion out and letting it go a little more each time. This step is to remind us that no emotions are permanent – they are always coming, going and changing.

At the end of the LABL process you might notice that the emotion has changed. It might be less, or it might be more... or it could still be very similar. The point of this exercise is not to get rid of the emotion. The point is to not avoid the emotion. It is normal to want to get rid of painful emotions and most people feel frustrated if the emotion isn’t gone after you let it go. That’s why it can be useful to repeat the LABL steps several times each time that you sit down to do it. Once you let go, go back to the start and label whatever feeling is strongest and start again. This will help you to learn that trying to get rid of emotions is avoiding. The LABL exercise is designed to increase your willingness to experience emotions. This will help you to reduce the avoidance of emotion that tends to keep negative experiences going. 

Here is the link to download a guided mp3 version of this exercise: https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B59Y9tDyah5AaFZLUE94c1R5S0U&usp=sharing. When you click on the LABL exercise you will see a small arrow appear in the bottom right of the screen to download the file. 

Acknowledgement
With gratitude to Belinda Khong for sharing this technique with me with the many people it has helped over the years.

Dealing with Anger, Blame and Resentment

This is the first post in a series about dealing with anger, blame and resentment. The first post will look at how these are maintained via our expectations. The following posts will look at what you can do to reduce these experiences using some new skills.

Firstly, let’s start with a few definitions. Anger is a naturally occurring feeling and is usually triggered when we think we have been injured, mistreated or when we are faced with obstacles that keep us from attaining personal goals. It can be used in healthy ways and unhealthy ways.

1. Anger & Unrealistic Expectations
The previous posts about 'Thought Challenging' examined how the way we feel is a result of our thoughts about a situation and certain ‘thinking traps’ often maintain unhelpful feelings. It might not be clear at first, but there is usually an unrealistic expectation and a ‘should’ thought that underlie any feeling of anger. That is, you are probably feeling that someone or something ‘should’ be a certain way, and that expectation has not been met. Like all unhelpful thoughts, ‘should’ thoughts are often unrealistic. Let’s look at some examples. 

You can learn to manage your anger by challenging the ‘should’ thought and making your

expectations more realistic. For example:

Unrealistic expectation: My daughter SHOULD listen to me and do what I say.

Realistic expectation: Should is irrelevant. Realistically, she is acting the same way as thousands of other teenagers, which is why she thinks it is normal to behave the way she does. My unrealistic expectation will only make her feel misunderstood. Realistically, it will help if I expect that she acts like a teenager. Then I can feel less angry and talk to her calmly to understand where she is at and why she is doing this. Once she feels calm and understood we are more likely to be able to figure out what to do. 

This is obviously easier said than done. The following posts will look at skills to resolve anger, blame and resentment. 

Building Motivation to Shift
Letting go of these is fundamentally about a key choice:

You either get to be right or you get to be happy, but not both. 

For example: if we use the above experience of a parent being angry with a daughter then for as long as the parent demands they are right, the daughter will continue to feel misunderstood, unheard and unsupported. Misery is likely to continue. However, if the parent is willing to let go of the need to be right then the whole situation relaxes. Most fights can be resolved when something shifts to cause both parties to relax and be calm. Curiosity is possible. Compromise is possible. Happiness is more likely. 

Building motivation to let go of anger can be useful. Look at the following consequences of anger to build reasons to change if you are struggling to let go of being right. 

Positive Consequences
Even with seemingly unhelpful behaviours, there is usually a payoff or a positive consequence from acting in that way – otherwise we would do it far less often! However, these payoffs are not always realistic and there may be more effective ways for achieving the end result. Here are some common positive beliefs that people who experience anger and rage have: 

• Rage allows me to tell other people what is annoying me
• Rage protects me from getting hurt
• At least anger allows me to feel something rather than nothing 
• If I was to let go of the anger then I would have to deal with worse emotions (shame, guilt, sadness etc)
• When I rage, people will usually do what I want them to
• If I rage it show others that I care
• It makes me feel in control 

Negative Consequences

Although there are some positive consequences, there are many negative consequences that are
caused by anger. A helpful initial step in learning to reduce rage is to honestly examine the negative consequences:

