Dialectics: Learning How to Find Balance and Walk the Middle Path

This episode was pre recorded as part of a live continuing education webinar on demand. CEUs are still available for this presentation through all CEUs. Register@Allce.com Counselortoolbox you. I'd like to welcome everybody to today's presentation. Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills. Today we're talking about dialectical strategies. So we're going to start by defining dialectical strategies. And you know, we could have put this at the beginning of the series on dialectical behavior therapy, but I find a lot of times people want to get into the nitty gritty of what are the tools that I can use. So we're kind of working backwards and we're going to define the theory that underlies a lot of dialectical theory. And then we're also going to review some dialectical strategies to help clients identify truth and reality. Remember, we talked about truth as being something that can be synthesized from multiple points of view. There's not necessarily one single truth and reality as ever changing and ever evolving, which a lot of clients, if you just kind of put it that way, look at you like you've got three heads. What are you talking about? So we're going to try to figure out how to break it down and make analogies. I encourage you to think about whatever setting you're in, the types of analogies that you could use to help them understand. Sort of walking the middle path and understanding the dialectics. Remember, if you are new, the other people have heard this before. If you have anything to add, any comments, you've worked with this before and you want to put in your two cents. That's fabulous. Just go ahead and put it in the chat window and I will segue that in as quickly as possible. So the universe is filled with opposing sides or forces. So we want to look at things like good and bad, happy, sad, right and wrong, willingness versus willfulness, content versus process, and following the rules versus reinforcing assertiveness. So let's think about it in terms of losses. Think about a loss that your clients generally experience. And we can stick with really obvious, tangible losses like death or loss of custody or something that's less abstract than loss of hope for the purposes of what we're doing right now. So let's talk about death. Everybody experiences death in their life and it can feel really oppressive and it can honestly feel like it really sucks. So we want to say, how can there be two sides to death, good and bad? Well, you know, when my father passed, it was devastating to me. It was just awful. And you Know, I can identify the bad real easy in that, but the good was a little bit harder to come by until I kind of turned my mind to the fact that he wasn't suffering anymore and depressed. Depending on what your spiritual beliefs are about souls and afterlife and that kind of stuff, you can also find other good in death. So looking at what are the good and the bad things about this, because when daddy was alive, he was going through chemotherapy and it was really stressful, not only on him, I mean, he was in a lot of pain, but it was stressful on everybody. So it was a relief in some ways to my stepmother when he finally passed because he was at peace so she could be at peace. So looking for the good and the bad. Now, when good things happen, we typically don't look for the other shoe to drop. So a lot of times we don't do this in reverse. You can, but it's not as productive in my opinion. Thinking again about just staying with the death metaphor for right now. Happy versus sad. Now, some people see death and going to heaven as a happy occasion, but those of us who are still here on earth see it as a sad occasion. Again, it's going to depend with that particular loss on your spiritual beliefs. Not a whole lot right or wrong. Well, there is. When people start thinking about death, they may be angry and may think it was wrong that this person had to die now or that this person had to die and they had to stay behind. So looking at, okay, that person passed on and you're still here. So what's right about that? How can you make that right? If that person was a wonderful person, how can you emulate that now? To embrace the right in addition to what you feel like is really a tragedy right now. Willingness versus willfulness, a willingness to let go, a willingness to accept that something has happened versus a willfulness of kind of plugging your ears and closing your eyes and going, I just am not going to pay attention. When again, my personal experience when daddy passed, I didn't want to accept it. So for two years after he passed, I did not go back down to South Florida. And in my mind I could pick up the phone. I mean, I knew I couldn't. But it was not much different than when he was alive because, you know, we weren't a real close, touchy feely family that called and talked all the time. So it took a while before I hit the willingness to accept that he was gone. And that was actually another layer of the grieving process for me. So experiencing and being Willing to experience the grief and come to acceptance instead of denial or resistance is an important part in walking the middle path. Understanding that you have to be willing to accept it, but also willfully going into it and forcing yourself to look at what is being willing to do it, and then forcing yourself. Content versus process. You know, we're really looking at what is actually happening. You know, the physical manifestation of what this loss is. And if the person has died, the person is no more. But process is. What does that mean to you? What does that mean that they are no longer there in the physical body? You can combine both sides. You know, yes, the person's physically completely gone, but are their memories still