To Date or Not to Date?

I recently wrote a piece for Psychology Today on dating during COVID-19. I provided four questions to ask yourself to figure out your boundaries around dating during a global pandemic—starting with the question of whether or not you should be dating at all. 

While many outlets are trying to untangle guidelines around safely getting to know new people—from video dates to socially distanced meetings—it’s important to start with this question. Dating during a pandemic can raise the stakes and make dating feel more intense. Just one reason is that many new partners are becoming monogamous immediately to lower risks of transmission. Some people may like the new focus and clarity. Simultaneously, negative outcomes like ghosting can feel more hurtful when we’re spending most of our time at home near our phones, unable to seek as much in-person support or distraction as we normally would. 

Whether or not you decide to date, it’s important to focus on grounding yourself and taking care of yourself on a daily basis. Grounding may look like meditation, yoga, journaling, or speaking with friends who make you feel supported and confident. Taking care of yourself means both focusing on physical care (getting enough sleep, exercising, eating healthily), and finding pleasure in whatever forms work for you (taking nature walks, watching horror movies, making art). With self-care as your primary goal, you’ll be more likely to handle whatever emotions come your way in dating or not-dating.

Image Source: Glen Anthony on Unsplash

Guiding Your Child Through the Coronavirus

Children always see, hear, and pick up on more than parents think. It’s likely that they have noticed people out in public with protective masks, heard pieces of adult conversations, or have talked about it with friends. 

Children are not immune to feelings of fear, worry, or anxiety. Here are 6 ways to guide your child through the outbreak: 

1. Take care of yourself 

In order to help your child regulate their emotions and anxieties, as parents, you have to manage your own first. Your child is likely very aware of your emotional state and will be able to pick up on your feelings of fear and worry. 

Before talking to them, take some time to notice your own feelings and do what you need to do to take care of yourself.  You can check out my last blog post [link to above article] to learn more about how to manage feelings of anxiety.

2. Provide age-appropriate information

There is a wealth of misinformation on the coronavirus. It’s important to be a reliable source for your child(ren), while also filtering out unnecessary details and delivering only what’s pertinent for their age. 

Generally speaking, it’s helpful to frame the coronavirus within a context that is already known to them, such as having a cold or the flu. 

3. Validate your child’s fears 

If your child expresses feelings of fear or anxiety, take a moment to notice your own reactions. Many parent’s attempts to reassure their children often end up invalidating how they are feeling. Instead of telling your child “everything will be ok” try saying something like, “I can see why you are feeling this way.”

4. Let your child know who’s protecting them

Letting your child know that they are loved and that as a parent you won’t let anything happen to them adds a layer of protection. Another can be added by letting them know that doctors and scientists are working to keep them safe as well. 

For older children, letting them know that as a parent you are a shield of protection against the coronavirus may not be enough. Empower them by collaborating on a “family game plan”, which is yet another way of opening up a dialogue. By listening to their ideas, you can learn more about their fears and attend to them as needed.

5. Stay on schedule

Maintaining routines is an important part of helping children to feel safe. They feel safe within structure, and notice when schedules are changed or not followed. As time goes on, some of this may be outside of your control as a parent, with closures of schools and other public spaces being a real possibility. 

Should this happen, keep as many structures in place as possible, and help children to highlight what does remain the same: “We didn’t go to school today, but we still brushed our teeth when we woke up and will brush our teeth before we go to bed.” 

These changes in routine can also be framed as exciting rather than scary, with potentially more time to be spent with family, playing, watching tv, doing crafts, or reading. 

6. Talking to them about hygiene 

Even if your child is too young to know about germs, it’s never too soon to talk to them about hand-washing.  Framing hand-washing and other hygienic behaviors in the context of “virus-stopping powers” can help children to feel more empowered and secure. 

For younger children, this can be made into a game, by measuring how long they wash their hands through singing songs such as “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” and “Happy Birthday”, or seeing who can wash their hands the longest. With children who know about germs, learning how to cough into their elbows and not touching their faces is just as important.  

In times like these, it can be easy to get caught up in our fears and worries. Remember, the best thing we can do as parents is take care of ourselves. Don’t forget to be gentle with yourself and your children.

Coronavirus: Managing Fears and Anxieties

Over the past weeks, coronavirus (COVID-19) has spread worldwide. With more outbreaks being reported each day and conflicting information getting shared around the clock, it can feel harder than usual to stay calm. 

With so much still unknown about the coronavirus, you may be feeling more fear and anxiety than normal. Feelings of fear and anxiety can feel unmanageable as they feed off of the unseeable and unknowable. 

