Why does this piss me off - I am sitting there in skills group and we are all doing a check in as to how our week was with practicing the skills that we learned the week before. There was this one girl there who said that there was so much stuff going on in her life that she didn't even think about her "homework". She was making so many excuses for so many things, I'm thinking "what the hell are you even doing here?" I don't think she is in the mind place to have this therapy work. I want to smack her up the side of the head but I, myself, have to practice my skills and remain mindful. (LOL See what I did there :-) )
OK enough venting.
Today we had our second mindfulness lesson. Learned about the What and How skills.
Mindfulness skills help us balance "emotion mind" and "reasonable mind" to achieve "wise mind".
Mindfulness skills help us tolerate intense negative emotions, experience positive emotions, think clearly in order to solve problems and avoid numbing out, zoning out, dissociating and/or acting impulsively in the face of emotional pain.
Mindfulness WHAT TO DO skills
1. Observe - simply sense, notice or experience without describing or labeling the event. Notice what is occurring in the present moment without reacting to it.
2. Describe - use words to represent what has been observed. It is labeling what is observed. Put the experience into words. This can only be applied to observed experiences. You cannot describe what someone else is thinking or feeling, you can only describe what you directly see or experience.
3. Participate - enter wholly into an activity and becoming one with it. Throw yourself into something completely. Lose self-consciousness.
I personally had a slight issue grasping the concept of this participating thing so I'm going to enter an example here. A parent who is tossing a ball back and forth to their child but is also talking to a neighbour is most likely not entering into either activity completely. If that parent stops playing ball for five minutes to talk to the neighbour, s/he has now fully entered into that experience.
Mindfulness HOW TO DO skills
1. One-Mindfully: This is ultimately the opposite of multitasking. It is focusing on one thing at a time, doing one thing at a time and being aware of this experience. It is not being distracted by thoughts and images of the past, worries about the future or focusing on current negative moods.
2. Non-Judgmentally: This is observing and describing things as they are without adding or deleting information, attaching adjectives or colouring with emotion. Labels, such as mean, nice, ugly, fat, good, stupid or perfect, are not used. This is a way to decrease emotions in order to directly solve problems.
3. Effectively: This is behaving in a way that will make a situation work for both you and others.. Do what works for you and the situation without being carried away by your emotions and acting as skillfully as you can.
So that is what we learned and what we had to practice for homework. Not sure how successful I was at the homework thing this week. I was really distracted with moving and unpacking and such. I guess I did get to practice other skills though like radical acceptance and distress tolerance through distraction. Lots of distraction - shampooing carpets, coffee group, unpacking, walking the dog, etc...
That's all for now....
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