there? Are. Is their spirit still there? Is there? You know, again, I'm treading on some real touchy territory for some people. So I obviously would investigate with my clients where their spiritual beliefs were before I went down this road to know where the dialectics were that we were going to talk about. But understanding there's the manifest content and the latent content, if you will, or the process. And then the last one is following the rules versus reinforcing assertiveness. And this doesn't always apply. You know, obviously in death, this is not one that's really going to apply. Now I'm going to go through a little quicker. One other loss that people experience a lot is a loss of a job. It may happen, and it can be a loss because you got fired or a loss because you quit, but the job is no longer. So there are good and bad aspects to that. There are things you're going to be elated about and things you're going to be sad about. I just had a friend who retired and, you know, there are certain aspects that she is just thrilled that she doesn't have to get up at 5am every morning and go to work. But she misses the people that she used to work with and she's sad not to be working with the clients. So you've got to be able to look at both sides of it and accept that some things are bittersweet, if you will. When you're making a decision about losing a job or changing jobs, about this job loss process, there are going to be right things about it and wrong things about it. If you're getting ready to do it voluntarily, you're going to look at basically, what are the benefits, what are the right things, right reasons to stay in this job, and what are the wrong reasons to stay in this job and make that decision. No job is perfect. So encouraging people to look at whether it's a job they just left or they got fired from or where they're going. You know, it may feel really wrong that they got let go or laid off. So how can they turn that into lemonade? How can they make that right? How can they turn that into an opportunity to do something new and awesome and amazing? Which comes back to willingness versus willfulness, A willingness to embrace change or a willfulness digging your feet in like one of my donkeys trying to go in the barn and saying, no, you know, I liked it the way it was. I want to go back there. Well, we know we can't go back in the past. We haven't figured out how to time travel, nor would we probably really want to if we had the opportunity. So encouraging people to look at what are you willing to do? Are you willing to embrace the change and resist that willfulness? There's a part of them that is going to be willful and not wanting to make. Not want to make that same mistake again. So that's good. Content versus process. Again, you've got. You lost this particular job, but the process is, what does that mean? What does losing this job mean about you? Mean about your situation, mean about the world? So you're going to balance the fact that, yeah, the job's gone, but where's the meaning in that? And put the two of them together, following the rules versus reinforcing assertiveness. And this is really passivity versus assertiveness. And sometimes it's not worth making waves. Sometimes you just say, yes, okay, I'll take my lumps and I'll go on with it. Because it's something you decide that's not worth the energy at that point in time versus making the decision that, you know what, I need to stand up for myself and I need to be assertive in this situation. And having people understand that there are times for both. And it's important to be able to walk that middle path and figure out when it's time to be assertive and when it's time to just let it go. Changes are the same way. Anytime there's a change, you move. You have a child, you get married. There are going to be dialectics to it. Nothing is a hundred percent perfect, but I truly believe nothing has to be a hundred percent wrong. So looking at where, where's the good stuff and what can we find sort of in the middle so we don't feel like we're stuck over here in the pit of despair? It's helpful. Now, I don't want to. I'm not encouraging you to tell your clients that, you know, just look at the bright side, because that's really annoying and invalidating. However, at a certain point, you want to try to look at how to make lemonade out of lemons. You know, let's experience the sadness, the grief, the anger, the unpleasant, unhelpful or helpful however it is emotions and go through that. But once you experience them and you address them and it's time to move on because we can't stay stuck there forever, then we've got to decide how to do that. And that's where the dialectics really are helpful. It's when you choose to improve the next moment and say, okay, I've identified all the this side of the dialectics. And again, most of the time when we're talking about it in counseling, they've already identified the negative sides to everything. So let's look at how we can find the silver lining or put a little sunshine into it or whatever metaphor you want to use. There's always more than one way to see a situation and more than one way to solve a problem. And I've noticed, I mean, a lot of the people that are on my Facebook friends list are people in recovery and I value their opinion, love reading about different recovery stories and all that kind of stuff. But one thing that I find troubling to a certain extent is how vehemently some people cling on to the idea that their process of recovery is the only process of recovery for anybody out there. That's not a dialectic. The dialectic says there's more than one way to solve a problem and not everything is going to work for everybody. And it's so important as clinicians that we realize that, yeah, the 12 steps are there and with the right sponsor and under the