• People don’t really hear me when I rage – they hear the anger and not the issue o People are afraid of me when I rage
• People see me as mean because I rage
• People don’t trust me as much after I rage
• I hurt people when I rage
• I feel out of control after I come down from rage and I beat myself up for getting angry
• I can’t perform as well when I rage. I don’t think clearly
• There can be very serious, irreversible consequences from raging
• When I rage, people may do what I want but later they are passive aggressive to get me back o When I rage, some people just rage back at me
• My kids are learning violence from watching me
• Some of the people I have offended have backstabbed me or sabotaged me
• As long as I stay angry, I will never deal with the underlying issues and get better
• Getting angry stops me from needing to learn better coping skills
• There are health consequences from getting angry
• I just feel terrible when I rage
• Anger tends to get worse and worse 

What would you gain by stopping yourself next time you get angry? 

Please check in again in a month or so for the next post, which will look at how to reduce anger.

Upcoming Seminar for Therapists in Sydney: PTSD - What does the evidence say?

Just a quick note to any therapists in Sydney who are interested in the evidence base for PTSD:

I will be giving a seminar on Monday 24th February on research between 1980 and 2012 conducted on PTSD treatments. Tickets are $40 and it will be in Glebe starting at 7pm. Information and tickets are available here: http://www.aacbt.org/viewStory/PTSD+Treatment%3A+What+does+the+evidence+say%3F

If you can't access the link then go to http://www.aacbt.org/ and search in their events calendar.

How To Deal With Thoughts That Cause Guilt

This post looks specifically at how to use thought challenging (or cognitive restructuring) to manage thoughts that cause us to feel guilty. If you often feel guilty then the exercise below can help, even if you haven't heard of thought challenging before. If you are interested you can read about the basics of thought challenging in the earlier posts in this blog. In this post I will go over a quick introduction about guilt then look at a written exercise that has been shown to reduce guilt in research trials.

Guilt has many definitions but for the purpose of this exercise I will refer to it as the emotion that comes up when we feel as though we should have done things differently and/or feel as though something is mostly our fault.

Here is the thought challenging exercise for challenging thoughts about fault and responsibility:

Step 1: Write down the thought
Step 2: List all the other factors that contributed to the outcome
Step 3: Estimate how much influence that each factor had
Step 4: Look at what is left to see your own role in the outcome

For example:

Step 1: Write down the thought. One easy way to make sure it is in a format that can be challenged is to finish this sentence: It's all my fault / mostly my fault that ...

Let's say that my thought is: It's my fault that I couldn't make my relationship work with my partner (Ben).   

Step 2: List all the other factors that contributed to the outcome. This includes people, events, institutions and any other circumstances that influenced the outcome.

So for a relationship break up it might be:

• Ben's depression
• Influence of Ben's parents (always critical of me as no one was good enough for him in their eyes)
• Ben's upbringing (especially his experiences at boarding school)
• Ben's sister (she was always cruel to him and he has trouble relating to women)
• Bad economy (and financial stress on us)
• Work stress (due to five people in my department being let go and rest of us picked up the work)
• My parents (if they had been better communicators I would have learned skills to manage my relationship with Ben more easily)
• Ben's drinking
• Ben's friends (none of them look out for him or help him when he is depressed)

Step 3: Estimate how much influence that each factor had. To do this, write down your best guess as a percentage. It can help to ask yourself: if this factor was different then how much more likely would it have been for everything to work out ok. For example: if Ben wasn't depressed then perhaps it would be 20% more likely for me to stay with him. 

• Ben's depression (20%)
• Influence of Ben's parents (15%)
• Ben's upbringing, especially his experiences at boarding school (5%)
• Ben's sister (15%)
• Bad economy and financial stress on us (5%)
• Work stress (5%)
• My parents (35%)
• Ben's drinking (25%)
• Ben's friends (10%)

Step 4: Look at what is left to see your own role in the outcome. To do this, you subtract each percentage from 100%. 

So you start with feeling 100% responsible for the outcome and you...

- 20% (for Ben's depression)

- 15% (for Ben's parents)

- 5% (for Ben's upbringing)

... and so on. By the time I get up to my parents I am already at 100%. What does this mean? It means that there are a lot of factors that have played a role, some of them much larger than my own. By the end of doing this hopefully you can see that your role in this may be much, much less than you feel. 