Here are some ways to manage feelings of fear and anxiety brought on by the coronavirus:

1. Seek out reliable information

Anxiety is an emotion that wants to plan and protect. It feeds off of information, and when it’s fed information that is wrong,  it goes into a five-alarm alert, setting off fight-or-flight responses.

To help manage your anxiety, check for updates by reputable health organizations such as the Center for Disease Control (CDC) or the World Health Organization (WHO). 

2. Pay attention to how your feeling

Feelings of anxiety are normal and to be expected given the circumstances. Ignoring the anxiety will only make it grow louder in order to gain your attention. Paradoxically, only focusing on your anxiety can make things seem worse than they are.

Mindfulness can be a great tool to help you notice what you’re feeling, allow yourself to acknowledge the feeling without judgment, and continue on with what you were doing. 

3. Identify other factors that may be influencing your anxiety

While there are valid reasons to feel anxious, there may be more happening beneath the surface. Get curious about your anxiety, and consider what other aspects you are responding to, especially if you are aware of heightened sensitivities to germs, death from illnesses, or hospitals. 

4. Controlling what is controllable

There are plenty of things we have no control over. There are also a lot of things we do have control over. Consider engaging in habits  that you do have control over, such as: hand washing, disinfecting household or workspace surfaces, and traveling with hand sanitizer. 

5. Take a break from the news and social media

More information is not always what will help us feel safer. It can be easy to get pulled into echo-chambers of anxiety and fear when we’re constantly plugged in to the latest updates. Mindfulness can help us understand why we’re checking the news and how it serves us. 

6. Grounding activities

It can be easy to get caught up in our worries about what might happen. Grounding yourself in the present moment can be done wherever, whenever. You can mindfully take a walk, wash dishes, or cook dinner all by noticing what you see, feel, and hear right here, right now.

You can also try, the 5-4-3-2-1 technique works by noticing and taking in the details of your surroundings using each of your senses: 

What are 5 things you can see? 

What are 4 things you can touch? 

What are 3 things you can hear? 

What are 2 things you can smell? 

What is 1 thing you can taste? 

Part of a disease's impact is psychological in nature. As humans, we tend to respond to information emotionally. This can include feelings of anxiety, hyper-vigilance, catastrophizing, and helplessness. Mindfulness can be a helpful tool to help us notice our fear, acknowledge it without judgment, and respond proportionally.

Next time, we’ll talk about how to support your child during this global health crisis.  

Codependency: Do You Think You’ll Be Happy If They Change?

Hello again. 

This will be the final installment in my blog series about cognitive distortions and codependent relationships. Those two terms are a mouthful! So for those who haven’t read the previous blogs, let’s start with some definitions.

For these blogs, I’m defining codependency as a bond between someone addicted to a substance, or who engages in dysfunctional behavior(s), and their counterpart, or codependent, who enables their partner’s dysfunctional or addictive behavior.

The codependent, sometimes called the giver, will do all sorts of things that aggravate or perpetuate the taker’s behavior. And the codependent will often make great sacrifices in the name of “caring”. These include trying to fix their counterpart, care-take them, compensate for their irresponsible behaviors, protect them from the negative consequences of their actions, etc. The giver is fueled to do this because their sense of self -- their mood, self-esteem, feelings of well-being, and subsequently their actions -- is often contingent on the taker’s current emotional state, words, or behaviors.

The term cognitive distortion comes from Cognitive Behavioral Therapy or “CBT”. CBT posits that our thoughts, or cognitions, determine our feelings and behaviors. According to CBT theory, cognitive distortions are irrational or exaggerated patterns of thinking that usually lead us to feeling bad or taking unhealthy actions. These are not the thoughts themselves, but paradigms or ways of thinking that cause people to perceive reality inaccurately.

My last two blogs examined two cognitive distortions that are commonly seen in codependent relationships: Blaming and the Control Fallacy. This time we’ll look at the Fallacy of Change.

As with the control fallacy, a person who engages in the fallacy of change unrealistically believes they have the great power to cause their partner to change – in particular, to cause their partner to change to their liking. Since the codependent thinks their happiness and wellbeing depend on their partner being and acting the way the codependent wants, they unknowingly or purposefully manipulate their partner. The codependent becomes highly invested in pressuring, tricking, or humoring their partner into doing what they desire, or being who they want them to be. And they mistakenly believe that these efforts will work! For example a woman thinks that if her husband were only more romantic she’d be happy (despite the multitude of other problems in their relationship), so she hints around about going out for a nice dinner, harps on him “you never give me any little gifts…like flowers!” or tells him directly, “I’d be happy if you were just more romantic!”

The typical example of the Fallacy of Change is the person who believes everything would be perfect if the alcoholic in their life would just stop drinking. They might hide the bottles, threaten to leave if their partner doesn’t stop drinking, or cajole them into going to an AA meeting with a promise of a nice surprise later that night. Invariably the alcoholic is immune to or actively resistant to their efforts, and the codependent is left feeling unhappy and like a failure.

