Serenity, Powerlessness & Unmanageability for Anxiety and Depression Relief

Foreign. Good morning everybody and welcome to today's presentation. We are talking about serenity in the face of powerless and un. Powerlessness and unmanageability. I AM your host, Dr. Donnelly Snipes. So let's just think about this for a second. And you know, life. Life is not always like a box of chocolates. Sometimes it's like a trip. Would you go on a trip without first identifying where you are going? And you know, most people wouldn't. And in life, we want to live a rich and meaningful life. We want to be healthy and happy. So are you going to do things and just kind of randomly launch into whatever without trying to figure out what you need to do in order to be healthy and happy? Probably not. Would you go on a trip blindly without getting directions to your destination? Now, there may be one or two people out there that just get in the car and start driving, but most of us want to know in general how to get from point A to point B. In order to do that, we need to figure out what steps and activities will help us achieve our definition of health and happiness in life. So, so if we're going on a trip, we want to know, you know, what road do we get on, where do we turn, etc. When we are talking about our health and our happiness, we want to figure out what things do I need to do in order to help myself be healthy and happy? That really helps us guide our actions. Purposeful action. We've talked about it repeatedly over the past couple of weeks. Occasionally in life, as in on. On road trips. When you're on your way, traffic jams and delays just can't always be anticipated. You're bebopping along and all of a sudden, kabam, you are at a screeching halt. When you run into those traffic jams, you are powerless. Sometimes in life, when we run into delays or obstacles, we may be powerless over certain aspects of it. So what do you do when you feel powerless? Do you stay stuck? Stuck and just rev your engine and burn through the gas while you're sitting on the interstate? Probably not the best idea. And that is akin to those away behaviors that we were talking about yesterday. If you stay stuck and you just feed that anger or anxiety, all you're doing is revving yourself up and spending a lot of energy spinning your wheels. Unless you start thinking about, how can I address this? Do you randomly turn off? You know, some people will find the first way to get off, or they'll pull off onto the shoulder and drive up into the next Exit and hope they can figure out how to get back on course. You know, this is assuming you don't have Internet access. You know, can you do that? Sure. Do some people have better internal directional stuff than others? Oh, yeah. You know, my husband can do that and probably get us headed back in the right direction. If I get off, off the interstate, I am lost. I can't find my way out of paperback. I know this. I like directions. I like structure. I like, you know, a map. And, and that helps me a lot in life when we get stuck by something. When life throws us lemons, we can, you know, sit there and just be angry about it. Or we can randomly turn off and say, you know what, screw it, I am going to go back to bed, or I'm going to go get drunk or I'm going to go do this or go do that. But if we do that, do. Do we know exactly what we need to do to get back on course? Not always. Do you, in these situations, just sit there and scream at the cars in front of you, blaming them for your problem, blaming everybody else for how you feel at this point in time? Well, you could. Is it going to do any good? And. And the answer is a resounding no. You know, screaming at the other drivers, if you can't move, they probably can't move, and they probably want to move. And. And it's important to recognize that in life, as well as traffic jams, even if somebody else caused the problem, it's your responsibility to fix how you respond to it. You may not be able to fix the traffic jam, but you can address how you respond. You can address whether you blame others, whether you just take this random detour, whether you sit there and rev your. Rev your engine, you can address those things. Or do you, you know, recognize that you are in a traffic jam and say, all right, well, don't want to stay here for too long and take a minute and look at the map, look at your, you know, plans to find the best alternate route. You know, a lot of us will do that. Especially if you're at a screeching halt. And it may be. You look at the map and you go, you know, this is the best route. And I may just have to sit through this distress right now. Other times you may say, no, there are things I can do. There are. I can see that there actually is a route if I can get off the interstate here. Same thing is true in life. If you, once you get out of that adrenaline haze, if you can take a minute and Take a breath and go, okay, in my life, I want to be happy and healthy right now. This situation over here is prompting a distressful reaction in me. All right, Remember when we talked about yesterday? Accept what is non judgmentally. I am angry right now or I am scared to death right now. Okay? It is what it is. I know you hate that. Had to throw it in there. So when you're looking at your map, what makes sense in your life, given your resources, your skills, your strengths and all that stuff, what options do you have to deal with it? Can you get out from around the distress and do something to actually address the situation? Or do you maybe just have to be patient until the situation resolves itself? In 12 Step Recovery, we talk a lot about serenity. And I use this not only in 12 step recovery, but also with, you know, all of the people that I work with and my own life. The Serenity prayer. Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change and the courage to change the things I can, recognizing that there are aspects of most situations that you can change and aspects of most situations that you can't, and not trying to change the unchangeable. When you're on a trip, do you pay attention to your gas gauge or just hope that when you need fuel, you'll be able to find a gas station? And this is one of those things. If you've done much road traveling, I don't know how it is in other states, but for example, in Florida, it's about 40 to 70 miles between gas stations. And so it's important to kind of pay attention to how much gas you have as you're going along, or you may run out of gas on the side of the road. So it is important. The same thing is true in life. The same thing is true. And I use the acronym Bad Halt. I've added to what we use in, in addiction recovery, which is halt. And I call it Bad Halt. You need to notice along the way, you need to be mindful to notice if you're feeling bored, anxious, depressed, hungry, angry, lonely or tired in order to address those things before you run out of gas. Once you run out of gas, you're no good to anybody. You're stuck on the side of the road. So it's important that you pay attention and make your health and your happiness a priority. Because guess what? If you are sick, exhausted and miserable, you ain't going to be any good to anybody. So it's important, just like you pay attention to your gas gauge, to pay attention to Your internal gas gauge, so to speak. And finally, when you're on a trip with a time limit like a two week vacation, do you follow the directions? You know, follow your plan to ensure you get to your destination so you can do what you want? You know, maybe you're going to Disney World. All right, cool. Yay. Do you follow the road and follow the directions that Google or whoever gave you? Or do you frequently get detoured by something that seems exciting in the moment? So you may be driving along and you know, Disney, Disney World is 18 hours ahead and all of a sudden, ooh, that looks like you see a sign on the side of the interstate and you get distracted and you decide you want to go see that attraction. And if you do that too often, you may not, you may run out of time, you may not get to where you really wanted to go before your time is up. These detours in life, in, in recovery, we kind of call them defects of character. I, I talk about them in terms of impulsivity, doing things reactively, seeing something and wanting to experience the pleasure in the moment instead of looking at the big picture. You know, yes, you may feel pleasure in the moment if you eat that brownie or if you do something and it might help you feel better right then. But in the big scheme of things, in the big scheme of how you define health and happiness, is it a good use of your energy to go on that detour and do you get to your destination, that health and happiness, or end up get going home without getting there, which in terms of recovery may mean, you know, dying. So thinking about how you want to spend your energy, do you want to make a direct path to health and happiness and really, you know, soldier through in order to, you know, work through those issues that are keeping you from being, feeling your best? Or are you just kind of going to do something here, something there, and then kind of backtrack? Which brings us to good, orderly direction. Not everybody believes in a higher power. Not everybody believes in God. So the term God or God as we know him, can be challenging for some people. And, and I want to point out, I try to point out as much as often as possible that good, orderly direction can mean a belief in something greater than ourselves, a belief that our ultimate destination, our ultimate goal is more rewarding than immediate gratification. Good, orderly direction or God can be thought of like the Google Maps for living. It's a set of directions for how you want to live your life in a way that most efficiently gets you to your destination of a Rich and meaningful life. And your definition of a rich and meaningful life may be very different than mine, and that's okay. What you want to do is figure out for how you define it, what do you need to do to get there. I have friends who love to travel. And one of the things that they want to do when they retire is spend, you know, spend their retirement traveling. So they organize their life and their finances and everything else around the notion or around the goal of being able to travel when they retire. That's not my goal. My goal is to have a farm out in the middle of nowhere with a few cows, a bunch of chickens. You know, I want to be somewhere very serene and peaceful. So I have different goals. I have a different endpoint for my good, orderly direction, how I would spend my money, how much money I need to earn when I can retire. All that stuff is defined by our different end points. We need to make sure that we use good, orderly direction, our big picture, to, and keep it in focus. To help us have serenity, to accept the things we cannot change. We, when we start to get revved up, remember feeling. A feeling is perfectly normal. That is our body's reaction to dump energy. So we can have the energy to evaluate the situation and decide whether we need to fight, flee, enjoy it, whatever, depending on what the emotion is. But when we feel those feelings, accepting them, acknowledging them, and doing something and saying, okay, I feel this way, so I have the energy to evaluate what do I need to do and looking at what my options are, what things are worth my energy and what things aren't. Is it worth my energy to fight with a troll on social media? Probably not. Is it worth my energy too? And you know, just finish that sentence and that helps us find serenity because, you know, too often we