Guilt is caused by many things, but perhaps the largest contributor may be that guilt is a survival mechanism that helps us avoid punishment from our parents. As children we are taught to feel guilty and to take responsibility for our actions. We are taught that if we do something that causes our parents to be upset, we should feel very bad. In the parents' minds - they are teaching an important lesson. In the child's mind - we feel guilty and think about how we might be able to avoid upsetting our parents in the future. In order to believe that we can do something to avoid the situation in the future, we must view the event as somehow under our control or that we were responsible. The other option would be to feel that the outcome was not under our control. Importantly, if we believe we have no control, there would be nothing that we could do to prevent our parents from getting mad at us again. It is a survival mechanism to feel as though we are in control, rather than feeling hopeless and as a consequence, depressed. However, this means we must also feel guilty. 

So guilt is a learned reaction where we typically take on much more responsibility for things than we need to. The payoff is feeling that we are in control bad outcomes by noticing all the things we did to create it. The cost is that the guilt can become crippling. 

This exercise can be done repeatedly for different thoughts about responsibility and guilt in order to see that we don't need to feel guilty all the time and that it is ok to forgive ourselves. 

How To Deal With Thoughts That Cause Anxiety and Worry

This post looks at how to challenge unhelpful thoughts that cause anxiety and worry. This post is part of a series about thought challenging so please check the previous posts if this one isn’t making sense. I’ll start by looking at how to identify the thinking that causes anxiety and then look at how to challenge those thoughts.

The thinking that typically drives anxiety is some type of prediction about the future. Anxiety is actually caused by dozens of factors, but for the sake of understanding, this post just looks at how to deal with anxiety caused by worrying predictions about the future.

Step 1 is to write down your worrying thoughts and use the downward arrow technique to identify your core fear. Instructions for using the downward arrow technique are listed in a previous post here. This exercise takes about 1-5 minutes.

Step 2 is to take the core fear and write down everything that would have to occur in order for the core fear to actually happen. You can use the steps from the downward arrow technique and then add others that are logical.

For example: Let’s say that someone’s initial worries are that their relationship with their husband is going badly. So they do the downward arrow technique and they recognise that the core fear is of being alone for the rest of their lives. In order for that to occur the following things would need to happen.

John and I can’t work through our issues together by talking.

John refuses to attend couples therapy to address the issues.

John stops talking to his friends/family and has no feedback from any other person about how to address the issues.

John becomes 100% unwilling to change.

We get a divorce.

I am unable to recover from the impact of the divorce.

No men show any interest in me for the rest of my life.

I refuse to go out or put myself in situations where I might be attracted/interested in another person.

I completely deny any feelings of interest in other men for the rest of my life and refuse to interact with men who are interested in me.

I will be alone for the rest of my life.

Step 3 is to write down the chance that each one would occur. Write this down as 1 chance in 2,3,4,5….10,000 etc so it looks like this:

John and I can’t work through our issues together by talking. (1 in 5)

John refuses to attend couples therapy to address the issues. (1 in 2)

John stops talking to his friends/family and has no feedback from any other person about how to address the issues. (1 in 20)

John becomes 100% unwilling to change. (1 in 20)

We get a divorce. (1 in 1)

I am unable to recover from the impact of the divorce. (1 in 1000)

No men show any interest in me for the rest of my life. (1 in 50)

I refuse to go out or put myself in situations where I might be attracted/interested in another person. (1 in 1000)

I completely deny any feelings of interest in other men for the rest of my life and refuse to interact with men who are interested in me. (1 in 100)

I will be alone for the rest of my life. (1 in 1)

Step 4 is to multiply all of these estimates together. This allows you to estimate how likely the core fear actually is.  1 in 2 becomes 1/2; 1 in 3 becomes 1/3 and so on.

From the above example: 1/5 x ½ x 1/20 x 1/20 x 1/1 x 1/1000 x 1/50 x 1/1000 x 1/100 x 1/1. A quick math refresher from school: multiply the numbers on the bottom on a calculator. Then the final probability of the core fear is 1 chance in that number.

1/20,000,000,000,000 or 1 chance in 20 trillion.

Step 5 is to understand how likely that is to occur by going to a page that explains the odds here. You can see from that page that this person has a higher chance of dying from spontaneous ignition of her nightwear than she does of remaining alone for the rest of her life.

