Mindfulness and Mental Health

Mindfulness can be Simpler than It’s Made out to Be

A brief, internet search about mindfulness might bring you to a range of techniques and practices for embodying a mindful self. This is awesome. Many of these are extremely helpful practice in developing abilities that range from increasing focus to reducing stress. However, many of these (concentration, breathing, etc.) can feel very aimless without the right teacher. At least, for me this was true. Of course, this is fully an internal struggle of my own. Almost all resources I encountered make it very clear that the entire experience should be free of pressure to perform.

Still, though, it is honestly difficult to accomplish that. And because it is difficult, it is at least worth looking at what the goals of all of these practices are.

What you Stand to Gain

At its heart, mindfulness is your ability to draw your attention and focus to the present moment and everything that it affords you. If you are distracted with deadlines at work, financial strife, or conflict with a loved one, you are having a natural reaction to the stressors of life. Additionally, you might not be fully present in the moment.

Now, another natural reaction might be to read the previous paragraph and think that I am trying to convince you not to worry about fairly consequential things in your life. However, I can assure you that this is not the case. Of course you have matters to attend to that simply cannot be ignored. At the same time, there are undoubtedly moments that exist in between your opportunities to work toward solutions. In these moments, the question is how to tend to what is going on right then and there.

Maybe the situation in front of you is a really lovely one that warrants a little appreciation and gratitude. Those seem to be the moments that our loved ones insist we make an effort to live in. On the other hand, maybe the situation is a minor concern that still needs tending to. In either case, there is something of value happening in the current moment that makes your attention valuable there as well.

So ultimately, you stand to gain an increase in value on each moment of your time and attention.

How to Practice Mindfulness

I should take this moment to fully acknowledge the benefits of any other mindful practices you might find. They truly are fantastic. Again, though, this blog is meant to provide more easily accessible ways to get the ball rolling on mindful practices.

One thing to try is to notice when you are feeling preoccupied. This might sound easy. With some practice, it can be. However, noticing what you tend not to notice is a skill. One way to build this skill is to take note of when you miss some details in whatever you might be engaging with. For example, maybe you are watching a movie and can’t remember what happened in the last few minutes. Maybe you are reading and go over the same paragraph several times in a row without retaining anything. These are experiences that everybody has at some point, but noticing it is the first step.

Next, simply tell yourself that you notice when you notice. Even try saying it out loud. Obviously this might not hold all of the answers to mindful practices, but again, it is a start. Once you make a habit of noticing when you can’t seem to keep your attention in the present, the next step is to identify what feelings and emotions are tied to your distraction.

For example, you’ve just realized that your attention has been somewhere else for several minutes, and you’ve told yourself that’s what has happened. Great! Now ask yourself this:

“While my attention was elsewhere, what was I feeling? Was I sad, anxious, angry, agitated, upset, etc.?”

Of course, you can feel many emotions at the same time. Even so, identifying even one goes a long way. With a few repetitions, you might see some patterns. Maybe you are identifying the same emotion again and again. Maybe it’s a different one each time.

In either case, you have now begun the process of getting in touch with your moment-to-moment feelings. Whether you choose to begin unpacking all of them on your own or with the help of another person, you might have a little bit better of a grasp on what you are trying to address.

If you feel like you need some extra help, there is always someone to talk with.

What Does it Mean to 'Work Through' Your Baggage?

Concerns From the Past

All right, so by virtue of the fact that you are reading this post, you are some number of years old. These years have afforded you experiences. And the nature of experiences is that they can be either good or bad. Both have affected you in some way. Sometimes you draw upon moments of success and triumph to inspire yourself today. Sometimes you utilize the lessons of hardship and failure to make better judgments moving forward.

Other times, though, it is difficult to find any meaning in your past other than just pain. Sometimes when you draw upon certain memories, all you can do is hope that they recede back into the depths of your mind to keep from putting you through it all again. These memories are your traumas, your wounds, and any other unresolved pain.

How the Past Affects the Present

It is easy to find comfort in the idea that making it through a difficult time is all you might need to come out better on the other side. And sometimes that is absolutely the case. When it isn’t the case, though, the past has many ways of working its way into disrupting your life today.

As mentioned previously, finding meaning in past experiences opens the door to drawing upon those memories in positive ways. However, when it is difficult or impossible to find meaning in them, their context in our lives deteriorates, but the memories remain. And this remains to be true even if we do our best to push such memories away. Maybe, you could even say that this makes it worse. Now, we are dealing with an inherently painful memories that stirs up certain negative emotions compounded with a sense of anxiety about even bringing it up in the first place.

This is the part where you have likely heard somebody else express the unwarranted advice that you just need to work through it.

