How Can I Help Clients with Overwhelming Emotions?
Another mini-interview with Psychotherapy Networker – such timing. Exploring how positive emotions are not a bypass for dealing with difficulties. In fact, they shift the functioning of the brain to more receptivity, openness to learning, and optimize. resilience is the direct measurable cause and effect outcome.
I will be teaching many exercises to cultivate gratitude, compassion, awe, tec. In my new online course Resilience 2.0™, explain the science behind why these practices work so reliable will to strengthen our resilience.
One of my favorites is the Web of Life, gratitude for the people who keep our lives going – farmers, postal workers, bus drivers, sanitation workers, even if we have never met them.
Gratitude for the Web of Life
1. Recall people you know who are helping you keep your life going in this moment: someone who helped you find your reading glasses; a friend who sent a supportive e-mail; a co-worker who took over your duties for the day when a nasty flu simply would not let you get out of bed.
2. Take a moment to focus on any felt sense of thankfulness these recollections evoke; notice where you feel any sense of gratitude as you let the sensations resonate in your body.
3. Expand the circle of your awareness to gratitude for the people who also keep your life going but you have never met yet: staffing your local hospital right now, in case you slip on a rug on the way to the bathroom, break a bone, and have to be rushed to the emergency room. You might include people staffing grocery stores, pharmacies, fire stations, gas stations, those testing water quality at the municipal reservoir so that when you turn on the kitchen faucet you have drinkable water to drink, the people who fix potholes in the street. Practice gratitude for the people growing your food and recycling your garbage, for the entire web of life that keeps your life going, moment to moment to moment.
4. Take a moment to reflect on this experience of practicing gratitude and empathy for helpful people in your life and for the larger web of life. Sense the feelings your practice evokes. Notice any changes in your own emotions or thoughts about yourself as you focus on cultivating gratitude.
It’s important to say here that gratitude practice lays the foundation for one of the key practices in transforming any adversity into learning and growth – finding the silver lining, the gift in the mistake of any trauma, and real upheaval of a life. That tool, finding the silver lining, can be a real turning point in someone’s recovery from trauma, and we’re building the muscles for it with gratitude practice.
Another good preview of Resilience 2.0™ –