Hopefully she feels a bit better now.

Our brains are built to detect threat. Evolutionary theory predicts that if we didn’t have a brain that detected threats quickly then our genes would be unlikely to survive. However, surviving in a modern world where the threats are not usually fatal means understanding that your brain will overestimate how likely a threat is. If you are an anxious person you come from a good stock of ancestors who may have been the first to detect threats and run or fight. Their anxiety saved them. In order to not feel anxious yourself you can use self-talk to remind yourself that the actual risk of something happening is nowhere near as imminent as your brain is telling you.  

Thought Challenging 2

This is the second post in a series that I am writing on a skill called thought challenging. This post looks at the foundational skills for challenging negative thoughts. The two approaches for this are to challenge the accuracy and unhelpfulness of a thought. Remember, it is essential to write down your challenges otherwise this skill won’t work well.

Recognising thoughts

The first step is to identify the thought that is causing your negative mood. Many people are not aware of their thinking but instead tend to notice their symptoms, like anxiety, shame or behaviours like shutting down or feeling paralyzed. In these cases try to guess what you might be thinking. It might help to look at the post on Common Thinking Traps (which is two below this one) in order to understand what kinds of thoughts to look for.

Challenging Negative Thoughts

Once you have identified your negative thought (or thoughts) the next step is to challenge that thought by writing down the reasons why the thought is not accurate and why it is unhelpful.

Why is this thought inaccurate?

Write down all the reasons why the thought is not 100% true. No thought is ever 100% true although it is very common for it to feel that way. Look for the reasons why the thought isn’t true in all situations, all the time, with everyone.

For example, let’s say you were challenging the thought: “I am a failure because my kids hate me”. Here is a list of reasons why the thought isn’t 100% true in all situations, all the time, with everyone. 

1. Sometimes my son can be quite caring towards me, but only when others aren’t around.
2. Just because they don’t like me a lot of the time, doesn’t mean that I am a failure. Most parents are hated by their children when they go through adolescence – it doesn’t mean that they are all failures.
3. There are a few areas in my life where I am not a failure. I do ok at my job, my husband is happy and I still have relationships with some friends that are quite good.
4. My kids don’t actually hate me all the time. Last week they seemed quite happy with me for taking them out for the day.

The idea is to keep this list handy and to keep adding to it regularly. Part of the reason why negative thoughts feel so true is that there is so much evidence for the thought. If we have a thought like the one above then we are more likely to look for evidence that confirms our belief.

Think of this like a courtroom. The negative belief has a star legal team and mountains of evidence and you are on the other side with just a few reasons why the thought isn’t true. In order to feel better you will need to collect the facts in order to build evidence against the negative belief. The more evidence you have the more likely you are to win the case against your negative belief.

Why is this thought unhelpful?

It’s usually easier to start by writing out the reasons why the thought is unhelpful. Sometimes it’s just too difficult to see how the thought is inaccurate. In these cases write out your answers to the following: 

1. How do you feel when you believe this thought?
2. How do you behave when you believe this thought?
3. How do you treat yourself unkindly when you believe this thought either in your head or physically?
4. How do you treat others unkindly when you believe this thought?
5. When you believe this thought, does it cause avoidance that will lead to long-term problems?

Troubleshooting

I can’t stress how important it is to WRITE DOWN YOUR THOUGHT CHALLENGING. This is the number one reason why I see people get stuck and unable to progress in treatment. Part of the reason why I think they get stuck is that they try to challenge the thought but their negative thinking has 10,000 reasons why the belief is true. The thought challenging may not work because each time they try to think of one reason why they thought isn’t true, their mind comes up with 20 reasons why it is true.

Writing down your challenging will slow the process down. It will help you to see that there are several valid reasons on a page that dispute the belief. It also let’s you come back to the page and add to it so that you have a solid argument against the thought instead of just a few pieces of one-off evidence.

So after reading this post write down these two questions somewhere:

Why is this thought inaccurate?

Why is this thought unhelpful?

When your mood becomes more negative try to recognize the thought by guessing what you may have believed about yourself or your situation at the time. Write down the thought then write out your challenges to it. Write on paper, in your phone, a diary, on your computer – anywhere that’s convenient. That’s the process.

Next post I will write about some more advanced techniques for challenging negative thinking.