get stuck in this loop and we can't break it. I know a lot of people are stuck on the Twitter refresh loop right now looking at, you know, stuff that's coming about, out about the election or about COVID and that's not changing anything. So is that worth their energy at this point in time? Or could they spend those minutes, those hours, and that energy doing something else and then, you know, periodically checking in with, you know, the CDC or Twitter or whomever they want to get their information from. Good, orderly direction also gives us the courage to change the things we can not. Everything that needs to be done to help us achieve our goal of a rich and meaningful life, for health and happiness, whatever you want to call it, not everything that we need to do, to get there isn't necessarily something we want to do, unfortunately. However, when we keep that big picture in mind, when we see that prize at the end of the day, at the end of the race, whatever, you know, metaphor you want to use, it helps give, give us the motivation and the courage to do the things that we may not want to do and to take action. So serenity to accept the things we cannot change be and, and it's not worth wasting our energy trying to change something we can't. Courage to change the things we can, and wisdom to know the difference. Having that big picture, that good, orderly direction, helps us feel confident and say, you know what, it's okay for me to let this go because it's not going to be an effective use of my energy. And it helps us get over sometimes guilt, it helps us get over sometimes anxiety or anger. If we decide that in this context at this time, the probability that this issue is actually going to be a major threat to me is pretty small. So let's look at this in terms of the 12 steps. And, and I've obviously reworded these a little bit because I want them to be more general. First step, admit that you're powerless over a particular situation. It can be a cart, a traffic jam, it can be something going on in your life. Whatever it is, admit that you're powerless and the situation you're currently experiencing has made your life unmanageable. You're, it's unhappy. You're unhappy right now. You're no longer working toward that goal of health and happiness. You've kind of hit this barrier, and you've got to figure out what to do to get around it or over it or under it. So let's actually just take depression as an example. You wake up and you're feeling clinically depressed. You, you know, wake up in the morning, notice it mindfully, accept it nonjudgmentally, and say, you know what? I'm not feeling on my a game today. I'm feeling pretty depressed, okay? So that makes life a little bit, or a lot of it, unmanageable when you're feeling depressed. Step two, believe that following your plan of good, orderly, good orderly direction could restore your health and happiness. You know what's in your relapse prevention plan, you know what's in your recovery plan. And following that, like forcing yourself to get out of bed and take a shower, can help you start moving forward even though, or, and feel depressed at the same time. You can feel depressed and continue to move Forward. It may not be as quick, but it's important to remember that there is a plan. You do have steps, you do have things that you know you can do that are helpful to continue to move you forward. Make a decision to adhere to that plan, that good orderly direction to guide your actions and use your energy in the best way possible to help you reach your destination of health and happiness. So you know you've got this plan out there, relapse prevention plan, wellness plan, whatever you want to call it, it's there. You know that following this plan will help you feel better. Maybe not right now, but eventually, you know, you know that doing those things is in your best interest. But then you've got to make a decision to actually follow it. You know, you can look at it all you want, but you also need to make a decision to follow it. Examine your thoughts and behaviors for those that are impulsive or reactive or not guided by the plan. And we have those. You know, if when you're depressed, you wake up and you're like, oh, this, yeah, I'm feeling awful today. I am feeling really low, apathetic. You know, however you feel when you're depressed, one of your first knee jerk reactions may be, I just want to pull the covers over my head and go back to sleep for the rest of the day. Okay, well that is a realistic thought and behavior. We want to be aware of it and acknowledge it. Accept it non judgmentally, but also examine that thought and behavior. Recognize that that's an impulsive reaction to how you feel and not guided by your plan of good orderly direction. Identify the exact nature of your unhelpful thoughts and behaviors that distract you from the plan. Why is it that I want to go back to bed right now? Why is it that I want to pull the covers over my head? What might be prompting, what thoughts might be prompting or motivating or contributing to this depression? Step 6. Be entirely ready to resume your plan. Following the directions and foregoing immediate reward so you can get headed back towards your destination of continuous health and happiness. And that's hard. You made a decision to adhere to the plan. Then you start to get distracted by these little voices and impulses that go, oh, this would be a lot better. You acknowledge what's going on. You identify those thoughts, feelings, behaviors that you want to do, impulses that are not helpful in, in terms of your, in terms of the big scheme of things. And then you make that decision that you're entirely ready to resume and, and follow this plan. Even though it may not be something you really want to do right now. You may be willing to do it and regularly remind yourself that the