How to Actually Work Through It

It is worth taking a moment to note that as I am talking about past events and their effect on the present, specifically do not mean very recent events. If you have just gone through something, there is naturally a period of recovery (and that period can vary depending on how severe it was). What I am talking about are the situations when you have had adequate time to heal but it simply has not happened. This takes a different mindset and approach, and it is

Being perfectly honest, there are many different ways to do it. However, there are certain goals and markers along the way that should help. First, if recalling a certain memory stirs up a significant amount of pain (similar to the level as when it happened), that is a clear indication that this is a point of focus. Ultimately, one of the most important ways of dealing with this is to be able to provide yourself some context.

While you are living through something painful or difficult, you have no way of knowing how things will turn out. Even right after you make it through a trying time or traumatic event, it can be difficult to foresee how things will settle down. The more time that builds between that event and where you are now, the more opportunity you have for context. Sometimes it is even necessary to let that time build before you can revisit your pain in a constructive way.

Once you have reached that threshold of time, though, the tempting nature of trying to forget begins to become more and more of an obstacle. Many times, it takes support from somebody else to muster the courage to revisit the event again, but being able to acknowledge what happened in as unfiltered terms as possible will go a long way in beginning your journey to healing. As you do this, your beliefs and feelings that you hold in regard to your memories begin to come to the forefront of your mind. Once you have the opportunity to face these beliefs, you will find much of the source of your current pain.

And this brings us to one of the keys to healing. The beliefs that you hold in regard to your painful memories influence the meaning that you derive from your experiences. This meaning drives the narrative that you tell about your own life. All of this starts with your understanding of your pain in the greater context of your experiences overall. But gaining any understanding means that it is necessary to take a courageous look at your pain to begin with.

My Teen is Turning Away From Me. How do I Get Help?

The Moment a Teenager Arrives

No matter how you view human development, it seems that nobody is in disagreement that teenagehood is a critical time period when people experience massive changes. One of the scariest changes from a parent’s perspective is when you notice that your child fully begins to embody a sense of differentiation from the rest of the family. The way this might look varies greatly on a case by case basis, but generally speaking, it is accompanied by a sensation that you don’t know your child quite like you used to.

One of the things that is happening here is that your teenager is entering a developmental crisis. In this context, a crisis is when a natural juncture occurs through the inevitability of change. In our teen years, the major one that we contend with is the formation of one’s own identity. The way that teenagers do this is to try out different roles. To a parent, this might appear to be a departure from who the child has been up to this point. In reality, your teenager’s sense of self is naturally and predictably shifting away from who he or she is in the context of the family to who he or she will be upon entering the world.

In short, your teenager is making a natural attempt to test what will serve best once they no longer have the comfort of home to protect them.

The Natural Risk

Okay, so we’ve established that what your teenager is going through is a natural step toward becoming a fully developed person. One who you can look at and feel confident in their ability to tackle everything that you know awaits in the ‘real world.’ The question is how you know that what they are trying will translate to success.

Undoubtedly, this question is what makes this the most nerve-racking period for most parents. Add on the fact that it might feel like your influence is waning, and you have a real predicament on your hands.

One thing that I really want to make a point of right now is this. You have been this teenager’s parent for a long time. Nobody knows him like you do. Take a moment and search your own feelings. Somewhere inside you might find that you truly have faith that your teenager will successfully navigate this period and come out stronger on the other side. This knowledge might not completely solve the present, but it might provide some level of comfort.

If, on the other hand, it feels more like your teenager is headed down a path toward a more difficult launch, know that there is hope through this.

Solutions

At the end of the day, nobody knows your teen better than you do. That part cannot be overstated. Because of this, you have unique insight into the subtle changes in trajectory that your teen has displayed. Along with this, you have a great foundation in determining how she might adjust as this stage of development progresses. If you have a feeling that your family would benefit from some additional support, the question is how you know whether or not the efforts that you put in will translate to success.

Perhaps the greatest asset to all of us in our time of needs is our relationships. Building and nurturing a strong relationship is the key to overcoming so many different obstacles in our lives that it almost becomes easy to overlook. If you are thinking about looking for counseling for your teen, this is absolutely something to keep in mind. The relationship that your teen builds with his counselor is paramount to how that process will go. This does not mean that you have no say in who this person is, though. To the contrary, remember what I mentioned earlier. Nobody knows your teen better than you do. You both should feel comfortable with who you reach out to.

Why the Unknown is Scary Even when it Must be Better

Learning to Succeed

From the moment you were born, you began your slow and steady path of incremental progress. Though you don’t remember it, you had to learn to control your flailing limbs. You had to learn to distinguish between different sounds. You had to learn what the presence of your mother and father meant. Success in each of these pursuits armed you with the ability to navigate more and more complex situations. And you also gained the comfort needed to try bigger ventures. Eventually, you learned how to crawl and then walk. As your orbit around your parents grew, you tackled newer and bigger feats. Going down a slide, swinging on the swings, getting on a bike. The list is endless, but each item on the list began with an unsure footstep in that direction.

