boundaries – Grow Mindfulness

Relational Resilience through Bodily Awareness

Christina Dohr presented on the topic of “Relational Resilience” during the recent Embodiment Festival. Christina is a qualified somatic educator and embodiment coach, who aims to help people through bodily awareness (of breath, sensations, posture and movement) to achieve self-awareness and authentic connection and relationships. She is a strong advocate of movement as a way to tap into the mind-body connection and emotions – her background includes dance, improvisation and a black belt in Aikido.

Relational resilience is a concept typically employed in research literature especially in relation to the development of girls and women and often refers to the capacity to bounce back in the face of trauma, difficulties and health issues. The concept is also employed in the context of parenting and dependent child development. In her presentation, Christina used the idea of relational resilience to refer to any relationship, intimate or friendship relationship. She focused on sustainability of relationships in the face of life challenges and the role of deepening connection to facilitate mutual growth. Christina also reinforced the research-based evidence that demonstrates the key role that supportive relationships play in healing from trauma and coping with personal difficulties.

Bodily Awareness

Christina, being an embodiment coach, offered bodily awareness as a way into relational resilience. She highlighted the fact that the way we visualise and use our bodies impacts our relationships. Throughout her presentation she introduced a range of embodiment practices designed to build bodily awareness and the messages we communicate in our interactions. We can concur with Bessel van der Kolk’s concept that The Body Keeps the Score – not only in relation to traumatic experiences but also everyday interactions.

Christina focused on a number of areas that either sustain or dimmish relationships such as listening. She suggests that we explore how we listen and whether or not we bring openness, curiosity and genuine interest to our intimate relationships. Christina offered an embodiment practice to look at the relative give and take in a relationship – a key determinant of sustainability and resilience. She suggested that participants in the Zoom workshop joined their hands together and visualise the balance occurring in their relationship by moving their joined hands towards themselves or away from themselves. At the same time, participants were encouraged to tap into their bodily sensations as they experienced this movement to or away from themselves.

Another key area that Christina covered is “ownership” in a relationship – the degree to which we own our words and action and their outcomes, intended and unintended. She stressed the need “to take responsibility” and not deflect or deny when we make a mistake or “stuff up” in a relationship. This could mean simply acknowledging that we didn’t listen properly or that we were not paying attention. This genuineness and honesty contribute to trustworthiness which, in turn, develops relational resilience. We can notice our bodily reactions/sensations when confronted with the challenge to “own responsibility” for our words, actions, inactions or omissions in a relationship.

Christina indicated that there are times when we tend to own responsibility when its is not appropriate – we might overcompensate, overdo giving (trying to anticipate a partner’s every need) or try to read another person’s mind. She offered a simple embodiment exercise to illustrate this point. If your shape your hands “to hug a tree”, the inner circle (or the imaginary tree) represents your area of responsibility – outside the circle is someone else’s responsibility. She suggests that you can also embody this concept of responsibility boundaries (and experience it through accompanying bodily sensations) by facing one palm in towards yourself (your responsibility) and the other palm facing away from you (the other person’s responsibility). Being conscious of how you feel as you do this can increase your bodily and emotional awareness.

Reflection

Christina encourages us to use our body as a mirror to our “inner landscape”. There is so much we can overlook or ignore, but our bodies are registering everything – the way others look at us, avoid us or attend to what we say. Our bodies are continuously sensing and reacting, often at an unconscious level. One of Christina’s goals is to assist us to “uncover unconscious embodiment patterns” and help us to change what no longer serves our relationships and its resilience. To this end she offers embodiment coaching and workshops to help people gain bodily awareness and develop mature and resilient relationships.

We can grow in mindfulness and self-awareness as we explore embodiment practices and pay attention to our bodily sensations and reactions in our daily interactions. Christina’s presentation gives us some relationship areas to think about, focus on and experience bodily. Other presentations at the Embodiment Festival can advance our personal insight by offering a variety of embodiment practices.

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Image by Holger Schué from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group, and the resources to support the blog.

Overcoming Anxiety

Presenters at the Anxiety Super Conference reinforced the view that adverse childhood experiences provided the foundation for anxiety in later life. The early childhood experiences could involve sexual and/or physical abuse, psychological control, cruelty, demeaning words and actions or any other form of adversity that undermines a child’s self-esteem, sense of self-worth and security. The effects of adverse childhood experiences are long-lasting, sometimes a whole lifetime. I find it amazing that in my seventies, I am still anxious in confined spaces, especially lifts. I track this anxiety back to 18 months of confinement in an orphanage when I was 4 years old and separated in the complex from my younger sister.

We are told that there is wisdom in anxiety and it can be good for us, e.g. warning us about an unhealthy situation, either self-generated or other-generated. It can also be useful when it activates focus and energy when pursuing our goals, whether at work, in sport or in our homes. Anxiety is counterproductive when it undermines our confidence or causes us to freeze, dissociate or engage in destructive, addictive habits. However, the path to overcoming debilitating anxiety does not lie in avoidance or denial, but in truly facing up to anxiety and related fears. The presenters at the Anxiety Super Conference provided ways to overcome anxiety, many of them embedded in the body, such as Restorative Yoga offered by Adelene Cheong.