benefits of arriving at your destination that health, happiness by adhering to the plan of good, orderly direction outweigh the momentary benefits of acting on impulse. So, you know, this obviously is a very, very modified version of the first seven steps. But I encourage people that I work with and that I know to try to apply the steps to life, not just their addiction or their mood disorder. You know, let's talk about co workers. You may have a coworker that is just intolerable, okay? Admit that you're powerless over that co worker, and the situation you're currently experiencing has become unmanageable. You don't want to go to work. You don't like this person. You want to scream every time you're around them that that's pretty dagum unmanageable. Believe that following a plan, you know, you have a plan for, you know, how you want to be as a person, how you want to interact with people, what you need for a rich and meaningful life, which could mean keeping this job. So you have this plan. So following that plan, that good, orderly direction can help restore health and happiness. Recognizing I can't control this person, but I can control my reaction to this person. Because ultimately, keeping my job is more important than, you know, letting this person get under my skin. And I can choose not to let them rent space in my head. Make a decision to adhere to your plan, to guide your actions and use your energy in the best possible way to help you reach health and happiness. So asking yourself, you know, having this dialogue with yourself of, okay, this person's intolerable. I have to deal with them every day at work. How can I deal with it? How can I cope with this? Because keeping the job is important to me for my. For my future goals. And it could be, you know, using empathy, trying to get in their head and imagine in your own, in your own head, why, how dark it must be in theirs or what benefit they may get from acting this way. You know, try to empathize. A lot of times, pity, when somebody is being challenging, pity can be internal. You know, you don't want to necessarily engage them with it, but having this attitude of pity towards them and saying, wow, to be that hateful or to be that whatever, that must be really dark in their mind sometimes that can help you get past that. There are a lot of other ways to handle it. Too much to go into here. Examine your thoughts and behaviors for those that are impulsive or reactive or not guided by your good orderly direction, your plan. Well, you could. I'm not recommending it. I'm just saying if we're spitballing ideas, you know, you could punch the lights out, you could quit your job, you could go to hr. You know, physical aggression, probably not going to be helpful for your long term goals. Quitting your job, probably not helpful for your long term goals. So examining each thought and behavior and putting them in like we talked about on yesterday, either the away behaviors or the toward behaviors, you know, what are my options here? Let me just sort them out. Be entirely ready to resume your plan and regularly remind yourself that the benefits of arriving at your destination be by adhering to your plan outweigh the momentary benefits of acting on impulse. So this can help you kind of move through and get motivated to deal, for example, with a challenging person. Are there questions? Let me see here. Taking a step back. Unhooking from our situation, unhooking from our emotions is so important. Unhooking can be done in a variety of ways. When it comes to emotions, I really pr we practice in group sessions and in individuals just sitting with our emotions and noticing that you know what it is. It can be uncomfortable, but it's not intolerable. We actually do have the strength. We can be angry and it doesn't, it actually doesn't kill us. We can be really depressed and sit with that emotion and that emotion itself does not kill us. And it's important for people to be able to address those distress intolerant thoughts, but also notice those feelings, become aware of those feelings, accept them non judgmentally so they don't get into that whole dirty discomfort thing. Say to themselves, I'm feeling angry or I'm feeling depressed. Okay, I am, I am what I am. As Popeye would say, now what do I do about it? What are the next best steps I can take to help me move forward to what's important to me? You know, is sitting here hitting refresh on Twitter actually helping me move forward is getting angry and going and getting drunk or going out and smoking cigarettes. Is that helping me get towards my ultimate goal? And thinking short term rather than long or thinking long term rather than short term is hard. I'm not saying any of these skills are easy. Immediate gratification is definitely far more rewarding than stopping. Getting into our, our wise mind and then making a purposeful choice in, in how we handle our, in how we choose to use our energy. It is difficult. It takes practice. Most People, even people that are good at it, are probably not perfect at it. And. And again, that's okay. Recognizing that we want to strive for progress, not perfection, is so important. Are there other questions right now? Now, obviously, if you are following the 12 steps with AA N A CA any of the 12 step programs, you're familiar with the 12 steps as they are actually written, and I would encourage you to. Whenever you face something in life that triggers your feelings of powerlessness, that is step one. Step one talks about admitting we are powerless and the situation is making us unmanageable. So apply steps one through three at the very least, to see where that gets you in dealing with life, in dealing with other people, not just in dealing with your addiction. And powerlessness and unmanageability are very unpopular topics for a lot of people, and I've done