Whew! Perhaps I should begin by saying that this is not a post I thought I would be in a place to write in the midst of a global pandemic, economic crisis, landmark racial justice movement, and an election year. Are you feeling burnout? Trust me, you aren’t alone.
I also want to credit at the onset of this post, a researcher I really admire, Dr. Emily Nagoski. Her recent book, Burnout, inspired me to talk a little about what I’m seeing in my practice with respect to burnout and ways of coping. I cannot recommend her work highly enough – and if you’re a person with not much downtime, the Audible version is great. Burnout. The easiest way to explain it might be on an experiential level… what does burnout feel like? Burnout feels like apathy. It feels detached, short-fused. It feels like only the things that absolutely have to be dealt with are necessary… Things that are done for enjoyment fall to the wayside. Burnout is survival mode. Burnout is drinking too much, or smoking too much, or scrolling too much. It’s about distracting in your free time – as much and as often as possible – from the thing that’s draining you. When I ask my clients who seem ‘burned out’ what’s draining them, they usually identify the culprit right away. For many, the source is a stressful job; for others, it’s caretaking, either for young children or aging relatives. In any case, clients seem to know intuitively where the external trigger is, which is a great first step. What’s burning you out? After we identify the trigger, it’s important to move. You’ll hear that from me a lot. The concept of movement – action – is fundamental in effective problem solving. How do we go about finding movement in the midst of burnout? Let’s examine. I enjoy a good bulleted list, and I’ll assume I’m in good company in that regard. Movement may come in infinite forms, but for our purposes, I’ll offer three, in no particular order.
When you step into your shower, notice the temperature and pressure of the water, the sensation when it touches your skin. Take in the scent of your soap. Move slowly and with great care. Close your eyes and feel. Bring your awareness to the physical sensation of bathing. That is all you need to do.
MM
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Warning: This content may be triggering for individuals who have suffered sexual assault in the past. While no details of assault will be discussed, themes related to sexual assault and prevention are prevalent in this post.
As a trauma therapist, I spend my days working with clients who have been through some really difficult experiences (to put it lightly). Some of my clients have endured abuse as children, others have been involved in car wrecks, and some reach out to me for help with specific phobias. The majority of my clients, however, come to my office following one or more incidents of sexual assault. Over the years, several pronounced themes have arisen amongst this latter group, many of which I’d like to discuss here at some point, but today I want to focus on a theme I’ve seen crop up in my office several times lately: It’s okay to be rude if you feel physically uncomfortable. Allow me to expand on this point. Many of my clients recall the details of their assaults and point to a moment where they knew something was wrong – perhaps the hair stood up on the back of their neck, or maybe they got a sick feeling in their gut. Maybe they had the impulse to back away, or felt that the person was encroaching on their physical space. At this point in our conversation, clients typically say something along the lines of, “I knew something was wrong, but I didn’t know what to do. I was afraid of being rude.” This is the piece that sticks with me on the drive home – “I was afraid of being rude.” I think about this often and, though I know it to be a psychological cliché, I believe that we learn to interact with the world early on, and primarily from our caregivers. I also believe to my core that most parents and caregivers are well-meaning in the way that they guide the children in their care. Parenting comes in many different flavors, but one thing that all parents could benefit from incorporating into their parenting style is the absolute importance of self-preservation over social niceties. The ability to function well in society is a useful skill, and I am a proponent of “good manners” in most situations. However, predators often weaponize social norms and use the internal sense of obligation that many people feel towards being “polite” to their advantage. By the time the victim realizes consciously the gravity of the situation, it is often too late. What does “being rude” look like in these situations? It can take many forms, but a few of my favorites are… “Excuse me. I have somewhere to be.” “I’m not comfortable with you standing so close to me.” “Back off.” “Please leave me alone.” “You are making me uncomfortable.” The decision to make a quick exit may be the difference in getting home safely and experiencing something profoundly traumatic. Teaching our children to say things like this without guilt is so, so very important – if we normalize self-preservation in childhood, our children will be better prepared to handle dangerous situations as adults. When given a choice between following their intuition and using “good manners” in potentially unsafe situations, it is my hope that my child – and your child, too – will have the tools and the internal permission to “be rude.” Hello, all!