Anxiety Loops

Amber Benziger, who spoke at the Anxiety Super Conference, provides a short video on the nature of anxiety loops that potentially generate escalating fear. She suggests that experiences like the pandemic can intensify uncertainty around day-to-day activities like getting the children to school, retaining a job or maintaining physical and mental health. The uncertainty can provoke anxiety about how to handle the resultant disruption and disconnect with established routines. This, in turn, can lead to physical manifestations of heightened anxiety such as increased heartrate, headaches, or pain in the arms , legs, neck or back (through tightened muscles and constriction of blood flow). The physical symptoms can activate negative thoughts such as, “Why haven’t I prepared for this?” “I am not a good parent/spouse/colleague”, “Why can’t I cope with this disturbance when other people seem to be coping?. Amber suggests that, over time, the uncomfortable feelings intensify, negative thoughts become reactionary and excessive and anxiety can be experienced as a panic attack or burnout.

Breaking the anxiety loop

Amber’s suggestion to break the anxiety loop is to first validate the true nature of the external stimulus, e.g. acknowledge that it is a global pandemic and certainly a challenging time that is causing uncertainty and worry for many people. Then, asking yourself a number of questions relating to control (which appears to be the thing we experience as most under attack), e.g. “What can I actually control?, “What is in my power to do now to prepare, protect and provide for myself and others?” She encourages us to check in to our bodily sensations via processes such as a body scan and progressive releasing of tension. At the same time, she encourages us to challenge our negative thoughts and underpinning assumptions. Amber asserts that in the final analysis, “feelings are not facts!” and we should question why these feelings are arising – just as Jon Kabat-Zinn asserts, “We are not our thoughts!” and we should use diffusion strategies to minimise their impact.

Amber is the creator of The Anxiety Lab which is a membership site for women who want to overcome anxiety and restore control in their lives. Besides social support provided by members, Amber offers resources and workshops to enable participants to develop mechanisms for coping with anxiety. As a trained counsellor and clinical therapist, she also offers counselling for individuals and families as well as group therapy and teletherapy.

Anxiety can be compounded when we take on new roles such as that of a leader in a community organisation or a manager in a commercial enterprise. Our inability to cope with anxiety can be more public and open to scrutiny in these roles and environments.

Managerial anxiety

Managers can be anxious about the decisions they make, their impact on the welfare of staff, their ability to properly represent the organisation and its goals, their capacity to observe legislative requirements or meet any of the multitude other demands of a manager in this day and age (including coping with new technologies and industry discontinuities). Managers can be concerned about how they are viewed by their hierarchy, their staff, their colleagues or their clients. They can be anxious about meeting targets, avoiding budget overruns or achieving the required organisational growth. Managers, whether executives or managers lower in the organisation, can be captured by expectations, those of others as well as their own unrealistic expectations arising from a perfectionist tendency. This anxiety can lead to overwork and an inability to create boundaries between work and home (particularly in these days of hybrid work).

During the Anxiety Super Conference, Moira Aarons-Mele raised the issue of leadership anxiety and explained that it is different for every person. She stated that because of our nature as “human relational creatures”, we worry about how we are viewed by others, “ping” off others’ anxiety and take on others’ urgencies. She maintained that this anxiety-related behaviour is aggravated both by email (where we worry about the communications we initiate and our response to others’ communications) and online meetings. Meetings via platforms such as Zoom, can be draining not only because of the level of concentration required but also the fact that we are “performing under lights”. Moira suggests that the “energetic output” required for a series of Zoom sessions is excessive and in a TED Talk, she offers 3 steps to stop remote work burnout.

Moira self-identifies as “an extremely anxious overachiever” who is working to bring some normality to her life. In pursuit of this purpose, she created The Anxious Achiever Podcast – a series of podcasts in which she interviews experts in the field of anxiety management including those who propose writing as therapy, adoption of Acceptance and Commitment (ACT) therapy and dealing with the “imposter syndrome”. One of her interviewees, journalist Priska Neely, explains why managing is the hardest job she ever had.

Overcoming managerial anxiety

Moira offers a number of ways to overcome managerial anxiety. She suggests that one of the first steps for a manager is letting go – stop micromanaging and empower others through mindful delegation. Associated with this, is the need to adopt healthy work habits that become new norms by way of modelling desired behaviour. Sometimes this involves changing the expectations of staff that have arisen as a result of the previous behaviour of the manager, e.g. arriving early and leaving late.

Moira also recommends talking about the work situation and the stressors involved and working collaboratively with staff to develop ways to cope effectively – e.g. introducing a wellness program or a morning exercise routine. This self-care and other-care approach could involve checking in on oneself as well as staff experiencing distress. Moira also strongly recommends setting boundaries , both at work and at home, ensuring there is a clear divide between work life and home life (avoiding endless spill over, a trap for the unwary when working from home). Moira, like Ginny Whitelaw, encourages movement and bodily awareness to enable leaders to let go of tension – otherwise, their tension contaminates the mood of everyone else they come into contact with (bosses, colleagues and staff).