You may recognize two fallacies operating here. 

#1: The codependent believes they would be happy or have what they want and need if their partner would only change and be more (insert adjective) or just do (insert action). 

#2: The codependent has the power -- through their various subtle and not-so-subtle forms of manipulation – to change their partner. 

Neither is realistic. Both are cognitive distortions that lead the codependent, and likely their partner, to feel bad and potentially engage in unhealthy behavior.

You’ve now heard about a few cognitive distortions that codependent people tend to engage in. Perhaps you recognize yourself in one or more of these scenarios, or you think you fall into one of these “cognitive traps.”  Maybe you think your partner is “making” you feel a certain way, or you blame yourself for someone else’s behaviors or feelings. 

Or do you relate to the fallacy of change? Do you hold the belief that your wellbeing depends on your partner changing, and that you have the power to get them to change? 

Change is definitely possible, but the person you have the power to change is the same person whose changing will make you happier. It’s you.

With a mindfulness approach to psychotherapy, you can start to be more present. You can learn to sit still long enough to become aware of your thoughts and feelings. Your therapist can help you look at those thoughts, and the feelings and behaviors that are fueled by them, and see how they might in some way be serving you or have served you in the past. You can start to identify your unrealistic, distorted ways of thinking, and look at the negative consequences they cause: unhealthy behaviors and distressing feelings. And that is the start of your process of change. 

The funny thing is, you may actually experience an additional, unexpected-- yet welcome-- consequence of changing your thoughts and behaviors. When you start doing things differently, the balance in the relationship shifts. The unhealthy dynamic that perpetuated itself in the relationship is destroyed. That will likely cause a shift in the balance in the relationship, and a subsequent feeling of discomfort in your partner. In order to restore a sense of equilibrium – but this time a positive one -- your partner may end up shifting their own behaviors and attitudes. Thus a new and healthier dynamic for relating is born.

Until the next time…

Kayla

Setting Mindful Intentions

Recently I was asked to interview for Pilates Style magazine on creating and maintaining New Year resolutions. In the article, I offered three stages of applying mindfulness to succeed and sustain your aspirations for the new year. The three stages are:

1. Setting Mindful Intentions

2. Putting It Into Practice

3. Maintaining Intentions

Setting Mindful Intentions:

An important first step in setting mindful intentions is to decide how you achieve your goal. One way to adopt and preserve your New Year's intentions is a concept I will highlight called harm reduction. Harm reduction is taking simple yet measurable steps towards a larger goal. 

Why is harm reduction important in setting intentions? Researchers found that people are more likely to succeed when they are rewarded for the small wins along the way. According to a study conducted by Teresa Amabile and Steven J. Kramer, “When we think about progress, we often imagine how good it feels to achieve a long-term goal or experience a major breakthrough. These big wins are great—but they are relatively rare. The good news is that even small wins can boost inner work life tremendously” (Amabile & Kramer, 2011).

I will use a case example of a client named John to help further illustrate mindful intentions through harm reduction.

Putting It Into Practice:

John is a 25-year-old recent college graduate in finance who has been smoking half a pack of cigarettes every day since he was 14 years old. Over the course of several months in therapy, John and I implemented a harm reduction technique to slowly decrease John’s smoking habit. Rather than smoking half a pack, he started to smoke one less cigarette every day for one month. In the subsequent month, John reduced his intake even more by smoking two less cigarettes a day. He continued to reduce the daily number of cigarettes each month in small, manageable increments. 

John was able to identify work stress as his primary trigger. In therapy, we worked together to develop a toolkit of mindfulness technique, such as body scanning, diaphragmatic breathing (breathing from the abdomen instead of the chest) and waiting 10 minutes before picking up his next cigarette. By combining mindfulness and harm reduction techniques,  John was eventually smoking only one cigarette per day, a dramatic change from his daily half a pack habit. 

Maintaining Intentions:

Now that I covered the first two stages, let’s talk about the third and most important stage: maintenance. Accountability is important for maintaining new habits because we all have blind spots. In the mental health industry, we call them cognitive distortions. Some examples are denial, minimizing, and all-or-nothing thinking. By setting mindful intentions and engaging in harm reduction techniques, you can shift out of the all-or-nothing mindset of “I am a failure because I fell off the wagon” to a healthier and more sustainable narrative such as “I can take this one step at a time, be patient, and not judge my progress.”

The reality is, the three stages of Intention Setting, Putting It Into Practice, and Maintenance is challenging for all of us. But, by seeking support, practicing harm reduction, and implementing mindfulness skills, we can take manageable steps towards a happier, healthier year.