Four Square Breathing

Four Reasons to Try "Four Square Breathing"

1. It’s easy. If you can count to four and breathe, you can do it.

2. You can do it anywhere. One DBT skill for distress tolerance is distraction. For this you can go for a walk, watch TV, squeeze silly putty, smell flowers, etc. The list is endless (and having all those options is empowering). But you don’t always have the time to go to the gym, or the money to buy an adult coloring book. And, if you’re in a meeting or on a date, let’s face it, playing with a slinky or going around chanting in lotus pose is just plain weird. But no one needs to know that you are controlling your breathing, refocusing, and calming your nervous system as you do four-square breathing.

3. Turns on parasympathetic nervous system. I will spare you the nerdy science, but let’s just say that four square breathing can help take you from frenetic fight/flight/freeze to calm rest/digest/process mode.

4. Gives anxious or obsessive brain a task. If your brain is going a million miles an hour in circles, sometimes it is soothed by doing something basic and concrete. Instead of letting your monkey mind swing from thought to thought, you can focus on counting your breathe and noticing your inhales and exhales. It is difficult for a brain to obsess about the talk you’re about to have or taxes or germ while simultaneously counting your breaths.

How to do Four Square Breathing

1. Breathe in for a count of four

2. Pause for a count of four

3. Breathe out for a count of four

4. Pause for a count of four

5. Rinse and repeat. Do 4 cycles.

Now all you have to do is try it!

Gaslighting in Adult Relationships

Gaslighting is basically crazy making. It typically happens in abusive relationships, relationships where one (or both) partner has an addiction, or if one partner has narcissistic tendencies. It can be a defense strategy (he says "I wasn’t drunk", when he obviously was), a form of manipulation ("I'm worried about you. I hope you haven't told anyone, they'll think you're crazy"), or a result of limited attunement or empathy ("you're just being sensitive"). Sometimes it's blatant. Sometimes it's more tricky to spot. Either way, it has an impact on your health and vitality and is a pattern that needs attention and effort to change.

Because one effect is lack of trust in your perceptions, if you’re being gaslighted, you may be second guess if you’re actually being gaslighted. Here’s a list by Robin Stern, PhD to help.

Signs you may be being gaslighted:                        

• You are constantly second-guessing yourself.

• You start to question if you are too sensitive.

• You often feel confused and have a hard time making simple decisions.

• You find yourself constantly apologizing.

• You can’t understand why you’re so unhappy.

• You often make excuses for your partner’s behavior.

• You feel like you can’t do anything right.

• You often feel like you aren’t good enough for others.

• You have the sense that you used to be a more confident, relaxed and happy person. You withhold information from friends and family so you don’t have to explain things                               

We are here to help. Get in touch and start getting help today. 

Gaslighting - A Form of Manipulation

If you were like me, you had parents who did their best but made mistakes. One mistake that can have lasting impact is invalidating or gaslighting.       

Whats gaslighting

It’s basically crazy making. Its denying or significantly distorting facts and feelings. In my house it looked like not talking about fights or denying fights, being told I was too sensitive, being told that I was selfish for not helping even though I didn't know help was required, being told "I never said that" or "I already told you that". There was a lot of stress in my family and that sometimes left insufficient room for my needs and emotions.           

Is Gaslighting Manipulation?

Gaslighting is often described as a form of emotional abuse and manipulation. But it’s not always so conscious and sinister. Sometimes a parent or caretaker simply doesn't have capacity or skill or emotional space to see our emotion or take our perspective. But regardless, the result of chronic invalidation is that we are left separated for our self, our feelings, and our intuition. The initial anger we may have felt as a kid gets turned inward and manifests in poor self worth, shame, and depression. Most of the people I work with (and in my case as well) deal with that by numbing and soothing those invalidated emotions with food, sex, alcohol, drugs, codependency, etc. I would happily be out of a job if parents would be able to validate their kids emotions.

I think through therapy and work on ourselves we learn to validate ourselves and be comfortable with our own reality and then can we be able to tolerate the feelings and perceptions of others. By doing that we can make an impact on future generations.

How to Tell Your Partner You Want Couples Counseling

Telling your spouse or partner you want to go to couples counseling can be really tricky for some people. In fact, I often get calls from people asking this very question. They know they need help but aren’t sure how to approach their partner and they aren’t sure what to say.  

Tell Your Partner You Want Couples Counseling

First, make it about you. Do not make it about them. Try something like this: “I am having trouble communicating with you and think I need some help in figuring this out. I think it would be great if we both went together. We could get a few tips and some new skills. What do you think?” Or:  “I would love to learn how to approach you in a new way so that maybe you can hear me better. And sometimes I don’t do a good job of hearing or listening to you either.  Would you be willing to go to couples counseling with me?” Or: “Honey, we know we are both really struggling right now, we have the same fights over and over. I think this is at least a 50 / 50 thing between us and I think we could use a little help here. I don’t think either one of us is to blame. How would you feel about some couples therapy to get us both back on track?”

