Hardiness, Serenity and Learned Helplessness | Live Chat with Dr. Dawn-Elise Snipes

Foreign. So good morning everybody. I hope you are having a wonderful start to your Tuesday morning. It is absolutely, positively gorgeous here in middle Tennessee. So, you know, I'm a little bummed about having to be in the office, but I am grateful for all of you who are here with me today because, you know, I really love my job and I want to be able to help people live happier. As you all know, I've had several requests to do some short form videos on specific tools and techniques in order to live happier. Partly, I think because of, you know, the pandemic and the lockdown and the social unrest and the election coming up, people are feeling very strong, stressed and anxious and, and antsy. So, you know, that's what I am going to try to do. Like I said, I'm going to try to do them little short videos every day, but you know, definitely several times a week. So if you have any requests for the topics that you want me to cover, you can submit a support ticket email to support all ceus.com and I will keep a running list different topics people are interested in. But for now, let's go ahead and start talking about hardiness and serenity. That is our topic for today. Hardiness is a really kind of an old fashioned topic. Cabasa identified it back in 1978, 1979, so, you know, I was still knee high to a grasshopper at that point. Some of you probably weren't even here. But hardiness has persevered throughout the ages. We call it different things and there have been, there's been progress on it. But basically the crux of hardiness is the three Cs or are the three Cs commitment, control and challenge. They found that people who have more hardiness traits, who have stronger hardiness, tend to recover from illness more quickly, tend to bounce back from, from problems, you know, social problems, financial problems, mental health issues more quickly. So hardiness is a trait that can be developed. It's not something that you're either born with or you're not. And it is wonderful for helping to regulate that HPA axis, which we know not only will help us not feel so anxious and agitated, but it can also help reduce pain and inflammation and other systemic issues that arise as the result of excessive stress. So what do these things stand for? Commitment to what you may say. Well, Kabasa identified or conceptualized commitment as recognizing that there are a lot of things in our life to which we're committed. I'll take myself for example. I'm committed to my job. I, I Love what I do. I love being able to help people. I love being able to take hardcore scientific articles that a lot of people don't want to read in journals and translate it to useful tidbits for practice. I love that. I'm committed to that. I'm also committed to my family. I'm committed to my garden. I'm committed to my pets. I'm committed to, you know, I can go on for a long time, but I won't. There are a lot of aspects in my life that are meaningful to me. Not just my job, not just my family. And this year, thank God, not just my garden, because we did not have a very good harvest this year. But I can recognize that, okay, right now, for example, for me, my garden harvest was pitiful this year. I put a whole lot of effort into it and got very little back. And it was very frustrating. But that doesn't have to, you know, make me feel depressed and, you know, overwhelmed. Yeah, that aspect didn't go so well. But there are a lot of other things in my life that I'm very grateful for and that are going well. Commitment and, you know, gratitude. If you want to kind of wrap that in, there are really important to recognize that, you know, most of the time, every aspect of our life is not going to be going hunky dory. There's going to be little hiccups in there. But the lion's share of things in our life are probably going okay, so what is it that you're committed to that's going well? And those things are the things that you're going to put your energy into. You can choose to do that, or you can put your energy into holding on to frustration and anger about the one thing that's not going well. What do you think's more productive? The second aspect is control, recognizing that in every situation. And you can think dialectics, you can think, you know, Eastern medicine. You can think a lot of different philosophical theories. But one of those points that is pervasive through a lot of different theories is the fact that in any situation, there are things that you can control and there are things that you can't control. For example, if you are waiting on test results or to find out if you got a job you interviewed for, you can't control how fast those things come back. You can control what you do with your energy. In the meantime, you can control your reactions when you are discussing things with your friend or your partner. You know, you may be having an argument. You know, we'll go past discussing and have an argument. You can control your part, your reaction, Whether you are empathetic, whether you're listening, whether you are paraphrasing, you can't control that person's reaction. So there are things you can and cannot control in every situation. Seizing on the aspects of what you can control is going to help you use your energy in ways that are most