Finding Positive Thinking Patterns

Vivienne Greene authored one of my favorite quotes.  It states “Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass, it’s about learning to dance in the rain”. To me, this is an important message about finding the positives in all the things in your life, even those that could otherwise be construed as negative.   This is especially important for those who suffer with depression.  Negative thinking can lead to feelings of hopelessness and people with depression tend to get mired in negative thinking.

One technique I teach patients is a form of a pro and con list.  Whenever you begin to feel overwhelmed with everything that seems to be going wrong or seems to be negative in your life, make a list of those things.  Then you draw a line down the center and try to make a list on the opposite side of any positive you can think of about that situation.  For instance, you may say “my son had to have emergency surgery” as the negative thought and the responding positive may be “thankfully he is through the surgery, doing well and will make a full recovery”.  In part, this is acknowledging the old adage of remembering that things could always be worse.  In fact, if you are struggling to come up with the positive in the situation you can always ask yourself how it could be worse.  It will always be a positive that the worse thing didn’t happen!

Over time, this technique can help to change your negative thinking, but I must warn you that it does not work overnight.  It takes practice to rewire the way your brain thinks.  I often have to remind patients that they did not start thinking negatively yesterday and, therefore, thinking positively is not going to take effect overnight either.  Seeing the world in a different light is worth all of the effort involved in getting there and the more you practice the better you will become.  The hope is that eventually you won’t need the list or the negative thoughts to be able to see the positive ones.  They may just naturally occur to you instead.

Choosing Therapeutic Activities

In my practice, I am always connecting with other professionals who offer services that my clients may also need.  In a recent conversation with one of these professionals, a wonderful occupational therapist that I often refer appropriate cases to, she happened to bring up a question she often hears from parents: are there activities I should be doing with my child that will enhance the therapeutic process?  In this world of overscheduled children, it is often difficult for parents to narrow down the activities with which they should get their children involved.  This leads to a desire to “kill two birds with one stone” and focus energy on activities that will be enjoyable but may also work on issues that the child is facing.  This discussion with the occupational therapist caused me to take a deeper look into what other activities could be used to help kids work on the issues that bring them to my office.

For my colleague, her answers are straightforward.  Any activities that involve fine or gross motor skills and offer sensory input are great.  If you have a child with fine motor issues, enroll them in piano, guitar, art class or rock climbing, for example.  All of these activities require the use of pressure and muscles within your hands and strengthen those things.  For balance issues, yoga, gymnastics, karate or dance might be a good recommendation.  But what can I offer as suggestions to parents whose kids have ADHD, social anxiety or poor self-esteem? I began to look at what skills I was trying to build and what activity would help build those same skills.

So if your child has social anxiety or low self-esteem, you would be looking for an activity that builds confidence and allows them to build comfort with being part of groups and builds leadership skills.  Girl or Boy Scouts seem like a great way to achieve these things.  Volunteering is also great for this.  Look for opportunities for your child to become a part of the community at large.  Work at a soup kitchen or food drive. 

If your child has ADHD, you will likely be looking for activities that promote working memory and executive functioning skills.  In order to accommodate their need for stimulation and activity, you might steer your child toward active things that are more solitary in nature such as running or swimming.  As an added bonus, you could involve them in things that are active but involve strategy such as fencing or rock climbing.  Activities that require thinking ahead or anticipating an opponent’s next move will help them train their brain to slow down and organize information.  Chess is a fantastic game for these kids.

Instead of just signing our kids up for whatever activities in which they express an interest, given the limitations on everyone’s time these days, I think it is smart to think about how an activity might help them learn the life skills they need in a fun and natural way.  Instead of having to fight with them to practice skill building activities that seem like work, they can be building the same skills in a way that they enjoy.  While this doesn’t replace the need for therapeutic intervention, it certainly could lessen the time that is required and build skills that could grow with your child throughout their lives.   Using these methods can help you incorporate these interventions into your child’s activities in a more time efficient and enjoyable manner. 

Connecting with Your Children

I recently re-read parts of Dr. Laura Markham’s book Peaceful Parent, Happy Kids in order to find some wisdom to help me through a difficult situation with one of my own children.  Interestingly, it took looking through this book to remind myself that the underlying issue was a lack of connection with my child.  I realized that I often take for granted that my children feel special, loved and connected to me.  If every decision I make about their lives is made with love, surely they feel that love, right?  Unfortunately, it is not uncommon for parents to fall into a trap believing that their children understand their motivations and that because they have obvious love for their children they do not have to work hard to show those children empathy. 

In my professional and personal experience, most problems that occur when parenting are related to our own personal emotional triggers and the fact that we take our connection with our children for granted.  It is important to notice when interactions with your children are upsetting to you or them.  Is it upsetting because you are reacting to the current situation or is your response really triggered by a memory of something else in your past?  Most of us desire for our children to have better experiences than we did and want to protect them from hurts we experienced.  However, your child is not you and their experiences are uniquely their own.  Knowing what your triggers are so you can identify them and remove their emotional volatility when dealing with your children will help to make sure that you are effectively addressing the problem currently at hand.