right circumstances, especially if there's nothing major CO occurring issues, 12 steps can be very, very useful and helpful. And lots of people have recovered using the 12 steps without counseling. I'm not going to dispute that. However, there's a whole lot of people who have not gotten that far for whatever reason that fell through the cracks, if you will. So in order to embrace recovery from a dialectical standpoint, we want to recognize. And when I say recovery, I don't mean just addiction recovery. I'm talking about anxiety, depression, bipolar, even schizophrenia. Although there are some more standard protocols for schizophrenia as far as medication, helping that person integrate into a higher quality of life is going to differ for each person. So there's always a slightly different path in recovery. There are good and bad aspects to every approach. Whether it's medication assisted recovery, which is like your methadone and your Vivitrol and that kind of stuff, or 12 step recovery, or smart recovery, or celebrate recovery, or any of those. There are great aspects and for some people, they are amazing and they work. But there are also bad aspects. And if those bad aspects are, you know, outweigh the good aspects, then we may need to look at a different path. And we also need to understand that two things that seem opposite can be true. Can you love someone and hate them at the same time? And those are two really strong words. So that could be a whole different therapeutic discussion. But when we're talking about opposites, let's talk about that right now to illustrate the point. Yeah, you can love someone but hate their behaviors. And when we talk about opposites, that's kind of what I encourage people to look at, is let's really define what these ends of the dialectics are. What is it that seems opposite? Can your parent have loved you but also abandoned you? Generally, you know, that's a therapeutic issue for people. Can your parent love you and abuse you? And again, that would be something you have to go through with the client to figure out where they stand at that point and with their knowledge of what the parent was going through at that point in time. What we do influences our environment and the people in it, and they influence us. If you're at work right now, whatever you've done today has had an influence on everybody that you've come in contact with and just touched, whether physically touching or not, it's irrelevant. The person that you smiled at in the lobby, the person that you share an office with, the clients that you've seen today, it's amazing how many different ways we influence and touch other people. So if you. Let's take a happy example, because I like those. If you're in a decent mood and you're going through your day and you actually try to make eye contact and smile at people, how does that affect them generally? Not all the time, but generally it lightens their load a little bit. It may not make them deliriously happy, but a lot of times people will kind of note that as, oh, that's odd. Somebody actually, like made eye contact and smiled. How cool. That's just the way we are anymore because we're so busy with our nose and our mobile devices and trying not to make eye contact with anyone that when someone actually does and smiles, it does have a positive Influence, and the people influence us. If I see somebody when I'm on the way to work who's smiling and they smile back, then that makes me feel happier. That's how it affects me. But likewise, if I see somebody who seems like they're struggling when I'm on the way to work, it hurts my heart. So how does that affect me when I get to work? Generally, that gets me on some tangent of social work and making sure people know how to get resources that they need. But it does influence how we act and how we interact. Small things. It doesn't have to be a huge, like I said, just a smile. On more than one occasion when I was working in residential treatment, well, it was Iop. But I would have clients come in and they would be having a bad day, and it wouldn't take much at all to help them move from this side of this day. Really sucks to at least in the middle, where there are some positive things about today. And I encourage clients as well as staff to always look at the middle and look at what beneficial things happen today, not just focus on the negative. Because some of the things that happen may be more poignant, they may stand out more because they triggered a stronger emotion. True. However, can we counterbalance that? What good happened today? And we need to encourage ourselves to really try to keep balance because so much negative happens, and it's sort of thrown in our face that we need to balance it out with the good. Another example on Facebook, when you like things, they'll show you similar posts henceforth and forevermore. And whenever, you know, y' all know I do animal rescue. Whenever I would see a rescue post coming through that there was a dog in a shelter that needed out, it was on the urgent list. I would like share and cross post. And that's just what I did. Well, I went from seeing one of those, you know, maybe one a day to I couldn't open my Facebook feed without seeing, like six of them. And it just got overwhelming for me to see that because there was no balance. I was always seeing death, destruction, and despair. I'm like, that's not any way to live. So unfortunately, with Facebook, because you're dealing with a computer logarithm, I just had to stop liking and sharing those posts for a while. And it made me a little sad. But I had to balance the dialectics, the good and the bad. If I kept seeing that all the time, it was going to have a negative impact on me, which would have a negative impact on my family and yada yada. Yada. So recognizing that, making sure you have