If you make it about the other person, you are assigning blame. Nobody wants to be the bad guy. Plus, the research shows that when couples are in conflict, it is almost always a 50 / 50 deal where no one person is more at fault.  

What’s best is if you can pinpoint the things you want to work on personally and name them.  Perhaps you want to figure out how to be more flexible, a bit more forgiving, not running away when things get tough, learning how to control your temper, not lashing out when the dish is left in the sink (it’s never about the dish anyway).

Another option is letting your partner know that you sense this pattern that gets played out over and over again and you want to figure out how to jump out of it before it takes over again.  Think of the pattern as a weapon that is wounding each of you.  We can lay the weapon on the table and disarm both of you.  When we know what we are dealing with (the weapon, the pattern), we can then tease it apart and put you both back on the path to success so that you can thrive in your relationship.  

Ready to start working on your relationship? Call us today so we can help you and your partner get back to where you want to be.

Healing From an Eating Disorder

While all eating disorders are different in terms of primary symptoms, anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, and binge eating disorder all center around a dysfunctional relationship with food, weight, and appearance. But compulsive behaviors and obsessive thinking around food, weight, and appearance are only the tip of the iceberg of an eating disorder. 

Below the surface, we see that those behaviors could be a result of mental health issues, trauma, grief and loss, identity and societal pressure, gender and sexuality, or attachment wounds…. and not uncommonly, all of the above. A person with an eating disorder isn’t being vain or picky or selfish or sneaky or whatever by focusing on food, weight, and appearance, they’re just trying the best they can in the way they know how to cope and keep it together. 

Using an Eating Disorder to Cope 

People use eating disorder behaviors because (unfortunately) they work. Food and exercise impact our body chemicals and physiology. They can help ground and soothe anxiety and trauma by helping distract by focusing on food instead of pain or mindlessly eating or exhausting your body through exercise or being too hungry to feel emotions fully. They are also a way to have control. Maybe you can’t control your mind or your family, but you can always control your food and appearance. Everyone has their own specific ways and reasons why their eating disorder works…until it doesn’t.

Healing More Than Just an Eating Disorder 

Healing an eating disorder is complex in that there are usually hidden aspects of the person's life that lead to using food as a form of control. It does take  healing the relationship with food but, more often than not, that comes through healing the relationship with self and others that either were broken before the eating disorder or got broken as the eating disorder took over. 

Just focusing on food and weight in treatment would be a bandaid on a broken bone (at best).  Healing looks like attending to all those underlying issues and not just focusing on the eating disorder. The eating disorder was there to do a job (manage a complex, painful, and challenging life) and our mission in therapy is to heal old wounds and add new tools and skills so that the eating disorder is no longer needed. 

Because eating disorders can be quite damaging and even lethal, they often aren’t just treated by a therapist. Depending on the severity of symptoms and health issues, treatment often also involves a medical doctor, registered dietician, or psychiatrist. If they’re caught early or in less severe cases, these may not be as necessary as often, but like all eating disorder treatment, those decisions come on an individualized basis. 

Eating disorder treatment is slow, complex, and challenging but also rewarding, transformative, and, most importantly, possible.

Depression–Friend or Foe?

By reading the title, I bet you are wondering if there is a typo where the word 'friend’ exists in the same sentence as depression. How is that possible? We hate depression, right? Almost everything about depression on the internet explains how it is enemy number one and how we can overcome it. In many instances, I agree with the desire to get rid of depression as it can be incredibly debilitating to not just the individual but those around them as well. However, I would like to suggest something different. 

Treat Depression as a Friend

Let us view depression as a friend, just for a little bit. Consider this a thought exercise. The more time I spend practicing as a therapist, the more I have noticed clients’ goals of excommunicating the big-bad ’depression’. People are taught that depression is something that should be “treated”, “overcome”, or “dealt with”. Society tells us that people with depression are sick and need to have it taken care of. 

Ideally, it sounds wonderful to get rid of this so-called ‘negative’ energy and be able to enjoy the sunshine and rainbows of the world. But what is holding them back? It could be because getting rid of something that is so deeply rooted in our nervous systems feels impossible and even discouraging.

So let us put on our new filtered lens and take a peek at what is the purpose of depression in me. Have you noticed how depression has been there to protect you from further harm? Minimizing risks? Evolutionary speaking, depression encourages the individual to rest. 

“While depression may be maladaptive when it comes to mood and social interactions, the symptoms could be quite adaptive when it comes to keeping a person alive while fighting infection. The theory also helps explain why stress can trigger depressive episodes. It may be the body’s effort to amp up the immune response in preparation for infection.” (Walton, 22)

Different Ways to Look at Depression

If we take a break from resisting this very important part of us, we just might notice the purpose of its existence in our lives. To try something different, would be to understand and befriend it first. Once you feel like you have made peace with depression as a part of you, only then can you start to encourage that part to move over to the passenger seat, while you focus on taking the right steps towards regaining control of your goals and life. 

• Being aware of how depression is negatively (isolation, lack of motivation) and positively (reevaluation of habits, re-prioritization, self-protection) impacting your lives. 

