Pomegranate: But when I'm too depressed, stressed or triggered that's not only what I think - I Believe it and will go off on people based on my feeling & thinking that they are doing things on purpose to make me angry, or hurt me or teach me a lesson. Like that. I feel hopeless and like I have no control over my life.
I think a better thing to call at that point would be "time out" so that you have a chance to settle your emotions and the opportunity to reflect. More often, when we get triggered we don't reflect, we simply respond. With practice however we can learn to recognize that we have been or are about to be triggered. In a situation with a significant other, we may be able to ask them to give us some time alone. In a more formal setting such as work or a social situation, we may be able to make a polite excuse so we can withdraw from the situation.
See most often I was/am not gaming (and if I was I was not aware of it so the "********" call just baffled me and scared me, made me doubt my own feelings and motives
), but I'm not asking for help either. I'm just saying what's happening with me or how I'm really feeling in answer to people's questions, or in conversation in general.
My father was a social worker and I recall years ago he used to say to myself and my siblings, "I see your game!". The trouble was, we didn't it and no one had bothered to teach us the rules. All these years later I'm still not sure what he meant and neither am I sure that he wasn't playing a game of his own. Regardless, in that particular instance, his suggestion that we were playing games only seemed to impede any communication.
Often, our arguments were in relation to household chores so it might have been more honest for him to say something along the lines of, "I feel overburdened and resentful that you kids don't do more to help out without making me make you." In hindsight it seems more likely to me that that's what he was going through and it might have been something we could grasp.
Meantime, I got curious so I went looking for some information. I was surprised to see the mention of contemplative practices, mindfulness and acceptance mentioned in association with DBT. Here's more...
Quote:
In this interview, Dr. Van Nuys talks with Dr. Marsha Linehan, who is widely known as the founder of Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), an empirically validated form of psychotherapy useful for treating people who have borderline personality disorder, suicidal people, and other people who are in severe and chronic psychological pain.
Dialectical Behavior Therapy represents an integration of two traditions: the behavior and cognitive-behavioral therapy tradition which is focused on developing technologies of change, and the mindfulness tradition that comes out of various spiritual practices including Zen Buddhism and contemplative Christian practices.
At the start of her career, Dr. Linehan set out to develop a treatment for chronically suicidal patients and found that many of them were so overwhelmed by significant problems that it was not possible to address them all. Instead of focusing solely on how patients could change, what was required was also to help patients to better tolerate their circumstances. ...
Though DBT includes meditation-like practices, it is not about meditation, but rather a family of methods that help people to become less judgemental, more in the present moment, and more effective (where effectiveness is more important than being right). An important goal of DBT is to develop patient's wise minds through the teaching of interpersonal skills, emotion regulation skills, mindfulness and acceptance skills, and distress tolerance skills.
The therapy includes the word "dialectical" to emphasize that it is about the synthesis or integration of change and acceptance practices. It is necessary to learn how to accept and tolerate painful circumstance in order to be able to start to change it. Both acceptance and change are necessary components of the therapy and cannot be separated.
Radical acceptance is a fundamental tenant of DBT. Through actions as well as words, the therapist conveys radical acceptance of the patient, and helps the patient to learn how to accept him or herself. Radical acceptance is a state where people places and things are accepted without judgment. Radical acceptance of self opens up a space for patients where they can begin to make better decisions about how to go about making their lives more tolerable.
The main change target of Dialectical Behavior Therapy is to help patients stop engaging in life threatening behaviors. If that goal can be achieved, then the focus of the therapy shifts to work on understanding and altering behaviors that interfere with patients' ability to attend and benefit from therapy. This second focus inevitably calls attention to the quality of the relationship between the patient and the therapist.
[b]Read the full article and listen to the interview here: An Interview With Marsha Lineham
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