meaningful. And the third is challenge. And what she meant by that was, when we experience adversity, instead of seeing it as a problem or an obstacle or a barrier, seeing it as a challenge, as an opportunity. When I took my sats back, when we used the sats and my GREs, you know, there are a lot of things even going into childbirth, Instead of seeing it as overwhelming, I saw it as a challenge. I'm like, okay, how can I knock this out of the park? I haven't done it before. Or it might be hard. But instead of getting stressed out about it, thinking to myself, all right, how can I get creative? How can I address this issue? Thinking about issues. When something happens in your life, you know, and I would encourage you to spend some time today, you know, even 10 minutes, thinking about what things in your life are you committed to? You know, think about every different hat or hat you wear or role you have. What are you committed to? And how is each one of those things going? What aspects of. Of your life are in your control right now? And there are a lot of things if you really sit down and think about it. Too often we focus on the things that are out of our control and ignore the parts that we can control. And it's important to focus on that as well. And then how can I view this as a challenge, as a. An opportunity? The second thing I want to talk about today is serenity. And it kind of goes along with the hardiness rubric or umbrella. Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. Recognizing, like we talked about a minute ago with control, a lot of times there are aspects of situations that you can control and aspects that you can't. When it's raining outside, you know, I can't stop the rain, so what am I going to do with my energy? Am I going to pout and throw a hissy fit because I wanted to go hiking and it's raining? Well, that's not going to be a good use of my energy. Maybe I'll use that time to clean the house instead. So when it stops raining, I can go. I can go hiking. So grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot Change the courage to change the things I can. Changing is not always easy. Changing how we think about something, how we feel about something, working towards acceptance, contemplating the notion of forgiveness. All of those things can be very scary and sometimes arduous to do. But having the courage to do them and saying, you know what, I am going to make a choice to recognize how I feel right now and do something to improve the next moment. The wisdom to know the difference. It's really important to recognize the things that you can and cannot control and reflect upon those things and maybe even talk with other people who are impartial to the situation, who can say, you know, what you're trying to, maybe you're trying to change another person. Well, we can't change other people. Other people have to be willing to change for themselves. So the wisdom to know the difference. Living one day at a time. And a lot of times we stopped stop right after wisdom when we talk about serenity. But I think these next three lines are so crucial and they really focus on mindfulness and using our energy purposefully in the moment. Living one day at a time, enjoying one moment at a time. Thinking about what is it that I can do right now to improve the next moment? What is it that I can do right now to move closer to my goals? Instead of spending all your time worrying about, you know, six months from now, thinking when I finally get that bigger house, when I finally get that higher paying job, then I'll be happy. Well, you can live in the future forever, but generally if you're living in the future, you're not happy in the present. So focus on living one day at a time and enjoying one moment at a time. Looking around right now, what are you enjoying? What can you enjoy? Maybe it's the coffee that you're drinking, maybe it's the music that you're listening to or like I told you at the beginning of this presentation, for me the weather is just glorious here right now. So I am enjoying it. I am reveling in that. The final line is accepting hardship as a pathway to peace. And you know, hardship is kind of an interesting word and I would replace that with challenges. Accepting challenges as a pathway to peace. What does that mean? Recognizing that when we have challenges, it helps us learn what we're capable of doing. It actually improves our self esteem when we face a challenge with courage and we're successful at addressing it. So challenges and can help us have more peace because it helps us have stronger self esteem. It helps us feel more competent, more confident and more Empowered. So let's go back over the serenity. They call it the Serenity Prayer, but you don't have to be spiritual in order to benefit from all of these things. Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, wisdom to know the difference. Living one day at a time, enjoying one moment at a time, accepting hardship as a pathway to peace. And remember that, you know, as we said back with. Back with hardiness. Up here, challenge means looking at adversity as an opportunity. Looking at adversity as something that you can. Something you can take on, like a, you know, championship game of some sort. It's a challenge. It is a something new. It doesn't have to be negative. It can be inspiring. It can be energizing. To look at something and go, all right. And this is part of the way my mind works, I guess. You know, when I experience obstacles, I want to figure out how to get past them. And one of the things about obstacles, when you think about the word obstacle, think obstacle course. And what do you do on an obstacle course? You don't get to an obstacle and look at it and go, well, crap, guess I'm done. You look at an obstacle and go, okay, do I go around it? Do I go under it? Do I go through it? Do I go over it? How can I solve this problem? You know, thinking of challenges, you know, challenges are problems. If you've ever done a par course with your company or, you know, with your school, you have experienced some of these things, like the high wall, figuring out, all right, how am I going to scale this wall? Because it's obviously way too big for me to do by myself. How can I solve this problem? How can I scale this obstacle? You're viewing it as a challenge and your brain's going, all right, let me think about different ways and try to figure out how to get out of that box, so to speak. And I love getting outside of the box. What questions, if any, do you guys have right now? What would you like to talk about? Like I said, at the end of these presentations, I will stick around. I'll answer questions. I will try to help point you in the right direction of resources. If there's anything that I can help you all with. These are really meant to be little short form sessions to provide nuggets of information. While you're thinking. If you haven't already subscribed to the channel, please make sure to click the subscribe button so, you know, when new videos come out, you can also Click the little bell so you're notified, I guess, as soon as new videos come out. I have difficulty figuring out YouTube. That's, you know, I'm not super tech savvy. Please, if you find these videos helpful, share them. That way we can spread the word and help more people find the tools that they need. And for people who have a strong spirituality, the entire Serenity Prayer is a great thing. There are a lot of people I found who are. Have difficulty embracing the last half of the. The last half of the Serenity Prayer if they don't have a strong spirituality. So, you know, trying to help people reach it and, and embrace it in nuggets. Do I have any suggestions on addressing learned helplessness? Well, the good thing about learned helplessness is it can be unlearned depending on what you are talking about. You know, it's really important to help people learn helplessness. They learned that they are powerless. So what do we need to do? We need to help them feel empowered, which means in many cases, setting very small, very achievable goals and helping people embrace their hardiness. So, yeah, you know, that's actually really on point for this. Embrace their happiness or their hardiness to recognize what aspects of situations they can control. A lot of times people develop learned helplessness when they're trying to control things that are out of their control. They can't control the election, they can't control Covid, they can't control their spouse, they can't control sometimes their child or whether they get a job or not. And there are certain aspects of each one of those situations that they can control, like whether they vote, whether they wear a mask and wash their hands, whether they're consistent in their parenting. You know, there's a lot of things that they can do to affect situations, but whether they can change the whole situation, you know, they need to develop an awareness of those aspects. But for other things, it is important to help them develop, learn how to set small goals and achieve those goals. Keeping a log is really helpful so they can see how far they've come in substance abuse recovery. A lot of times people have a, a sense of learned helplessness because they've tried to get sober before and they've relapsed. And maybe they've tried to get sober multiple times and they've relapsed multiple times. And it's important to go back over their relapses, for example, and look at differences, look at changes. You know, maybe they stayed sober for a little longer the next time. What did they do differently. How have they grown through each treatment episode or each recovery episode and helping them learn from those past relapses, figure out okay what went wrong so they feel empowered to prevent those problems from occurring in the future. Determined. You. You ask whether I have a website for group topics. Can you explain what you mean a little bit more? I'm thinking of a couple different things, but I don't want to send you to the wrong place. I do have several videos on the YouTube channel on, you know, group activities for, you know, fill in the blank. Depression, grief, anxiety, whatever. But I'm not sure that that's what you're asking about. And I do, you know, if you remember Psychology 101, the original learned helplessness experiments were so awful. You know, I am an animal lover, you all know that. So learning about learned helplessness was challenging for me emotionally in some ways. But so if you are an animal lover, you may not want to go to the wiki on the original experiments on learned helplessness because it did involve animal experimentation. But you know, we did