Author: jennifer.payment

Your partner comes home from work and sits on the couch while you are making dinner. You are tired from a long day. Instead of asking them to help you, you find yourself shutting down, keeping your thoughts to yourself. You would like to ask your partner for help but are not confident in your ability to say something in a way that doesn’t start a fight.  

Your boss asks you to take on an additional project at work. Already feeling stressed and overwhelmed, you agree to a project you cannot reasonably afford to take on without cutting into your sleep hours. You are not sure how to share this with your boss. 

 If this sounds familiar and you would like to begin to find your voice and confidence within, this blog post is for you.   

Have you ever wondered what is stopping you from asserting yourself? 

Anger is a protective force inside of us and it functions to look out for our best interests. Though many times when we think of anger, we think of something destructive, in reality, the destructive part is acting out on the anger and not the anger itself.  Anger is a three-part experience inside of us: a thought, a sensation in the body and an urge to do something to assert yourself.  When you learn to allow this experience as information in the body, it is channeled into adaptive actions that are calm and effective.  On the other hand, when you are fearful of anger and avoid it, you will find yourself lacking the confidence, strength and cognitive clarity to assert yourself.   

Anger often makes people anxious, especially when those feelings come up toward someone we care about.  Something about these mixed feelings of loving/caring and anger commonly leads to anxiety.  When we are anxious, our strongest tendency is to avoid the thing that makes us anxious.  Then we avoid the very thing that would help us be confident to speak up for ourselves in a loving way.  Feelings of love say “be loving to the other”, where anger says “be loving to yourself”.  If the feelings information is not avoided, you will do both.  You will speak up for yourself in a loving way.   

There are many ways we avoid experiencing the feelings that would help us assert ourselves.  Here are a few: 

• People pleasing: putting someone else’s wants/needs above your own when you don’t want to and just to avoid the feelings you would have if you didn’t engage in pleasing.  
• Shutting down: going silent
• Self-doubting: questioning one’s own feelings
• Rationalizing: convince ourselves why we should not have the feelings we do

Feelings give us direction, like an internal GPS. Avoiding feelings leaves us lost, driving down the road without a map. 

Therapy can help you reconnect with your internal GPS system, so you can find the power and confidence to assert yourself in your relationships.  

Together, as a collaborative team, you and your therapist can help you become consciously aware of the ways you avoid your feelings, identify how this hurts your confidence and interferes with your ability to assert yourself.  Once you are able to see the ways in which you avoid, you can begin to turn against avoidance and allow your healthy feelings.  Through your work with a therapist, you will align with the healthy voice within you and enjoy confidence in your relationships.  How amazing is it to know we have a GPS system of feelings working to help us resolve our problems? 

During the hustle and bustle of the holidays, it can be difficult to prioritize ourselves. We want to share a few ways you can build resiliency in yourself to have a healthy and satisfying end of this year as you start the next.

Noticing your anxiety, rather than ignoring it will help you feel more connected and prevent burn out. As you prepare for busy days, try to create moments of slowness to connect with your body. Pay attention to physical signs of anxiety, and help yourself soften as you breathe. This reset can help you re-enter a party, work, or travel from a more intentional headspace.  

Stop to ask yourself, “What do I really want for myself this holiday season?”

With so many external demands during the holidays, stopping to think about how you want to spend your time can give you more control to create the experiences you want. Once you have a picture of your wishes, what are actions you can take between now and then to help them come to life?

Spend some time in a group. Connecting with others can be healing for our nervous system. Some ways to connect socially could be: getting a group of friends together, attending an exercise or yoga class, learning a new skill, volunteering, joining a faith-based group, or finding a public event near you. If social groups tend to increase your anxiety, try joining one that doesn’t require as much verbal interaction.

Consider what rituals and traditions you want to keep, change, or create new for yourself this year. What would make the holiday season meaningful for you? What food, activities, clothes, decorations, music, or conversations are important to include this year? Share your ideas with your loved ones and invite them to participate with you.

Keeping to healthy rhythms and routines is stress-reducing. It is normal for our schedules to shift to accommodate new plans and time off, but ensuring that some parts of your typical schedule are prioritized will help you to feel your best, like ensuring you get enough sleep, planning time for exercise, and eating nourishing meals.

If you find self-care during the holidays to be difficult, you don’t have to wait for help. Contact our office to get connected with a therapist who can help. You can reach us at 517-481-2133.