• Speak to yourself and the depressive part with kindness and grace. (Negative self-talk discourages us from making progress)

• Encourage the self in you to be in control of the daily goals that you wish to achieve. 

• Start collecting the small victories throughout your day.

• Rewrite your story with new-found motivation and confidence!

If you struggle with depression and want to learn how to see it from a different perspective, please schedule an appoint with me today.

Holiday Family Traditions

Family traditions can provide a feeling of cohesion and belonging within families. Family traditions can come in all shapes and sizes, from weekly pizza nights to annual holiday celebrations that bring extended family together. The holidays are a wonderful time to create new traditions for you and your family members to look forward to. Maybe you drink hot chocolate and watch a holiday movie on the first snow of the year. Or, if you celebrate Christmas, perhaps you decorate the Christmas tree as a family on the first Saturday of December.

Holiday Traditions to do with Family

1. Go cut down a Christmas tree together the weekend after Thanksgiving

2. Decorate the tree together while listening to Christmas music

3. Bake and decorate holiday themed cookies

4. Drive around to different neighborhoods and vote on your favorite light display

5. Build a gingerbread house

6. Ugly sweater contest

7. Give everyone in the family matching pajamas for your holiday festivities

8. Start a silly tradition your kids decide on

9. Write holiday letters to kids in the hospital

10. Adopt a family in need and gift them with items they want or need for the holidays

Benefits In Engaging in Family Traditions

• Traditions are often formed around values and areas of importance for families and can help family members discover more about their unique identity as a family.

• Families who come together around a common interest when engaging in a tradition can feel a sense of cohesion and closeness.

• Joining in traditions as family members allows an opportunity to “show up” for one another, even in times of stress, frustration, hardship, and conflict.

• Traditions can help families create legacies and lasting memories that will live on with family members as treasured experiences.

Some families find it difficult to engage in traditions and experience the cohesion they desire. If you find yourself struggling to feel as close with your family as you would like, especially during the holiday season, please reach out to schedule an appointment today.

Stop Talking Yourself out of Therapy and Feel Better Today

The average amount of time people wait before seeking help is staggering.  The worst part is that people tend to only seek help when they feel awful or simply can’t handle what is going on any longer. They are agonizing, sometimes in silence and alone, for years.  You try your best to make things better, but a brain that is suffering isn’t going to be able to fix all the problems on it’s own.  You're stuck.

Then you get the courage to ask for help, and you hear this:

Just exercise!  You need some endorphins!  

Oh, I have these great new vitamins that you should try.

Just get over it, geeze it’s been long enough, time to move on.

That wouldn’t bother me, why does it bother you?

It’s just a phase, this too shall pass.

You must not be trying hard enough.

Meditate and do yoga.

Turn that frown upside down!

Sound familiar?!? Guess what? You won’t ever hear anything like that at CCFT.

Whatever you are suffering from, depression, anxiety, grief, relationship problems, eating disorders, mental health issues of all kinds, we will help you.  

We are here to hold your hand, listen to what you are going through and climb that mountain with you.  We are 100% devoted to your wellbeing and are experts in our fields.  Call today and feel better tomorrow. Book a session today on our website, or you can also call us directly:  303-881-3355.

To your wellbeing,

Carrie, Kate, Erika and Sarah

Thanksgiving Day Tips for People with Eating Disorders

Thanksgiving can be hard for everyone.

It's a lot of people, a lot of preparation and clean up, and of course there's all manner good old f-ed up family dynamics. But this food focused day can be exceptionally hard for people with eating disorders to navigate. Here's a few quick tips to help you deal with an eating disorder during the holidays.  

1. Keep your routine as normal as possible. Don't restrict or skip meals before dinner. Doing that may make it feel more safe, but it actually sets you up to be more anxious, less present, and more likely to struggle with diner if you go into the meal super hungry.

2. Don't spend extra time around the food. Limit time in prep and clean-up of food. Being around the food more than necessary may keep you focused on food and more likely to be anxious, calorie counting, or triggered to binge. Instead, see if you can spend time with friends and family outside the kitchen. When possible, before and after the meal, distract, distract, distract.

3. Don't drink much, if at all. That will make staying centered and grounded and connected more difficult.

4. Remember that it's just one meal. Regardless of culture and family messages, thanksgiving doesn't have to be a gluttonous free for all. It's just a meal. No need to eat past fullness. That being said, it's just one meal. Even if you eat more than you usually do, you may feel uncomfortable and at the same time you're safe. Your anxiety and fullness will pass. One meal doesn't make or break your life or your body. Usually bodies are far more flexible and forgiving with food than your eating disorder mind is.

5. Try to redirect your focus from food to gratitude and family. Food doesn't have to be the centerpiece of your day. The day originated as a way to celebrate friends and family and give thanks. Don't let your anxiety and eating disorder rob you of that. The meal can be challenging AND you can still feel and focus on gratitude. Be grateful that you have a meal to attend, that you are brave for showing up, that you have values you are moving towards (connection, family, love, humor, integrity, etc.) that are more important than your eating disorder.

If you or a loved one are struggling with an eating disorder, we are here to help. Contact us to schedule a consult.