balance, pay attention to your social media or even if you just watch the news, pay attention to what you watch most of the time. And it's one of the reasons I don't even watch the news anymore because it's just death and destruction and criminality. After death and destruction and criminality, I'm like, is there any good in the world? You have to go out there and search for it. Find those dialectics. Our clients who feel like the world is scary, feel like they are always in a threatening place, feel like they are always disempowered, often are bombarded with those messages constantly and they're not able to repel them with opposite messages saying, yes, that happened, but this also happened. It's kind of like a teeter totter. Everything is interconnected in some way. Recovery. Recovery is interconnected if you are happy. Well, one of the acronyms we use is hungry, angry, lonely and tired. Halt if you're hungry. How does that impact your recovery? Well, if. If you're hungry for interaction with other people, if you're hungry for love, if you're hungry for something sort of abstract like that, or if you're just not getting the nutrients you need to make the neurotransmitters to help you be happy and content, then your recovery may be in jeopardy. You may be seeking ways to escape, seeking ways to feel better, or heading down a path of depression and anxiety. So hungry is right there. Angry is pretty self explanatory. If you're feeling angry, you're probably pushing other people away who could be supportive. Likely not eating the best diet because most of us, when we're in a bad mood, tend to eat for comfort, not for nutrition. And you don't sleep as well. If you're angry, you're on high alert. You've got that stress response system going. Lonely. Well, if you're lonely again, you don't have those support systems. You may feel disempowered, isolated, rejected. Sleep may not be going so well. Most people I know when they're lonely tend to eat more, but not necessarily eat well and tired. When we're tired, it's hard to get excited, it's hard to concentrate. And when we're tired, it probably means we're not getting good sleep, which means all of those other vulnerabilities are wonky. So we're in jeopardy of recovery. But likewise, if we are well nourished, happy, have good relationships and well rested, the opposite of hungry, angry, lonely and tired, then Things are probably going well in our recovery journey, so you can see how things are interrelated. But remember that loneliness doesn't necessarily have to do with us. If we are interacting with people who are not supportive, then that loneliness can come out. We don't feel supported, we don't feel loved, and so we still feel lonely. So it's not necessarily just the typical vulnerabilities we talk about, but everything's interconnected. Your mood. Think about all the different things that influence your mood. And I'm not going to go through them all because we don't have that kind of time. But anything can influence your mood. But likewise, any good thing can influence your mood in a positive direction. Making sure to balance. If something bad happens, try to counterbalance it with something good. When you start feeling irritable or grumpy or judgmental about something, try to find something positive about it. Try to keep that balance going as much as you can. If you change jobs, how does that affect everything? Everything is interconnected. So if you change jobs, then they're going to have to fill it with somebody else, and you're going to go somewhere else and you're going to meet new people, which is going to impact you, and you may end up coming back around to that old job. But if you chart it out, you can see how everything we do is connected in some way. If I have a really hard day at work, I may not get on social media and, you know, so Facebook may not make as much money off of serving ads to me that day. Who knows? But everything we do is not just about us. We've got to look outside of that and see how we impact other people, how we impact our environment, how we impact sort of the world in general. Meaning and truth evolve over time. Well, yeah, it kind of does. Think about something that is meaningful to you now, that was meaningful to you as a child, that is not meaningful to you now. When I was a little girl, I had this doll, and they were called Madame Alexander's. It was like a fluffy, a soft cloth body, and then it had the little plastic arms that were sewn on. That doll was the most important thing in the world to me. And I carried it around everywhere. I slept with it every night. And it was my security. Some people have a blanket, some people have, you know, a teddy bear, whatever it is. When I was a child, that was very meaningful to me because it gave me a sense of security and it represented a lot of stuff to me. But now that I'm much older, I see that doll, and I remember what it meant to me, but it's not like I have to have her laying on my bed every night to get to sleep. So things that are meaningful to us as children may not be a big deal now. Santa Claus, some kids, you know, I think most kids grow up at least the first couple of years thinking there is a Santa Claus and being all excited about it. And then they gradually grow up, realize Santa Claus doesn't exist, and it's not a big deal. It's not that meaningful on Christmas if Santa doesn't bring you presents and you're not going to go out of your way to put cookies out for him and everything else. So thinking about how things that are important now may not be important six months or six years from now. Same thing is true about truth. What's true right now, what you need right now may not be true six months from now. One of my friends just was recently diagnosed with cancer. So thinking about that, what she needs now isn't what she ever expected