7 Ways Counseling Can Help You Make Life Changing Adjustments Easier ….to Anything
After helping countless clients through difficult adjustments, here are 7 proven ways counseling can make transitions easier, in no particular order.
Adjustments and significant life changes bring about some common experiences for people going through them. The foremost of these is the takeover of Emotion Mind. When your life had the balance of equal measure of the rational and the emotional (of both joy and unhappiness), unexpected and unplanned change brings the overwhelm of emotions, with Emotion Mind driving your bus. You are no longer in control, that balance has been hijacked. Somebody else needs to teach you how to retake that wheel. Enter your counselor or psychotherapist. She can help you....
Reduce Overwhelm
As I tell my clients, you are always in control of some things though it may take time to remember that. So it's OK to go on to the second one listed here (Bring Clarity and Focus) because that will help you get back here.
There is a great therapist aid I used early on, a list of 50 Things You Can Control In This Moment, adapted from Lori Deschene's blog on the topic ( https://tinybuddha.com/blog/50-things-you-can-control-right-now). The important part of my title was “In This Moment” because that is the part we all forget – to be in this moment rather than rehashing that moment from the past or rehearsing some imagined moment of the future. This rehashing and rehearsing often showing up as depression or anxiety, respectively (but not exclusively). Instead, if we look to this moment and control what we can in the here and now, we begin to reduce the overwhelm. What can you control in this moment? Whether or not you pay the bills now or tomorrow, how much time to spend on Facebook, what to have for dinner. These small, small decisions that you can take have just become adjustment baby steps.
Bring Clarity and Focus
Once Emotion Mind has you in its grip, you usually need someone from the outside yanking you back into reality. Sometimes our family and friends can do that, for sure, but just as often you will resent what feels like judgment to you – or maybe that's what you are getting. The 'it's been over a year, get over it' kind of comment lurks here. In contrast, as counselors we're trained to bring the facts into focus if for no other reason than because we have no skin in the game, as friends and family do. Grounding is one of the easiest to learn, most portable, and most potent of the skills I teach clients. The second part of the process is some cognitive reframing, a skill that's a little more complicated but it doesn't take all that long if you make the investment to practice. The key is learning the difference between feelings and facts.
Find Freedom from Guilt and 'The Shoulds'
Counseling can get you out of one huge trap Emotion Mind pulls us into -every last one of us- is 'The Shoulds' that run rampant through our thoughts delivering us into the harmful hands of Guilt. 'The Shoulds' are self-imposed rules that challenge many of our choices. How can you know what you want if your very own 'Shoulds' shut you down? How can you 'move on' when you doubt yourself? And if you don't do the 'Should' how much guilt will live rent-free in your head?
Replace that 'Should' with 'Want' instead, to guide your path. Try it. Your latest 'Should' statement might have been 'I should wash the kitchen floor today.' How do you feel? OK, swap the words out and lets see how you feel then: 'I want to wash the kitchen floor today.' Really? Which one of these framings gives you a feeling that you have a choice, a sense that you can control what you do today, guilt-free? None of us gets what we want all the time or even most of the time, perhaps, but the first step here is to learn how to get free of the guilt and build self-efficacy.
When you learn how to reframe 'The Shoulds' you will find that Increased Motivation and Building Momentum follow along quickly afterwards. And there will be plenty of guidance there, but less than you might think you need before you have given yourself the chance to restore them. You have amazing resources within that sometimes just don't have the moxie to come out when Emotion Mind is in charge.
Celebrate Successes
This is a skill that takes lots of practice, and most women are way behind here. We all know how to do it, we can do it, but do we? Nope – very, very seldom do we celebrate our successes. In contratst, we see the backward steps, the stagnation, the self-sabotage, the oopsies as if they were lit up on a theatre marquis. Just know that this is evolutionarily adaptive – this seeing the pitfalls, the dangers. It's OK. If our ancient ancestors hadn't learned from their mistakes, if they hadn't screwed up, they would never have learned to survive – we're not the biggest or strongest creatures on the planet. And, we aren't living in the 'Stone Age' any more so lets use new ways of doing things.
The key for women in our era, then, is to celebrate the successes. OK, I hear you saying to yourself, I'll get to that ''right after,' and 'when I have time' or 'once I've done X, Y, or Z.' Damn, those engrained patterns will out. You and I both know that 'right after..', 'when I have time' and 'once I've done X, Y, or Z' never come. You do know how to do this and it is one of those things we, as women, don't do. And without it, it's hard to keep that motivation and momentum. Let me, as your counselor, show you that rewarding yourself isn't selfish, it's fun, and it can put that motivation and momentum on steroids.
Let me give a quick, cute and perfect example. When my kids were young and had to clean their rooms -ugh, the pain of just thinking of it- I had a great way of motivating them. And as a bonus, I think I taught them to do this stuff for themselves. I promised ice cream sundaes when we all were finished with our rooms – me, too (I gave myself the same chore). Need I say more? Those rooms got cleaned and because they had found toys that had been lost under the bed or whatever, they got new motivation for playing with them.
So there you have it: 7 ways counseling can help you adjust...to anything. Let your friends be friends and your family be family, and find the counselor or therapist that fits you. It's not selfish, it's not a 'Should'. With a little help, you can adjust to significant life change. Yeah, you.