a couple of courses on those because it. They are challenging concepts for people. But recognizing that in every situation, almost every situation, we have a certain amount of power and a certain amount of powerlessness, I can't think of any situation in which we are completely powerless. We may not be able to change the situation, but we can change our reaction to the situation. So we do have some element of personal power. And that's where it. What it comes down to. For example, in addiction. People who are addicted to alcohol, for example, may be powerless over alcohol. When they start to drink it, they can't stop. But they do have the power to not put themselves in situations where they're exposed to it, where they have the opportunity to drink it. You know, so there are choices that they can make in order to protect themselves from those things that are dangerous to them. Let's talk about bee stings. You know, sometimes we talk about addiction as an allergy. So let's talk about bee stings, because a lot of people are allergic to bees, like deathly allergic to bees. All right? You're powerless over that. If you get stung, you're going to have anaphylactic shock. That's just the way it is. However. So what do you do? Well, number one, you don't go expose yourself to bees. Number two, you carry around an EpiPen with you. You know, there are steps that you can take where you do have power in. In. In your reaction to the situation, if not over the situation. And that's an important aspect for people to really hone in on is, where is my power? And where is my power not in a particular situation? And. And unmanageability we talked about the other day. I can't remember which day about control. And a lot of times, the more people feel anxious, feel afraid, feel unsafe, the more they want to control things, the more challenging it is to admit that the situation is unmanageable or out of their control. That is terrifying to a lot of people to throw their hands up and go, you know what? I can't do this, or I can't do it on my own. I. That's terrifying. Admitting unmanageability means admitting imperfection and. But recognizing that it doesn't mean the situation itself is completely and totally unmanageable all the time by everybody. It means at this point in time, with the skills and tools that I have, I can't manage this situation by myself. I may need support or. Or other resources in order to deal with this. In addiction recovery, you know, we admit unmanageability, and we ask God or good, orderly direction, however you want to look at it to help us, we recognize that we can't do it on our own. Guess what? So powerlessness means recognizing where your power lies, that you're powerless over some things. And unmanageability often means admitting or. Or recognizing that maybe it's not something that you can do completely on your own. And relying on other people can be extremely scary for people because a lot of times they have been let down or traumatized by others. So that's an important issue to work with, is the ability to not only trust themselves, but trust other people. So I would encourage you to really talk about words like powerlessness, acceptance, unmanageability, and forgiveness. Those are four big words that are extremely triggering for a lot of people, and it's important to explore those in terms of how do those four words actually allow you to embrace your own power? How does powerlessness allow you to identify where you have power? How does forgiveness allow you to take back your energy and choose not to invest your energy in something that's not going to change? Unmanageability, you know, recognizing how does that give you more power to be able to say, you know what? I may not be able to do this on my own, but if I ask for help, I do have the power to reach out and find resources to assist me with this. Recognizing that most things are not, again, totally unmanageable by everybody all the time? You know, sometimes you just need a little bit of help. So examining some of those. And acceptance is the other one that I. I mentioned. Acceptance can be difficult. Acceptance doesn't mean saying it's okay. Acceptance means saying it is. I accept that it's sunny outside. I accept that it's raining outside. I accept. It doesn't mean I like it. It just means I'm acknowledging what is in the present moment. Edwin is right. Willingness is a good one too. We have to be willing to do things, which requires that courage there. Being willing to commit to something, being willing. We can have that plan right in front of us for our good, orderly direction all laid out. It's beautiful. But unless we are willing to take steps to do it, and let's just throw Abel in there, unless we're willing to do it, then that plan doesn't do us any good. So making sure that we're willing to do it and that we have the skills, tools and resources we need to do it. You know, you can have the best plan and be willing to do it, but if you don't have the skills, tools and resources, then you're going to have a hard time. Alrighty, everybody. Thank you so much for being here with me on this Friday. I enjoy having you here. If you're interested in continuing education training, you know, obviously we have almost a thousand videos available on the YouTube channel, so you can find a lot of stuff for free there. If you need or are interested in actual more in depth training and maybe continuing education, you can get that at all. Ceus.com. And in response to a couple of you yes, there is a lot of overlap between 12 steps as well as dialectical behavior therapy, cognitive behavior therapy, and acceptance and commitment Behavior therapy or acceptance and commitment therapy, There is a lot of overlap. The semantics are a little bit different between each theory, but we really are talking a lot about the same thing.