to need six months ago. So her needs changed, her truth changed. And what is important to her has actually changed since she's realized, you know, she's diagnosed with cancer, and she's really re evaluating a lot of things that are going on in her life with all that, you know, always balancing, you know, because we can get stuck if something unpleasant happens. If we get in a dysphoric mood, we can kind of get stuck there and focus on all the negatives and really nurture that. But if you are open and willing to look at the other side and willing to look for the silver lining, you can see different perspectives. You can see. Let's go back. You can see that there's more than one way to solve a problem or a situation. You can decide that, you know, somebody may be a really awesome person, for example, but not be an awesome person for you to be in a relationship with. So that kind of goes back to those seeing the opposites. They can be great, but it may be like oil and water between the two of you. Each moment is a new reality. So that's not. Wait till tomorrow. Maybe tomorrow will be a better day. That's. Take a breath and go, okay, that was really unpleasant. Let's make the next moment better. And most of us need to take that little pause right there to make the next moment better, because it doesn't happen right away. Think about when you get a shot. I am a big CIC when it comes to needles. Oh, my gosh. I don't get A flu shot, because I am more afraid of the needle than I am of getting the flu. But that's not real rational. I know, anyhow. But when I do have to get shots for something that is a really unpleasant thing that's going on, but the next moment is a new reality, that unpleasantness is gone and everything's fine and hunky dory. I did have one nurse who would give me my. Whatever shot I was getting. I think it was a tetanus booster. And I was all braced for it. I was. I was just waiting because I knew it was gonna hurt. And I felt the cotton ball and that was all. And I was just like, it's over. She's like, yeah, it's over. So I was expecting the worst. Instead of kind of walking the middle path, going, well, this, you know, won't be so bad. It'll be over in just a second. I was just, like, holding on for dear life. So recognizing each moment is a new reality. Even if you go through the same situation again, it doesn't have to hurt as much. It doesn't have to be as awful. You have a chance to use new skills. You have a chance to use new strengths and new relationships in order to improve the next moment. So when people get stuck, and we do, and I say we because we, as clinicians, as much as our clients and our family members and our co workers, we all get stuck sometimes. That's just human nature. So you want to ask the wise mind, what am I missing? Why am I stuck? Why am I still holding on to this anger or this unpleasantness, resentment, whatever the dysphoric feeling is. And you may have to look a little bit, go to your rational mind and go through that checklist of all the things you should be happy or angry about. And then you go to the emotional mind. But then you have to open yourself up to the situation to see if there's something else that you might be missing, an opportunity. For example, they say when one door closes, another door opens. Sometimes all we do is walk around in a dark hallway with our eyes closed because we don't realize there's going to be another door opening. Look for a kernel of truth in the other person's side. So if you're. Obviously this is. If you're dealing with somebody else, you're having an argument, you think you're right, or a disagreement, look for a kernel of truth. What is it that you can latch onto that you can go, yeah, okay, I see your point there. Now, you don't have to 100% agree with it. We're just looking at truths right now, not agreement or anything like that. So if they say, well, this is what I see happening, you can validate that. Try to avoid extremes when you're talking to yourself as well as when you're talking to other people, such as always and never. Because most of us, and in reality, there are very few things that always or never happen. I mean, thankfully right now, the sun always rises and we can count on that. Other things, not so much. You know, everyone is going to die eventually. We can count on that right now. But other than that, there are very few things that we can say always or never happen. So try to look for exceptions whenever you start feeling extreme. This always happens to me, or I never seem to win, or they never tell me the truth. Whatever you're thinking, stop yourself. Think of some exceptions, even if it was only a partial exception, like they told you, a little bit of the truth. Validate yourself and the situation or the other person or both. Which means your feelings, your thoughts, your opinions are totally valid. The other person's, we're going to assume are as well. Think about going to a crime scene, interviewing all the witnesses. There may be six witnesses, and likely the officer taking the statements is going to get six very different statements. Now, does that mean that they're lying? No, that means that they noticed, paid attention to, and, or interpreted different things. If you put all six of those stories or accounts together, you're probably going to get something that's closer to what actually happened. But there's debate on whether you can ever, ever know what the real truth is in certain situations. So being aware, there's always multiple points of view. When I worked in middle management, I was constantly walking a dialectical path. My staff would, you know, be overworked, underpaid, stressed out. You know how it is in nonprofit work. They love their job, and senior management would want them to do more, would need more productivity, would need more something