So, there’s this thing that’s been cooking in my brain for the past few weeks, and I need to share it with you, because I think it’s a thing we’ve ALL struggled through at different points in our lives. Bear with me… The thing I want to share is something I call a… PSEUDOLUTION Yes, a pseudolution, and yes, it’s a made up word, like all words. Pseudolutions are fake solutions we use in a valiant attempt to solve our problems. They’re surface-level “solutions” that don’t actually fix anything and often reinforce our problems. I’ve broken this down into three categories of pseudolutions I see most often with clients. See if any of these resonate for you: Cliché Pseudolutions. Cliché pseudolutions are the I-don’t-know-what-else-to-say advice people give us when we talk about something difficult that’s happening for us, but they aren’t generally solutions anyone would actually follow through with. Unfortunately, we offer/accept them anyway because they fill what might otherwise be an uncomfortable period of silence.Some personal favorite cliché pseudolutions of mine are: “Oh, wow, that’s tough. You should really count your blessings though. It could be way worse.” “Everything happens for a reason.” “Keep calm and carry on.” (I’m not actually sure what that one even means.) Self-Defeating Pseudolutions. These are the attempts we make at solving our problems by indirectly facing them, generally by acting one of three ways: aloof, passive aggressive, or overly confrontational. The aloof self-defeating pseudolution looks like withdrawing from others in an effort to gain the upper hand. Maybe you’re seeking attention from your partner, but instead of approaching them affectionately, you go to bed early without saying why, hoping they’ll follow. The passive aggressive self-defeating pseudolution is attempting to get what you want with underhanded comments, snide remarks, or subtle but aggressive actions. It looks like leaving a note on the frig instead of asking your roommate to throw out her week-old Chinese takeout. Finally, there’s the confrontational self-defeating pseudolution. This one is fairly straightforward. Instead of taking a moment to check themselves, the confrontational type blows up on the cashier for giving them incorrect change. “More of the Same” Pseudolutions. These are my favorite, and they’re tricky, guys. “More of the Same” pseudolutions involve attempting to solve your problems repeatedly using logical means that aren’t working. For example… Having conversations with your mom about how uncomfortable it makes you when she mentions you not being married yet. She continues to bring this up, often at family gatherings. You don’t like mashed potatoes anymore. Asking your boss politely but firmly not to call you “sweetie” because it feels demeaning and you are a professional. He brushes this off and does it several times every week. Attempting to shorten a long-winded and energetically taxing conversation by yawning and mentioning how fatigued you are. The other party doesn’t catch or ignores your not-so-subtle cues and continues talking. Any of these hitting home? Now, to the most important part – What to Do Instead To better solve our problems – big or small – we first need to understand exactly what our problem is, and why it is a problem. Is it that the frig smells, or that our roommate is sloppy? Is it that mom is emphasizing the wrong priorities, or that she’s speaking to our fears? What’s at the heart of the problem? Get specific. Next, take a look at what you’ve tried so far. Chances are, it falls into one category or another of pseudolution. Maybe you’ve even got your own brand of pseudolution (if so, I’d love to hear about it – comment below). Label what you’ve been doing as a well-intentioned pseudolution and let it go. At the very least, you know what doesn’t work, and that’s helpful. Finally, choose an approach that is radically different from anything you’ve tried so far. This may be the exact opposite of what you’ve been doing, something that sounds silly, or something that sounds counterintuitive. It may be the thing you’ve dreaded doing, or a thing that’s never occurred to you before. Movement – action – is the enemy of our struggles. When we try something, we are moving in the direction of solving our problems, no matter how meandering the path may seem. <3 Morgan PS, if this post interests you at all, check out Lucy Gill's book, How to Work with Just About Anyone. It's a good read, grounded in research, and accessible whether or not you're a therapist by trade. In a recent blog post, we talked at some length about conflict, and more specifically, we focused on the tendency of some people to avoid conflict at all costs. If you didn’t catch it last week, check it out! I mentioned that later we would focus on another group – those individuals with a “tendency to approach conflict too readily,” I believe I phrased it – and this is the group we’ll spend time touching base with today.