Of course at that age, the concept of questioning any of it is not as overwhelming as it becomes later on, but why do progress and success begin to scare us as we get older?

Before we get into that, lets look at a commonly held assumption. The assumption is that people naturally fear failure. While this is definitely true, a far more dire truth exists in tandem. And that is that people tend to fear success even more.

Implications of Rapid Success

Lets look back at the example of riding a bike. Perhaps it starts with a strider or tricycle. Then maybe a bike with training wheels. Eventually, you are riding on your own with no assistance at all. Freedom.

And with that freedom comes more adventurous exploration. Of course, then you start hearing conditions accompany that freedom. “Be home before dark,” for example is a phrase that sounds foreign to nobody. And what does that demand imply? For one, it suggests that being home after dark comes with consequences. Maybe one of those consequences is losing bike privileges.

However, a more weighty implication is that you now have the agency and responsibility to monitor your time and to then make it home before dark without having to be reminded. Furthermore if you do manage your time well and abide by your parents’ rules, nothing happens. Everything goes on the way it should because that is what’s expected of you. If you don’t, something you don’t like will happen.

This means that the more success you have, the higher the expectations become. As a consequence, doing well is not rewarded the way it might have been earlier in life. Likewise, performing poorly comes with negative consequences.

If this is true, the question becomes why you should bother progressing further if rewards decrease and punishments increase.

How to Overcome the Fear of Success

As we previously established, a situation where rewards are far less likely than punishments is one that naturally inspires avoidance. If, however, such a situation arises as a result of progress and success, how can we ultimately call that success?

The answer to that is the key to overcoming any lingering urge to avoid success. While it is different from person to person, much of the how in finding that answer comes from how you personally derive meaning in your life. Getting to the root of that allows you to build the sense of reward from within instead of looking for it from somewhere else. Mastering that allows you to bask in the life that you achieve through realizing your goals rather than dreading the change that it begets.

I'm Hearing more about IFS, but what is it?

How IFS Developed

The first important thing to remember about Internal Family Systems therapy (IFS) is that it did not come about by accident. It was not the product of a long shot hunch. Instead, it was born out of people’s natural pattern of talking about themselves in terms of separate, internal parts. Very commonly, people will say things like, “Part of me wants to read this book I’ve had my eye on, but part of me doesn’t even want to start it until I have the time.” This is a clear articulation of the feeling of having conflicting parts inside that pull in different directions. In this example, it seems that the part that wants to put off starting the book is winning out.

In any case, this is likely similar to something that you have heard in your own life. Whether it be in a movie, from a friend, or even in a song, you have almost certainly heard somebody express different desires in this way. Because people do this so frequently, it seemed worthwhile to lean into that and to engage with those ‘parts’ that have such starkly different motivations.

How IFS is used in Counseling

Another understandable question to the fact that people naturally speak this way is, “So what?”

Because the success of counseling often hinges on being able to build a relationship between counselor and client, one important thing to consider is how a client speaks. Because it is such a common pattern for people to refer to their parts without thinking much about it, it only made sense to explore that further. Another way of thinking about this is that people often use different words to say the same thing and similar words to say different things. Without taking a deep dive into what is behind a sentiment like, “Part of me really feels like I should study for this test, but I can’t find the motivation,” it is much more difficult to gain an understanding of what is inhibiting the desired behavior.

This is where IFS in the counseling room comes into play. It might seem initially beneficial to lean into that desire to study. You might think that if you can just channel that energy hard enough, you can overcome your perceived laziness to just do it. However, what if we explore the part that is taking control enough to inhibit studying?

Think of it this way. Imagine being at a party where several people are talking about the same topic in a group. Perhaps a few of the participants are comfortable asserting their points of view, a few aren’t particularly moved enough to interject, and then one is trying to find the moment to speak his mind. Maybe he isn’t comfortable finding the right amount of space to effectively say what he wants to say. So instead, he waits. He waits and waits, and his point of view now builds up inside of him. Maybe it builds up with so much frustration that instead of finally finding his moment to be heard, he acts out instead. Maybe he throws his drink or storms off. At this point, all eyes are on him, but his emotion has pushed him into a state where he can no longer voice his sentiment in a way that accurately reflects what he believes on the inside.

This same phenomenon happens all the time internally with our parts. By gently engaging with the parts that have felt suppressed to the point of lashing out, we can more meaningfully gain a perspective on why our actions don’t match our desired behavior. With a skilled IFS counselor, it is much easier to build that internal relationship and adjust the feelings that we are slightly out of touch with.