With the election this week, many of us have been carrying an extra level of anxiety recently. Ruminating on these stressful events or venting with others can feel like you’re helping yourself process in the moment, however these behaviors can actually make our anxiety worse. Anxiety creates uncomfortable sensations in the body including muscle tension, headaches, stomach sickness, dizziness, lightheadedness, and can even lead to chronic pain.

If you recognize this in yourself, it can be helpful to take some time to get to know your feelings under your anxiety. When painful things are happening outside of our control, facing feelings toward what has happened will bring our anxiety down. As you spend this time with yourself, you may feel a number of feelings like grief, joy, anger, love, healthy guilt, or healthy shame at the same time. Slowly approach each feeling. How do you experience this inside your body? What information does this feeling give you to help you be good to yourself in the face of this painful and stressful election?

You do not have to face these feelings alone. If you’re already working with a therapist, consider talking this through with them. If you are not yet connected to a therapist, you do not have to wait long – call us today, and we will connect you with a therapist as soon as today. You can reach us at 517-481-2133.

I have a book on pre-order called “What I Couldn’t Tell My Therapist” by Michelle May.  I don’t know specifically the content of the book, but it brings to mind a very important topic.  What do you feel comfortable telling your therapist and what seems completely off limits?  It can be difficult at times to share things openly with anyone about topics that are painful for us.  In a psychotherapy session, it is generally taken for granted that this is a safe place, and a therapy client should be able to be open.  This is often not how it goes though and there are important reasons for this.   

Growing up in our families, we all have to learn to adapt to whatever the emotional environment is. 

We automatically try to adapt because it is part of our internal instinct for survival to remain attached to those who will help us survive by providing food, shelter and care.  It is not something we actively think about as a small child, but we learn early on what kinds of responses we get from caregivers to different emotions we express and things that we do.  We use this knowledge to protect the supply line of survival needs and caring.  If we learn that our tears are upsetting to a parent, we may learn to hide our tears.  If we learn that asking for help with a problem overwhelms a busy parent, we may learn that we should never ask for help with problems.  These two examples are just two of many ways that children learn to adapt that later become a problem for them in adulthood.  A person who hides their feelings may have difficulties knowing what they feel or getting close in relationships.  A person who learned not to ask for help may have difficulty asking for it even in therapy.  The way we learn to adapt early on becomes so automatic, we forget we even adapted that way and the things we learned to do will continue in our relationships in adulthood, usually outside of our awareness.   

When a person finds themself unable to tell a therapist exactly how they feel or what they need help with, it can lead to a poor experience in therapy or getting stuck. 

If you find yourself having difficulty expressing something in your therapy, be gentle with yourself and know there is always a reason for this.  Try sharing with your therapist your dilemma about feelings or asking for help so that you don’t have to be alone with it.  Your therapist can then help you be self-compassionate and begin to understand what you learned to hide or how you adapted so that you can be free to be the real you! 

There can be many reasons a person feels they cannot tell something to their therapist, including factors about the therapist themselves.  Therapist responses can certainly help or hinder a person’s comfort to share. I am looking forward to Michelle’s book to learn more! 

You may be thinking that talking about your depression won’t change anything. If it’s just talking, you’re probably right!  

Therapy is a very specific kind of talking, which uses a scientific approach to help you find out and understand what is happening inside you. Depression has a cause. Sometimes we think the cause is something outside of us, like a job we don’t like or someone else’s behavior.  And while these things can be distressing, they are not the cause of depression in and of themselves but instead a trigger to a reaction inside that is the cause of a depressive episode.  In therapy, we form and test hypotheses together to get to the bottom of what is driving your symptoms.  By doing this, you can learn the exact cause and you can address it and free yourself from the symptoms.  In therapy, you explore both what happened outside you and what happened inside you so you and your therapist can find the way out of darkness.  

Therapists use a scientific approach to help you form a hypothesis and test it: 

1. Look at when your depressive symptoms started and what was happening around that time 
2. Explore your symptoms currently in a specific example so you can get a clear picture of the exact sequence of events inside of you that lead to symptoms and problems 
3. Discover exactly what core feelings get stirred up in the body that lead to feeling anxious and wanting to avoid feelings 
4. Determine what automatic avoidance behaviors come up that take you away from your healthy feeling signals inside so that you can reconnect to them and get good information for yourself. 
5. Using your newly found good information, you take adaptive actions and begin to feel better and better. 

Just talking about something does not magically fix anything. Thankfully, there are scientific ways to find out what is causing your depression. Once the cause is addressed, you can live a life free of depression. 

Leslie Auld LMSW, ACSW