The therapeutic attitude of willing acceptance

How do you relate effectively to your distressing thoughts, feelings, and sensations?

Treatment can’t and shouldn’t mean that you are never in distress again. Becoming anxious is a normal, healthy adaptive reaction to doing challenging things with uncertain outcomes. I would never want to take the capacity to become anxious away from you. Instead, I want to teach you to respond to anxiety and other forms of distress in a way that helps you rather than hurts you.

When you feel distressed, here are your steps to relate to it effectively:

#1 – Label the feeling as a feeling

#2 – Switch from content to process.

#3 – Do the opposite of avoidance: Open up to your sensations.

#4 – Actively allow the emotion. Ask for more of it.

Observing with an attitude of compassion and curiosity

When you go about observing your emotional states, your attitude and intention matter. Some parts of you may feel very motivated and excited by the idea of observing your thoughts and feelings. If you have suffered a lot and felt stuck in your internal experience, making a plan can fill you with hope and efficacy. There might be another part of you who doesn’t want to observe what’s happening and would prefer to hide from yourself and others. Expect that. It is a normal part of the process.

Notice that you will retrigger yourself if you add fear, shame, or self-criticism to your observation process.

The moment you are triggered is an opportunity. You have the chance to use it for greater self-understanding and eventually, calmness, compassion, and connection.

This moment is also an opportunity for you to feel more fear, more shame, helplessness, hopelessness, and worthlessness.

The attitude with which you approach the task predicts whether you grow from this moment or experience more suffering.

Therefore, when you experience fear, shame, self-criticism or any other reaction that makes it hard to stay with the emotions as emotions, use your higher intelligence and redirect yourself back to the attitude and intention you chose. After all, your fear, shame, and self-criticism are also secondary processes. If you can redirect themselves back to the initial experience during those states, you are practicing well.