Relapse Prevention

·         The best way to prevent a lapse is to keep practicing your CBT skills! If you are regularly practicing, you will be in good shape to handle whatever situations you are faced with.

·         Know your red flag early warning signs. Watch for times when you feel more stressed too or when things happen in your life. I shared mine with my wife and she sometimes notices before me and reminds me to look through my toolkit.

·         Use your action plan even if you are feeling well. It really reminded me to set aside time to look after myself.

·         Put your review day on the calendar each month in a colored pen so you know it is your review time, or leave a post it note on the fridge or kettle.

·         Be compassionate to yourself, we all have negative thoughts or times when we don’t feel like doing things, remember it is doing the opposite that helps. When I noticed I may not be feeling like something, like going to see a friend, I make sure I go.

·         Focus on the present moment. If you notice you are having worrying thoughts, or going over things again and again in your mind, the best thing to do is an activity that focuses your attention. It helps to stop you ruminating or worrying and making yourself feel worse.

·         Think about small changes you can make that add up to big changes you may still want to do. Think of the big change as like the end destination you put in your sat nav. Even when it feels far off, there are little directions you can take to get nearer to where you want to be and that make sure you are still heading in the right direction.

·         Reflect on how far you have come rather than just the things you may still want to do or improve.

·         Don’t get too over focused on reviewing your mood, use your toolkit as often as you need to and with a weekly or monthly review day that you stick to. It does not have to be every day and remember that your mood will fluctuate up and down at times and that is normal and OK!

1. Mindful response

• Moving towards situations rather than away from them

• Focusing on the world as a whole, not just on anxious symptoms

• A calm, wise approach to difficulties

• Accepting physical sensations as they are

• Seeing thoughts as just thoughts

• Being grounded in the present

• Putting effort into what really matters

• Being compassionate with your experience

Result:

• Letting go of the struggle with experience

• Focusing instead on living as you would really like to

So  maybe  there  is  a  way  to  stop  treating  anxiety,  sadness  and  other  difficulties as problems that need to be controlled or solved. Our habitual ways of trying to fix such problems often make them worse. Instead, willingness to be with painful thoughts,  feelings,  urges  or  sensations,  without  trying  to  change,  escape  from or  avoid  them,  allows  us  to  be  more  psychologically  flexible.  This can make a profound difference to our effectiveness, vitality and contentment

2. Automatic ‘fight or flight’ reaction

• Avoiding situations, hiding away

• Checking anxiously

• Being on the alert

• Endlessly seeking reassurance

• Focusing obsessively on physical sensations 

• Anxious thoughts are big and ‘true’

• Getting tangled up in thoughts, eg ‘What if…?’, ‘I can’t …’

• Worrying

• Distracted - dwelling in the future

• Beating yourself up for being anxious or ‘weak

Result:

• Impulsive behaviors

• Constant struggle

• Exhaustion

• Narrowing of life         

                               

Mindfulness is the practice of paying attention to our experience in a particular way. It means:

• ‘just noticing’ thoughts, feelings and physical sensations

• experiencing them for what they are, rather than getting wrapped  up in them or trying to change them 

• letting go of judgments and evaluations about thoughts, feelings and physical sensations

• and as a result really dwelling in the present moment rather than in the past or future.

So anxious thoughts are not pleasant thoughts. And they are usually accompanied by physical sensations of anxiety, which will compound the discomfort. It’s all the more understandable, then, that we get caught up in these thoughts big time, and wrestle with them

                               

It’s very easy, when we are engaged fully in the struggle with anxiety, to lose a sense of perspective. Sometimes it seems as if we are putting all our energies into the struggle, and all we can see is the struggle. When we start to drop the struggle, though, and step back from our thoughts and feelings, we can get a much wider view. And this view is important – it’s the view of where we really want to go. After all, what do we want our lives to stand for? Do we want to be remembered for having gone into battle with anxiety? (And lost.) Instead, can we courageously take our anxiety with us in valued directions in life?

There is such a deeply rooted belief that we must do something with intense surges of feeling and emotion as they wash through: understand them, determine their cause, link them to some life circumstance or person, transform them, transmute them, or even “heal” them.

The pathways of abandonment are many, and were weaved into our sensitive little nervous systems as young children who did not have the capacity to metabolize the intensity in an environment of presence. Out of the very intelligent need to escape, we unfolded unique strategies of fight/ flight/ freeze, to take us out of dysregulating states of intense vulnerability and groundlessness, and away from the overwhelming aliveness of the somatic and emotional worlds.

But what if for just one moment, you did absolutely nothing in response to the arising of emotional intensity? If you neither repressed nor denied it, nor acted it out or sought to discharge the energy as it surges? What if the most wise, loving, attuned response was to take no action? Not some sort of cold, detached, uncaring, resigned “nothing,” but one that was filled with warmth, holding, and a relentless sort of self-care? To make a commitment to no longer abandon the uninvited ones as they erupt, seeking holding?
And discover, finally, if your heartbreak must be mended, if the sadness must be transformed into happiness, if the fear must be sent away, if the anger must be abandoned, and if you must turn from the fire as it rages. This is a “doing nothing” that is the doorway into the sacred world, to reuniting with the orphaned ones of your inner family – not by fueling a story about what happened, who is to blame, and what the presence of these ones mean about your worth as a person. But through encoding new circuitry – guided by slowness, by love, by empathy, and by attunement.

These feelings and emotions are pure energy flow and information. They are not enemies or obstacles on your path, but are the very path itself. They have not come to harm you but only to be allowed back in to the majestic vastness that you are. They are none other than Life itself, taking a wrathful appearance, longing to get your attention and to remind you of something you’ve forgotten. And to reveal that it is only in their abandonment, not in their nature, that suffering can take root and flower here.

This ‘doing nothing’ is not a cold, passive resignation, but is an alive, sacred activity, infused with the light of awareness and a wild, relentless sort of compassion. To do nothing in this way is a radical act of kindness and love, filled with qualities of earth and warmth, and a holy gift that you can offer yourself and others.

We need to be kinder to ourselves instead of punishing ourselves for feeling things, even if those feelings may not be convenient or “manly” or fall within any other self-imposed restrictions. Don’t be down on yourself for feeling those inconvenient emotions; give yourself credit for handling them. Forgive yourself for feeling in a way that isn’t helpful or for being imperfect. Instead of fighting them, work with them.