On a good day, I have only failed a few times at the world’s most important job before I even head out the door to the job that pays my bills. As a full-time-working mother of three boys and lifelong overachiever, I have developed an intimate relationship with the voice that says: “It’s never enough, you are never enough.”
By Catharine Meyers, Associate Publisher of New Harbinger Publications
We publish books aimed to help readers overcome mental health issues. Our mission is to provide evidence-based tools that help people understand the root causes of their suffering, or psychological struggles, and heal themselves.
“The conscious mind is a self-healing mind,” says psychiatrist and philosopher Roger Walsh. He is right. Just look at fear for example. The message of fear is, “Flee.” Our first impulse is to follow this instruction. So we think and act in an attempt to escape the fear.
When I was in high school, I had mixed feelings about going back to school each year. I loved the idea of a fresh start. Every year, I got a new opportunity to start over, to reinvent myself. Though I remember loving this time of year, that wasn’t the case for many of my friends. Some of them would practically get sick before school started because they were so stressed out.
As therapists, we’ve all experienced those moments when we’re talking about a stressful topic or doing an exposure intervention and, all of a sudden, the client seems to be flooded with anxiety or gives you a blank, spacey stare. They may even look like they’re about to run out of your office. This is the time to use a grounding strategy.
Dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) is a treatment that was originally created by Marsha Linehan and her team to treat individuals with borderline personality disorder (BPD). Folks with BPD have what’s called pervasive emotion dysregulation—in other words, they struggle to identify what they’re feeling, don’t have the skills to effectively manage the emotions that arise, and end up turning to problem behaviors (such as suicide attempts, self-harming behaviors, or substance use), in an attempt to cope.
When you practice mindfulness as a way of life, over time you start to notice that your understanding of what it means will naturally deepen. You may find an increased capacity to respond more flexibly to the present moment both in your personal life and your clinical work. But even when you have intimately experienced and felt the depth of the practice, you may somehow still struggle to describe it or put it into words when necessary for client work.