of this because they weren't making enough money to show growth or even break even some years. So being able to balance that when the edict came down from above that, well, this is going to change, or we're adding a new program, Yay. And guess what? You get to run it. They weren't always all that happy about that. So we would sit back and go, okay, well, part of the positive of this is if they're trying to put in a new program to keep us afloat, you've still got a job. And that's a benefit let's figure out how we can make this work. Instead of being willful and resisting it and saying, no, I am not doing another thing, gosh darn it, saying, okay, let's talk about how we can make this workable. Being willing to be open to an opportunity and look for different solutions. Accept reality and try to change it. When reality happens, it is what it is. You can improve the next moment, but you can't change what is right now. If you get a shot, that's unpleasant. If you've had a child, that can be really unpleasant. The delivery part, not the having a cute little baby to hold, but. And in that moment, you're going, what in the world did I do? When that's over, the next moment is better. So you want to improve the next moment. You can't change the fact that childbirth really hurts, but you can change the fact. You can embrace the next moment and revel in the beauty of the next one. Make lemonade from lemons. Sometimes it's just going to be tough for a while. And you know, my friend that I told you has, has cancer is just doing such a wonderful job of modeling this because she could be really unhappy and unpleasant, and she is taking it like a trooper. She has faith, she has hope. She is just really deliriously happy about getting to see so many of her family who are coming to keep her company with while she's going through chemo. So she's looking at all the bright side instead of going, oh, I'm going through chemo and I feel awful. So she serves as a excellent model for me. And I think for a lot of people, when it comes to, you know, trying to make lemonade, she's also embracing confusion. Sometimes there is no right answer. You need to embrace that and go, all right, you know, if you got laid off from your job or, you know, you got a diagnosis that you had cancer or something happened and your life was turned upside down, topsy turvy. Sometimes it's just going to be chaotic for a bit, and you can either fight it, which often doesn't work, or you can embrace the confusion and say, okay, what is the next right step for me to improve the next moment? What can I change? What can I focus on without trying to fix the whole situation? Find a little sliver. And often that little sliver is the person. You can play devil's advocate if you're having difficulty finding the good or the happy or the opposite side in something, play devil's advocate. I do this sometimes if, you know, like I said, you don't usually do it with good stuff. But sometimes if I get a harebrained idea and I'm like, oh, I really want to do this, I have to play devil's advocate to identify all the downsides to make sure it's what I really want to do. Because sometimes it seems like a much better idea until you think about it. An example of that would be when people get out of treatment, and in this case, I'm talking about substance abuse treatment, and they decide that they want to after being in residential treatment for 30 days and having probably 28 days clean, they're going to live together. And while that sounds good on a lot of levels because they can share bills and yada, yada rides to meetings, it's also got some significant downsides to it from what we know from history. So if clients are getting really excited about something and there's a spidey sense in you going, hmm, I'm not so sure about that. And this is true for kids and ourselves too, not just clients. Stop. If your spidey senses are going off, that's probably your wise mind screaming as loud as it can that you need to look at all aspects of the situation. So play devil's advocate and go, well, if I take this job, that would move me halfway across the country. Here are all the positive sides, but what are the negatives? Always balance things out and make sure you're looking at both sides. You know, you don't want to live in the negatives, but let's at least be aware of them and decide whether they're worth paying attention to or they can be discounted. Sometimes it can be helpful to try to think of a metaphor to describe your point of view or to describe what's going on. Part of the reason is because when you use a metaphor, it taps into that other side of your brain. So you've got your left and right brain, too. And our left brain, I always get that mixed up. Our logical brain looks at the good and the bad, the truth and the false and that kind of stuff. But the creative side of our brain can help us find a lot of times, can help us find a lot of good things that logically just seem pretty abysmal. One of my friends, before he got into being an addictions counselor, spent a lot of time in jail and that he could have viewed that as just devastating and not been able to bounce back from it. But instead, he used it as an opportunity to get his GED, to learn and to start studying and figure out what he wanted to do with his life. So he embraced the confusion because he didn't know what he was going to do when he got out, got out of jail, made lemonade from lemons. He was stuck there, had to figure out what to do with his time and made something better out of the situation. And change the next years, not even just the next moment. We want to make sure we're treating others as we want to be treated now. This doesn't require a whole lot of explanation. If we are nasty to others, then, you know, what we give out often comes back to us. If we give out hope