This post could easily trail in a number of directions, and keeping in mind my tendency to engage passionately with extraneous detail, today we’ll hone in on a few key points essential to understanding and redirecting emotional reactivity. First, we’ll talk about the reactive stance, and later, we’ll talk about some concrete ways to redirect the impulse to engage in unproductive patterns of conflict. At its core, conflict proneness is rooted in something called emotional reactivity. This means that conflict comes from a tendency to react emotionally (rather than respond rationally) to life experiences. It may be important to note that we speak of “tendencies” in most of the posts you’ll read here because humans aren’t unilaterally one thing or another. Our behavior isn’t always this way or always that way. We show tendencies to act in patterned ways because patterns are easy, even when the nature of our patterns makes our lives markedly more difficult. A person with a tendency to conflict proneness, then… What does this look like? For the sake of clarity, indulge me for a moment. I’d like for you to bring to mind someone you know or can imagine – maybe someone from a TV show or a movie – a person whose life is seemingly in a constant state of disarray or chaos. Maybe they’re involved in an unending saga of relationship drama with romantic partners. Maybe they chew out the wait staff for forgetting to put their dressing on the side. Maybe they’re impossible to please, constantly on edge, or even a little intimidating. They might frame their intensity as being “direct” or “giving it to you straight,” but often this “directness” comes off as harsh, disproportionate to the situation, or attacking. This is the face of emotional reactivity as it appears in conflict. How, then, do we go about redirecting this reactivity? Isn’t that more of a personality trait? Well… yes and no. If you think of personality as a collection of patterns of behavior, then sure, emotional reactivity could reasonably be considered a personality trait. On the other hand, if you visualize personality as this concrete, unchanging force, then no, that doesn’t really capture the heart of emotional reactivity. Regulating emotions is a skill, and like all skills, some of us learn it in our families of origin, and others don’t. Not being taught early doesn’t render us unteachable, and while it may feel more difficult to change our patterns as adults, humans are positively remarkable in their capacity for change and growth. It's never too late to learn to be a well-adjusted human. (An aside, schools are beginning to teach emotional regulation, and I couldn’t be more thrilled about the prospect of being out of a job in a few decades). Now let’s talk specifics, because if you’re anything like me, you don’t appreciate being offered vague, psychobabbly ways of dealing with your problems. When it comes to working on emotional reactivity, and perhaps especially as it relates to anger and conflict, I use a few basic methods in teaching clients to regulate their emotional responses. First, and perhaps most importantly, you’ve got to begin to practice awareness. There are a number of terms for this out there now, and the first that comes to mind is “mindfulness.” A quick Google search will give you scores of information on the topic, but if you’re a cliff notes sort of person, if boils down to this: When we are actively engaging with the present moment, our minds aren’t cluttered with past experiences, old mental scripts about a person or situation, or forecasts for future behavior. We are present. We notice what’s happening around us, and we notice our internal experience of that. We watch our thoughts and emotions as an observer. We don’t have to react. We can just notice, and when we decide to take an action, we’re far more likely to come across as rational humans beings. It’s a beautiful thing. Another tool I like to use relates to this awareness, but is a little more specific – my clients and I practice attending to body language. If you struggle with reacting impulsively, it’s worth examining how many cues from others you may have subconsciously ignored as the situation escalated. Is the person you’re with positioned in a way that feels open or closed? If you’re standing, which direction do their feet point? How does their voice sound? Do they come across as short in speaking with you? What about their jawline – tense or relaxed? What about their eyes? Squinted? Downcast? Wide? Noticing the other person’s body language does two important things. First, it roots you in the present moment. How can you be simultaneously attending to body language and plotting your next hasty, conflict-escalating retort? Second, it gives you the opportunity to act with empathy. If you see that a person appears angry, hurt, or anxious, you have the ability to comment on that and ask with sincerity what that person may need. If you’re able to do that, you may have just avoided an argument altogether because the person you’re with feels heard. Finally, I cannot overstate the importance in this emotional regulation process of learning to identify what we’re really feeling in any given moment (yet again, we find ourselves back at that awareness piece!) When we feel angry, we nearly always feel something else deeper down, and our minds are using anger to cover that up because it’s historically kept us “safe.” Maybe we’re afraid of being alone, of not having enough of something, of being taken advantage of. Maybe we’re jealous, or lonely, or insecure. The common thread here, which you’re probably already noticing, is that each one of these things feels a whole lot more vulnerable than anger. We all experience each of these emotions, to some degree, at one point or another. For some of us, it’s easy to react in anger when what we’re actually feeling is afraid, or insecure, or lonely. When we notice what’s really happening inside, we move from blindly reacting to behaving intentionally. We are giving ourselves a choice. It’s liberating. If you don't take anything else away from this, please hear me when I say… You’re not a prisoner to your past behavior or your old patterns. If what you’re doing isn’t working, learn to do something different. It's not too late. You’ve already got everything you need inside of you. Let me say it again. You’ve already got everything you need inside of you. <3 Morgan When I was a kid, I struggled to make and keep friends.