Reflection

There are many paths to overcoming the anxiety that negatively impacts our health, productivity and overall well-being. We have to start, and persist with, the journey into our inner landscape. This can be a lifetime pursuit but the rewards are great as we begin to break free of expectations and the other ties that bind us. As Janine Mikosza writes in her novel, Homesickness: A Memoir, “your past doesn’t have to be your future”.

If we adopt mindfulness practices such as Tai Chi, yoga or meditation, we can find that over time as we grow in mindfulness we begin to develop heightened self-awareness, the courage to change, the creativity to develop new ways of being-in-the-world and the resilience to maintain the journey. In the process, we will positively impact others whom we interact with at work, at home or during our everyday endeavours (such as sports or social events).

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Image by John Hain from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group, and the resources to support the blog.

How to Set Boundaries for Mental Health and Freedom

Tami Simon of Sounds True interviewed Terri Cole about the nature of personal boundaries, their importance and how to establish and maintain them. Terri is the author of the book, Boundary Boss: The Essential Guide to Talk True, Be Seen, and (finally) Live Free. In writing the book Terri drew on her own personal experiences, especially as a child, and her work with clients as a psychotherapist. She found that her own “need to please” created “dysfunctional boundaries” and observed that many of her client’s problems stemmed from the inability to establish “healthy boundaries”.

Our “boundary blueprint”

Terri maintains that we each have a “boundary blueprint”, imprinted by the key influencers in our life, including our parents. She suggests that over time we model ourselves on the behaviour and responses of our parents and key influencers, so that we can end up with an approach to setting boundaries that is ineffectual and even mentally harmful. Once we have been able to master the skill of establishing boundaries, we can free ourselves from the hold of habituated responses – which are often designed to avoid conflict, gain approval or maintain the “peace”. As Terri points out, our habituated responses typically involve not being truthful about our own desires and needs.

Becoming a “boundary boss”

The concept of “boundary boss” is not a harsh or unkind approach as the name might suggest but essentially entails being kind to ourselves and others through telling the truth (while leaving room to negotiate about desires and needs). Terri maintains that we all have a “boundary bill of rights” but often fail to understand those rights or know how to assert them. She makes herself incredibly vulnerable by telling stories about her own experience and dysfunctional boundaries, including her failure to assert her wishes with clinicians when diagnosed with cancer.

Terri maintains that becoming a “boundary boss” rests on five key pillars – (1) self-awareness, (2) self-knowledge, (3) self-acceptance, (4) self-compassion, and (5) self-mastery (incorporating self-love as well as “self-celebration”). Throughout her book, she offers exercises and powerful reflections to help the reader build these pillars and move progressively towards “speaking their truth”. Terri cautions, though, that the transformation involves one step at a time, not quantum leaps. It initially involves a very honest exploration of the boundaries we have in place in our relationships – and an understanding of where are boundaries are “loose or “rigid”. Her book is very much about self-exploration to determine a better way to respond to our interpersonal challenges.

Speaking truthfully

At the heart of establishing and enforcing boundaries is speaking truthfully from an enlightened self-knowledge. It means having the courage to present ourselves as we are, not as we think people want us to be. Terri stresses that it also entails having the courage to acknowledge other people’s rights and their right to decline or say “no”, as well as developing the skill to say “no” ourselves in appropriate circumstances. She even offers very clear guidelines on how to say “no” and how to modify your response depending on the interpersonal context (e.g., interacting with a stranger versus with an intimate partner).

Terri suggests that many of the occasions where we do not speak our truth result in resentment or anger, e.g., where we feel that some things in our relationship are not equitable, or that we are being taken for granted or where our emotional needs are not being met. These strong emotions can be indicative of our failure to establish our boundaries. Terri suggests that if we want to look at improving our relationships, we need first to look at ourselves-in-relationship and how we are presenting ourselves. As she asserts, “change begins with us’, with understanding our inner landscape and acting on our insights.

Reflection

Terri’s book is penetrating and exposing – it exposes our behaviour patterns and our behaviour drivers. She does this kindly by first sharing her own transparency and vulnerability. However, Terri does not leave us exposed but offers ways to develop the skills to understand ourselves and assert our desires and needs in a kind and compassionate way.

She offers practical, conversational starters to help us move beyond our habituated behaviour. It is difficult to hear her speak or read her book without feeling exposed but, at the same time, feeling highly supported to begin the journey of personal transformation by becoming our own “boundary boss”.

As we grow in mindfulness through meditation, reflection, and self-knowledge exercises, we can progressively develop the necessary self-awareness, self-mastery, self-acceptance, self-compassion and self-forgiveness, to establish our boundaries and have the courage to assert them in a mindful and kind way.

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Image by John Hain from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group and the resources to support the blog.