and optimism, it often comes back to us. So that can get in your way of being effective, but that also can get in your way of seeing the positive in the world. If you're always giving off the negative. If you're dealing with another person, look for similarities between the two of you. One of the things that we talk about in addiction recovery, and to a certain extent I talk about it with clients who are in any kind of treatment or recovery, is that the things that we don't like in other people are often there are things that we don't like in ourselves. So if you get irritated with someone, if you find challenges dealing with a certain person, ask yourself, you know, are you too similar? Is that person reminding you of the faults that you find in yourself? But you can also look for positives on similarities on the positive side. So, yeah, you have all these differences over here. I have some friends right now who I have very different political and philosophical leanings from, and that's okay. They're entitled to their opinion. And we just don't focus on that stuff. We focus on the similarities and the similar interests that we have. Try noticing the connection between all things. You know, I find it interesting when we're working with people who are in recovery and all we focus on is their mental health, their depression, their anxiety, their this, and we're not focusing on, well, what is life like at home? What is that environment like? What's that job like? You know, because where you spend a lot of your time influences you, and it can have a marked influence on your mental health, but you also impact that situation. So if you're depressed and you're angry and you're irritable and you go to work and you really don't like your job, and you project unpleasant emotions, then you could end up getting fired or laid off, or you're having your hours cut, which increases your feeling of disempowerment and irritability. And you can, I mean even on a small microcosm you can see how that works. Brofenbrenner and I wish I would have copied that. Has a theory and let me see if I can pull it up real fast while we're talking of. It's a socio ecological model that really talks about the interactions. Between everything and it's so helpful just to see it. So anyway, I will go on while I'm trying to talk. Practice letting go of blame. When you're blaming someone, you're throwing your energy, you're throwing your power, you're letting them take care of that. Looking at two fingers pointing out, you know, look at what their part was in it, but also the three fingers pointing back. What was your part in it, your interpretation of it or what you're doing with it now? Yuri Broffenbrenner. All right, let me see if I can blow this up big enough for you guys to see control. So he talked about the fact that there's an individual, but the individual impacts their family and their family impacts them. It impacts their work environment and their work impacts them, which also impacts their family and their siblings and peers and school. So all these are reciprocally interacting. But then in the bigger system, family and siblings interact with one another, siblings interact with peers, which also affect your interaction with family. I'm sure we've all had friends that our parents didn't like. Ultimately all this influences school and work. So everything interacts. If you have school friends, you know, people that you interact with at work or at school, you bring them home, they interact with your family or you interact with them at school or at work. But their impact on you comes home with you to the family exosystem. All of these things impact your extended family, the neighborhoods, mass media and the parents work environment. And you know, there's a whole class on this, so I'm not going to spend much more time on it. But spend some time just looking at this and thinking about, okay, how is it that the way an individual, a child interacts with the parents has an effect on the parents work environment. And one perfect example would be if junior is having trouble at school and mom's always constantly getting called to go down to the principal's office. That's going to impact work and it may impact work policies about being able to take time off and so on and so forth. And then in the bigger system we're talking about how all these things impact the economic system, social conditions, laws, history and culture. It's a fascinating theoretical framework. When you sit down to think about how one individual, one child, can actually have a ripple effect and somehow impact some of these things here. Anyway, remember that change is transactional, which means whatever you give out, you probably get back and you give more out. You know, it's not just a you give it and get it back. It bounces back and forth. Have you ever used one of those super balls? We used to have them, but my dogs eat them and that's not real safe, so we're not allowed to have them anymore in the house. But I didn't feel like any more surgeries. But for the dogs, not me, the super balls just keep going. Or one of those little clicker thingies. And there's a name for it with the little balls that go back and forth. You start one and the energy travels through like six balls and makes the other one go out and it kicks back and you constantly have that back and forth. So you want to remember that change. Any energy you put out, whether it's positive or negative, is going to continue through the system and come back eventually and kind of boomerang and we're going to keep going with it. Remind yourself that all things, including behaviors, are caused. The. Choice between whether to focus on the positive or the negative, or to act in one way versus another, always based on what's more rewarding. It's based on triggers in the environment and