unfortunately. Fortunately or unfortunately kind of embracing both aspects. We learned something from it. We also learned that there are other ways to figure this stuff out. Did I answer Yalls question about learned helplessness? I mean there's a, I could do an entire, you know, hour blah, blah on, on addressing learned helplessness. But you know, basically what we are looking at is learned empowerment, if you want to think about it that way. So whatever the person feels helpless about, let's help them figure out how to identify what aspects of that situation they do have control over and set small, very achievable goals to working towards their ultimate goals so they can develop that sense of efficacy and empowerment. Okay, so website for staff who are presenting groups for co occurring clients. Now I am going to try. Here we go. I know Yoda says do or do not. There is no try. So on the regular YouTube channel you can do, you can google group activities and you have cognitive behavioral group activities, interpersonal group activities, relapse and prevention awareness activities. So that can give them a lot of things to work from if you want to send them to those particular videos. Now if you want something more granular, I don't know if you're working with like behavioral health techs who don't have the background in counseling. My other channel, which doesn't have enough subscribers to actually have a name yet, I will put it right here. I am doing a series actually I should have just given you the playlist. It's a quick start. Guide for recovery. And each video is designed to provide about 10, 15 minutes of psychoeducational information. But it also has reflection questions and that people can work on in group. So let me just pull up enhancing self efficacy, since that's what we're talking about right now. So I talk about what efficacy is and I keep talking the impact of self efficacy. So what happens when you have self efficacy? And then I give them a time frame, about 40 minutes. And these are the questions that the facilitator can ask the people in group to talk about, to think about in order to kind of drive home this lesson. And then since Most groups are 90 minutes, Then the next activity talks about ways to improve self efficacy and encourages them to discuss strategies to help cope with cravings, for example, so people can increase their self efficacy, increase their confidence in handling cravings, anxiety, depression, pain. So right now, look, it looks like I have 25 groups worth of stuff there. And I am hoping to add some more videos probably this week. But you know, my husband yells at me for not pacing myself very well. Feel free to use, you know, any of those. The goal of putting them out there on the YouTube channel for free is to make sure that people have access to it. When I ran the residential programs in Florida, a lot of our groups were facilitated by behavioral health techs and specialists. And sometimes, excuse me, sometimes they needed prompts in order to help them figure out, okay, what do I do for this group? Other times it was helpful just to have a standardized curriculum and people who had more knowledge were able to, you know, pick and choose. They were able to use parts of the video or the curriculum that they wanted and put their own spin on it. And that was okay by me. I am a firm believer that you don't necessarily need to have, you know, years and years of higher education to be able to help people. Some of my most brilliant clinicians, you know, did not have master's degrees. And then developmental trauma. Let's go back to all CEUs. If you go through, I have probably there's complex trauma in children. I think is more what you're talking about with developmental trauma. But we also talk about the neurobiological impact of trauma. And then I go through SAMSA's treatment improvement protocol. I broke it down into, I believe, five different videos on working with trauma. So there's a lot of different trauma related videos that that may be helpful for you. Oh, and trauma focused cognitive behavioral therapy, parts one and two. If you work with, if you work with children and are looking specifically for a trauma informed intervention. Kim Whitefeather, My own self care. My husband keeps me on track with that. I have, I am bad, I will admit I am bad about doing that. But you know, he, he encourages me strongly to, you know, take weekends off and, and do things occasionally like that. And you know, I think we're a good balance because, you know, if you look at the Kiry or the Myers Briggs, we are polar opposites of one another. And Samara, you, you are exactly right. Learned helplessness does come from experiencing stressful situations repeatedly and feeling powerless to change it. Which is why, you know, the intervention is, is helping people identify those situations in which they feel helpless, identifying what aspects of those situations they are able to change they have control over, and then setting goals to help them develop the skills and tools to move forward and achieve those goals. Develop a sense of self efficacy and self empowerment. So the antithesis of learned helplessness is learned empowerment. Alrighty, everybody. Thank you for being with me today and I will see you tomorrow when we're going to talk about distress tolerance skills.