Survive Your Difficult Family By Being Calm (page 2)

5. Mindfulness practices
Meditation and other mindfulness practices that help you take charge of your thoughts and get a grip on your mind can prove very useful as part of your anxiety management program. The better you grasp the idea that the contents of your mind make suffering and the better job you do of releasing those thoughts, the less you will experience anxiety.

6. Guided imagery
Guided imagery is a technique where you guide yourself to calmness by mentally picturing a calming image or a series of images. You might picture yourself on a blanket by the beach, walking by a lake, or swinging on a porch swing. First determine what images actually calm you by trying out various images in your mind’s eye; then, when you’ve landed on some calming images, bring them to mind when you’re feeling anxious.

7. Disidentification and detachment techniques
A great way to reduce your experience of anxiety is by learning to bring a calm, detached perspective to life and by turning yourself into someone whose default approach to life is to create calm rather than drama and stress. You do this in part by affirming that you are different from and larger than any transitory part of your life: any feeling, any thought, any worry, any regret. By taking a more philosophical and detached approach to life you meet life more calmly.

8. Reorienting techniques
You can consciously reorient yourself away from your anxious thoughts and toward a more neutral stimulus. For example, if you’re a performer, instead of focusing on the audience entering the concert hall, you might reorient yourself toward the notices on the bulletin board in the green room, paying them just enough attention to take your mind off the sounds of the audience arriving.

9. Discharge techniques
Anxiety and stress build up in the body and techniques that vent that stress can prove very useful. One discharge technique is to “silently scream”—to make the facial gestures that go with uttering a good cleansing scream without actually uttering any sound (which would be inappropriate in most settings). Jumping jacks, pushups and physical gestures of all sorts can be used to help release the “venom” of anxiety and pass it out of your system.

Let’s focus next on dealing with what for some people is the perpetual chaos that defines their life. Many people today are functioning in the middle of exactly that sort of perpetual chaos. They run all day, commuting, handling work-related responsibilities, picking up their kids, shopping for meals, and simultaneously dealing with everything else that life throws at them, from health issues to bill payments to family crises to the state of their yard. Who can stay centered or even catch their breath nowadays? Where is calmness in that picture?

This chaos and overwhelm only increases if you are also dealing with intense family difficulties. Likewise, this perpetual chaos makes an already difficult family situation worse. Maybe you would be able to focus on your child’s school difficulties, your mate’s coldness, or your aging parent’s daily demands if you weren’t also obliged to handle a hundred other tasks, chores, and challenges. Lost in this agitated blur, you may be just able to get items checked off your perpetual to-do list and keep your life marginally afloat—but as likely as not at the cost of your emotional and physical health and with the added unfortunate result that your serious family difficulties go unattended.

What can help is the following simple ceremony. Take some time each day or a few times each day to do the following. Get a snow globe. Shake it up. Then breathe deeply as you watch the snow settle. As the snow is settling, say or think, “I am settling” or “I am calming down” or some other phrase of your choosing that helps you communicate that you now feel calmer. You can enact this ceremony with an actual snow globe, one that you purchase or have fabricated to your specifications, or you can enact it as a “mind ceremony,” shaking up the snow globe and watching it settle in your mind’s eye. 

It is hard to reduce the number of challenging things to which we must attend and it is hard to achieve calmness as we attend to those challenges. A difficult family situation only increases that anxiety and makes it that much harder not to feel anxious. It is therefore imperative that you practice and begin to “own” a few anxiety management techniques that work for you. You want to feel confident that you can calm your nerves before, say, having a hard chat with your child or your mate. If you don’t have that confidence and if you don’t know how to handle your nerves, you’re likely to avoid that conversation … once again. Make a concerted effort this week to bring a new calmness into your life by enacting the snow globe ceremony daily and by learning an effective anxiety management technique or two.

by Dr. Eric R. Maisel Ph.D.

Author of more than 40 books and teaching nationally and internationally at workshop centers like Esalen, Kripalu and Omega and in locations like San Francisco, New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Prague and Rome.

Our goal is to provide immediate and lasting solutions to your child's problems. At WinGate Wilderness Therapy, you can rest assured that your child will receive appropriate treatment in a caring and professional environment. Please don't hesitate to call (800) 560-1599 to speak with a representative and learn more about the possible solutions to your child's struggles.