Quote:
Originally Posted by ArtleyWilkins
Hmm. I never found reframing my emotions to be the same as avoiding my emotions. Perhaps that is something that you might need to talk with your therapist about (or perhaps your therapist really doesn't know how to do this with you).
Actually, reframing wasn't about reframing my emotions. It was about reframing my thinking so that my emotions would follow. So, for instance, I might be really angry and thrown by a student's behavior today -- I am totally keyed up and maybe even crying about it. My therapist would work with me to figure out what I was thinking about the situation; why was I thinking that thing; why was that thought so upsetting, when did I first have that thought about myself, etc. etc. What I would discover as we dug was that my initial thought (a thought that happened so quickly and instinctively that I probably didn't even recognize it in the moment) was almost always about something much older in my history AND often that thought was something that I had internalized as a belief about myself or about life that was usually a mistaken belief (core belief). Once I realized which thought had triggered such a chain of overwhelming emotion in me, I could reframe my thinking about what had happened with my student because, quite honestly, it wasn't today's incident with my student that was causing my extreme emotional reaction; it was that old stuff. Once I reframed my thinking and understood what was setting me off, I could at least acknowledge that the current situation wasn't nearly as severe as I was making it out to be. I could place the emotional reaction in the right context (old stuff) and handle the new stuff with more perspective.
So I wasn't avoiding emotions at all. I was validating where they came from WHILE reframing my thinking about current events. AND, once I had bumped into the same old thinking setting me off enough times, the bonus was that I reached a place where I could see it happening and calm the storm on my own more effectively.
If your therapist is just saying change your emotions, that's probably not taking it through enough steps to be helpful or validating.
|
....The bolded is where I never got to in therapy.
As soon as the therapists would ask "what do you feel", "how do you feel about this", "what is your automatic negative thought", I just would draw a blank. And all these "why" questions. They always draw a blank. The way you describe it also draws that same blank. Yeah. So that's just not my approach and it never will be.
I find what works for me is observing myself, repeatedly watching the same feelings as holistic "sensations" (not really localised bodily sensations for me - yet another area where standard therapy and self-help would fail for me). Repeatedly i.e. over time, weeks, months, years, so yeah giving myself LOTS of time to observe all that, until I'd find enough contexts for the particular feeling experiences.
And then I'd end up observing other things (not feelings, just events, or anything around me or about me), and realisations would just come to me while trying to reflect during regular journalling. Using knowledge I got from psychoeducation (both from therapists originally and then self-help over the years and stuff I've been told in some online support groups, etc). Knowledge I managed to make sense of for myself. But if I showed you my journal you'd not understand why I'd even call that a journal. It's not the standard journal stuff at all. Again, nothing standard about any of this. : p
But all this has been good enough for me to figure out whatever the feelings mean and how to link them to earlier memories (not really childhood memories, but sometimes even that) and how to change things such as my environment based on the realisations, "insights" I would get from all this. Change my external environment, change what I do, change my approaches to stuff I do, change my conclusions and views, rather than change myself. What's more, God forbid, I know we are on a psychology forum, but I would also learn to control&dismiss some of the newly understood feelings in a more effective way
I know I'm supposed to change myself but I couldn't care less about that standard therapy approach either. I can change my conclusions about things, but I cannot really directly touch core beliefs even if I manage to uncover them (that's taken VERY long for me, got no help with it at all....), they have to change on their own somehow, after I've done enough of all the above. I never do reframing that's not grounded in action and my actual environment. I don't like theorising like that reframing would require me to do. So, I could go on and on....but I think that's it in a nutshell.
So yeah, I'm kind of bored with how standard therapy approaches try to assume everyone has the same brain. Anything from CBT, DBT to mindfulness stuff all assume that.