the rewards and punishments that are available. And a trigger is something that prompts you to do something. If you put your hand on a hot stove, that's a trigger to pull it off. So that behavior was caused by the hot stove. There are all kinds of triggers. And when you have your hand on a hot stove, it's triggered to do something to make the pain stop. The most rewarding choice is to pull your hand off, obviously. So we want to remember that in some way every time we have a behavior it's caused and it's got a purpose. And it's purpose at that point in time with the skills we had available to us was the most rewarding choice. When somebody's angry or anxious, that's the fight or flight reaction. It's their brain going, there's a problem. You need to figure out if it's a big problem that we need to do something about or how to handle it if they're happy, you know, the brain's telling them, let's do that again. But all of those behaviors are caused by those emotions coming up and going, pay attention. Oops. Use the wise mind to Ask, what am I missing? Let go of extremes. Either or and both. And you can be right and the other person can be right. You don't have to have an either or. It's my way or the highway. That doesn't usually work. When you're working with clients and you want them to do something that they may not be all that fired up, ready to do. Look again at both. And how can you create a win win situation? Balance opposites by validating both sides. You know, again saying, I see your point. Try to step into that person's shoes, understand where they're coming from and validate the valid. You know, they may have some assumptions and opinions out there that you don't agree with. But of the factual stuff, find the stuff that you can validate. Make lemonade and find the silver lining. Treat others as you want to be treated. Look for positive similarities and focus on those instead of focusing on potentially conflictual differences. Sometimes it's awesome to look at differences and go, oh, I'm so glad you have that skill, because I don't. And you can balance each other out. But we want to look for ways it can become. Whether it's a similarity or a difference, it can become a win win. Practice radical acceptance, which is just accepting it is what it is right now. Like the flu shot. I get it. It hurts. It sucks. The next moment's better. And practice accepting change because nothing is going to stay the same, which is awesome. If right now is an unpleasant moment, that means things are going to change so we can get them to change for the better. Pay attention to your impact on others and how they impact you. Surround yourself. Expose yourself to people who build you up. Try to let go of blame because there's enough blame to go around. We need to look at what we control and the only thing we can control is really what we do in the next moment. You want to remember to balance, accept and change reality. Accepting and changing reality. Sometimes you have to accept what is and look to make lemonade from it. Like my friend has to accept she's got cancer, but she can change the reality of how she deals with it. Validating yourself and acknowledging errors. We can be right about 80% and wrong about 20% and that's okay. But validate that. You know there are good things too. Balance working and resting needs and wants self improvement and self acceptance. I like this one because a lot of times we want people, if they're in counseling, to work on self improvement and towards a goal and yada yada, and that's wonderful. There are things about themselves that they may want to change, but there are also things about themselves that I want them to focus on that are absolutely amazing. Like their patience and their courage and their creativity and whatever else they have. So I want them to accept all the awesome things. And there's also a time to take a break from self improvement, emotion regulation and emotion acceptance. You're going to feel angry sometimes you can't control every emotion. So being aware and being willing to balance that and not try to control everything and every emotion. Independence versus Dependence. We all need help sometimes. Openness and privacy. Self explanatory trust and suspicion. You know, trust is earned. There has to be a certain level of suspicion sometimes. But finding a way to balance that so you can be safe, but you can be happy and content at the same time and not always suspicious that somebody's trying to hurt you, undermine you, whatever. And balance focusing on yourself versus focusing on others. Too often as clinicians, we spend too much time focusing on others and our personal gas tank ends up really low. In order to be there for our clients, we need to make sure that we balance our self focus and self care. Dialectics is based on the premise that truth can be found by integrating multiple points of view because reality is ever changing. By walking the middle path with awareness of the differing forces, we can radically accept reality. We can accept that how we perceive it right now is unpleasant, but it'll get better. And we can minimize emotional turmoil because if there's somewhere in the back of our mind that we know that for every yin there's a yang or that things will get better, it's less distressful. We know it's going to improve instead of feeling like we're stuck. If you enjoy this podcast, please like and subscribe either in your podcast player or on YouTube. You can attend and participate in our live webinars with Dr. Snipes by subscribing@Allce.com Counselortoolbox this episode has been brought to you in part by allce.com providing 24.7 multimedia continuing education and pre certification training to counselors, therapists and nurses since 2006. Use coupon code counselortoolbox to get a 20% discount off your order this month.