Despite what the melancholic lead-in may have suggested, I swear this post isn’t going to be a downer. It wasn’t that I was a mean-spirited little punk – at least, no one has ever told me that I was – but when it came to forming those deep childhood friendships people always talk about, I never really seemed to be able to do that. I can remember sitting with my teachers at recess, chatting their ears off about the latest book I’d read or something I'd seen on National Geographic. It was always my teachers whom I felt understood me best, not my peers. Writing this now, there’s as good a chance as not that I was just a weird kid who grew into a weird adult, so it may be in your best interest to take the rest of this with a grain of salt. On the other hand, I might be onto something. I'll leave that to you to decide. When I reflect on my experience of childhood friendships, a recurring theme is how difficult it was to deal with conflict, which, as it turns out, is a pretty important piece of maintaining relationships with just about anyone. In my family and in a lot of other families, too, conflict was nearly always a thing to be avoided. In these sorts of families, when you have a problem with someone you’re close with, you put that problem in a box, take that box to the backyard, dig a large hole, put the box in the hole, pour a bag of concrete on top of the box, and you might even add a fresh layer of dirt and a couple of flowers to make the hole look pretty. You certainly don’t talk about the problem, and if you do, it’s because there isn’t any space in your yard to dig another hole. Fast forward a couple of decades, and I’m a therapist with a private practice. On any given day, I work with clients in the midst of some pretty intense conflict – some are in the middle of a separation or divorce, others are working through issues with their families of origin, and still others are struggling to communicate and maintain healthy boundaries with friends or coworkers. For some of these clients, the problem centers around – or, at the very least, is reinforced by – their tendency to approach conflict too readily. These are the people others might describe as “hotheaded.” They perceive some injustice committed against themselves or another and react quickly and intensely. For the time being, let’s set aside this group – if this describes you, don’t worry, we’ll talk about this approach to conflict more in another post. Today, we’ll focus on another group I work with a lot – that is, the conflict avoiders. On the surface, conflict avoiders can look like the “good guy” in a given relationship. They’re the ones people call “easygoing.” They’re the peacemakers, and, taken to the extreme, they’re the doormats. The prospect of confronting conflict head-on to this group seems daunting or unnecessary. They’re quick to make excuses for others’ behavior, rationalizing that the person’s behavior is due entirely to some matter of circumstance, or assume that they themselves must in some way be at fault for what’s happening. They don’t want to hurt feelings or step on toes. This mindset might temporarily keep the peace, but it’s also painful and paralyzing. The surprising part is, conflict avoiders lose relationships just as often as their hotheaded counterparts. Why? Because they never actually confront what’s happening, but they also don’t let it go. You see, conflict avoiders aren’t actually avoiding conflict – they’re avoiding dealing with the conflict that’s already bubbling under the surface. To use the metaphor from earlier, the problem still exists whether or not you put it in a box and bury it. Eventually, and usually following a series of unaddressed relational issues, conflict avoiders tend to avoid their way right out of a relationship that might otherwise have been fixed. If you’re a conflict avoider, it’s easy to let things blow over. It’s easy to default to what I like to call “not rewarding” the behavior you don’t want to reinforce. If it’s not the most common way of avoiding conflict, it’s certainly up there. Take this example: If I’m really bothered by others complaining and my roommate likes to rant without ceasing about her boss, her mother, or her turbulent love life, I might choose to “not reward” the behavior by responding with one- or two-word answers or by making some excuse to exit the situation – I’m not picking a fight, but I’m also not confronting the problem, nor I am letting it go. So maybe I don’t engage with my roommate, and maybe I don’t feed into the negativity, and in those ways, I’m not “rewarding” the behavior that’s bugging me (the complaining). But I’m also not taking any real steps to solve the problem, and perhaps even more important here is that I’m allowing my resentment to build, making it less likely that a calm, kind conversation around the problem will happen. I’m giving my mind a chance to run scripts about this person (“She’s so negative,” “She drains my energy,” “She’s the worst”), and I’m cementing myself in a powerless, victim role. In simply “not rewarding” the behavior, I’m resting in inaction and robbing myself and my friend of an opportunity for growth. Which brings me to the point of this post: Sometimes not rewarding behavior isn’t enough to change it. Sometimes, the hard conversations have to happen. And sometimes, you’ve got to be the one to initiate them. People aren’t always going to pick up on your subtle cues. People who pick up on your cues aren’t always going to heed them. If you want something to change, you’ve got to be willing to face the problem head-on. What does that mean? Well, a lot of things, but first, it means taking a moment to cool off. Even conflict avoiders can come off as harsh if they don’t take time to get present. Get grounded, get away from the situation, and check your pulse. Normal? Good. Once your mind has deescalated a bit, take a moment to define the problem clearly and concisely (i.e., “I sometimes feel overwhelmed when you share about...”). If the relationship matters to you, share the way you are feeling with the other person. You owe it to yourself not to martyr yourself, and you owe it to the other person not to resent them for not changing something they didn’t know bothered you. Bottom line? Be direct, and be kind. You've got this. <3 Morgan |
Dr. Morgan McGowanTherapist, Yogini, Archives
September 2020
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LocationOzark Psychotherapy Group
124 W. Sunbridge Dr., Ste. 5 Fayetteville, AR 72703 If you are in crisis, please call 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.
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