Once you identify and neutralize your emotional triggers, the most important predictor of a positive outcome is a strong connection to your child.  They are going to have difficult moments in their lives, so it is important that they feel that you understand and validate their feelings.  One advantage to this is that they will be more likely to respond to and satisfy your requests if they feel connected to you.  Also, experiencing empathy from you is the first step in modeling for them how to validate their feelings and find others in their lives who do as well.  Having empathy is not the same as agreeing with everything they say.  Certainly there may be experiences where you know as parent that more candy will prevent them from eating a nutritious dinner and make them get a tummy ache, but you can also sympathize with how difficult it is to be disappointed when they don’t get what they want. 

For more information on this subject I highly recommend that you read the aforementioned book.  While you are working your way through the book, though, make sure you are taking the time to work on your parent-child bond by becoming more self-aware, listening to your child and offering empathy for their feelings.  It is not enough to love them unconditionally; they need to know and experience that you do.  We all know that life can be hard and complicated enough, so spend your time being your children’s safe and supportive place.

Hitting the Pause Button

While there are many techniques that I employ in my therapy practice, some are favorites that have a lot of applications.  Lately I seem to be talking to a lot of my patients about “hitting the pause button”.  Like many therapists I love using metaphors to help myself and patients visualize techniques.  Hitting the pause button is a visual everyone seems to be able to pull into their imaginations.  When I tell people to hit the pause button, I want them to take a mental pause.  It is a great way to get them to stop or slow down to process things in a different way before reacting.

There are many applications for this technique but I find it especially useful for people who struggle with immediate emotional reactions.  I will always teach this technique to people who need anger management help, but it is also effective for helping to control anxiety response and strong emotional reactions.  The key is if you feel yourself having a strong emotional reaction to, as soon as possible, visualize hitting the pause button. 

While you are paused you do not respond to others, you may even choose to remove yourself from the situation.  The intention is not to avoid the dilemma, but to take a break to allow your emotional response to fade a bit and your rational mind to take over.  This break is supposed to give you time to process what triggered your emotional response, rationally consider what are your options for dealing with this situation, and calmly select which option is going to get you closest to your goal.  You will find that when you are having a strong emotion your reaction is often not the one that will get you closest to your goal, but rather the one that will make you feel an immediate release. 

I like the idea of pausing, but self-imposed timeouts can work as well.  However, such timeouts will not work if you do not pause your self-talk.  Pausing does not mean sitting and obsessing about the situation while you work yourself up further.  It means taking the time to calm yourself in order to respond thoughtfully and appropriately to life’s dilemmas.  While truly pausing and calming yourself may be hard initially, with practice it becomes easier to do.  As you become more effective in employing this tool, you will almost certainly find yourself less embarrassed and regretful about your responses when you take the time to pause.  Often, your first response is not the best one.  Take the time to fully consider your response to stimuli before you act on it.  The results can be profound. 

Reconnecting Your Relationship

It is sadly unsurprising to me that the divorce rate has become so high over the years.  I see a lot of couples who needed help far sooner than they realized and had no idea how to get started on working their way back to a solid relationship.  While many things can create cracks in the foundation of a marriage, the largest issue is a lack of connection.  It is difficult, if not impossible, to weather storms such a financial stress or childrearing difficulties with a spouse if you do not feel connected to them.  Over time fissures of anger and resentment or alienation can cause substantial damage to that connection.  The person who coined the phrase that marriage is “hard work” wasn’t making a comical observation.  If you do not invest the work into your marriage to maintain a strong connection, your marriage will suffer.

Couples need help remembering how to communicate with each other in a positive way instead of replaying the loop of their arguments repeatedly.  I often recommend spending some special time several nights a week checking in with each other.  This is a time where distractions such as phones and the TV should be shut off in order to respectfully offer your spouse your full attention.  I normally ask couples to list some issues that often trigger arguments.  Those issues become taboo during these conversations.  Those are the issues that may need to be talked through later when communication is re-established or worked through in therapy with an outside party mediating.  The goal of these conversations is to create a stronger connection.  The truth is that if you have a stronger connection with, and greater empathy and affection for, your spouse, you will naturally try harder to be respectful and kind when talking about the harder topics. 

Many couples tell me that they have no idea what to talk about that isn’t their usual argument or the surface level day to day conversations.  Neither one of these topics is going to help forge the reconnection I am talking about.  I often suggest the couple start with a recollection of the beginning of their relationship.  Do they both remember how they met?  What they thought and felt during significant early dating experiences?  These conversations will hopefully help them remember why they chose to marry in the first place and what their relationship is capable of being.  It also presents positively emotionally charged ground for them to agree and build on. 

It is not hard to build on this conversation and make it more present focused.  Do they still feel that their spouse shows them that love?  What do they love about their spouse now?  What are ways they both think they can strengthen the relationship?  Hopefully, if done successfully, this conversation can be the first of many on their way to reconnecting.  It requires a real commitment on the part of both individuals to be willing to change current patterns and re-create or strengthen their relationship.  The idea is to learn new ways to make each other a priority again and I don’t know anyone who doesn’t want to be a priority to their spouse.  Even if you think that your marriage is strong, it never hurts to remember fondly together.  Who knows what knowledge you may gain about your spouse’s thoughts and feelings that may leave you smiling the next day?