Couples Counseling, Marriage Counseling, Relationships

How to bring back spontaneity in your relationship

It takes ongoing effort to keep a relationship fresh and lively. In today’s society, it can be easy to become critical of our own relationship when we focus on what others are doing and how others are prioritizing their relationships. 

If you find yourself comparing your relationship to others’ and their relationships often seem more exciting or fulfilling than yours, this can lead to an overall dissatisfaction in your own relationship. We all know the saying, “the grass is not always greener on the other side, it is greener where you water it.” Watering our own grass requires a more mindful approach to nurturing our relationship. Rather than focusing on what is missing in the relationship, we make a conscious choice to devote our time and energy to finding ways in which we can enhance our relationship. 

One way that we can begin mindfully pouring into our relationship is by planning spontaneous activities that break us out of our old mold. If you are looking to increase spontaneity and rekindle the flame, try this strategy:

  • 1. Make a list of things that you and your partner have done that he or she considered romantic, exciting, or fun.
  • 2. Find articles online for things to do with your partner, focusing on novelty, variety, and romance. Write down the ideas that you would consider doing.
  • 3. Once a week, get out your list and look it over for inspiration. Plan a time to surprise your partner with your activity.
  • 4. Get your partner in on the action and together, add to the list any ideas you have for spending quality time with one another.

Our favorite links to ideas:

17 fun things to do as a couple

30 things to do with your partner other than binge-ing Netflix

For more relationship advice, reach out to Hollie! Read more about her here.

Anxiety, Kids Mental Health, Self-Care, Self-doubt, Trauma

Avoidance

After a traumatic experience, it may feel like triggers are everywhere. Sights, sounds, smells, places, or even thoughts that remind you of what happened can suddenly send you spiraling. If you get too heavily triggered, you may even flashback and feel as if the traumatic event is happening all over again.

No wonder avoiding triggers can become a habit. Nobody wants to be retraumatized. At least to some degree, avoidance can be necessary and helpful at times, but what happens when it becomes your main strategy for coping with triggers?

When we avoid things that cause us anxiety, we’re essentially teaching our brains that we can’t handle whatever it is we’re avoiding. Your brain learns the following:

Triggers = Anxiety
Avoidance = Instant Relief

Instead of draining triggers of their power to cause panic, avoidance heightens the association between triggers and danger, which increases anxiety and makes you want to avoid even more. And the more you avoid, the more limited your life becomes.   

So how do you keep avoidance from taking over your life without getting overwhelmed and retraumatized by all the triggers? It takes a balance. By working with a therapist, you can begin learning new tools for managing triggers, that way avoidance is no longer the only means of relief.

For more information, contact summer@eastdallastherapy.com.

Anxiety, Depression, Self-Care, Self-doubt, Uncategorized

I’m in a Relationship, With My Emotions

Being a therapist has a lot of perks, one of those being the countless opportunities for introspection. Being able to sit with negative, painful, and intense emotions is a part of the job description. I will shamelessly admit that at one point, this was my Achilles heel. In my early days of therapy, witnessing clients experiencing difficult emotions was uncomfortable for me. My instinct was to “fix it.” I wanted to make it better, make it go away, paint over it with an inspiring phrase or motivational quote, deflect, or better yet, lighten the mood with a good ol’ joke. Not cool.
You see, the problem was that I had an unhealthy relationship with my own emotions. I was unable to tolerate distressing emotions and had in turn developed a number of strategies to avoid dealing with my emotions. This made me less understanding, empathetic, and emotionally available. Choosing to work on my relationship with my emotions has enabled me to better understand myself and others and has improved my capacity to recover quickly from difficulties.

When we attempt to avoid, suppress, control, numb, or deny the existence of our emotions, paradoxically, emotional distress is maintained and sometimes intensified. Maybe you have heard the saying, “don’t think about a pink elephant.” Ironic process theory states that deliberate attempts to suppress a thought often lead to an increase in having the thought. So, if you were told to not think about a pink elephant, ironic process theory predicts that you would experience an uptick in the amount of pink elephant related thoughts. This concept can be applied to emotions as well. When we attempt to avoid our emotions, we increase our own suffering. Haruki Murakami once said, “Pain in inevitable, suffering is optional.” 

So how do you cultivate a healthier relationship with your emotions? It begins with self-awareness and understanding your responses to negative emotions. By examining your own behaviors and looking out for clues that indicate your relationship with your emotions could use work, you can begin taking steps toward creating an emotionally enriched existence. Here are 2 warning signs that you may be on the outs with your emotions:

Overuse of distraction techniques.

I love a good distraction, but you know what they say, everything in moderation. Being busy can be a great thing, but the ‘why’ for your busyness is important. If you are keeping yourself busy in an attempt to avoid experiencing painful or negative emotions, you may be doing yourself a disservice. You can’t outrun your emotions. Emotional avoidance reinforces that idea that worry, doubt, anxiety, anger, sadness, discomfort, etc. are “dangerous” or “bad,” therefore we must avoid them or run away from them. This belief reduces your ability to tolerate pain associated with many of life’s challenges. 

You judge yourself harshly for feeling bad.

Feeling bad is a part of the human experience. You are allowed to have bad days, you are allowed to feel sad, angry, lonely, anxious, rejected, afraid, envious, or whatever emotion is coming up for you. Experiencing a difficult emotion does not make you “weak,” it makes you courageous for being vulnerable enough to own that experience. Growing up, were you told to “suck it up, get over it, man up, quit your crying, stop overreacting, just be happy,” or any version of these phrases? Many of us were, which has proven to be detrimental in adulthood. These phrases can communicate the belief that you shouldn’t feel how you feel and perhaps your feelings are “wrong.” These phrases can lead to an inability to trust your own emotions, believing that they will lead you astray if you give them a voice or acknowledge their existence. You are entitled to your emotions and giving yourself permission to feel your feelings can help to normalize your emotional experience and prevent further pain from self-criticism. 

Your relationship with your emotions is similar to any other relationship you have had. It is a relationship that requires kindness, attention, nurturing, curiosity, understanding, awareness, and respect. Improving your relationship with your emotions involves embracing the emotions that come and allowing them to be, which ultimately helps you to develop a capacity to tolerate unpleasant life experiences.

Anxiety, Kids Mental Health, Parenting, Self-Care, Uncategorized

Cleaning Out Our Emotional Backpacks

Have you ever let your kid’s backpack go too long without being cleaned out? It’s like the creature from the black lagoon’s habitat in there! There’s no telling what you may find but you can be pretty sure it will be horrifying.


Kids also need to clean out there emotional backpacks on the regular! 

I got caught talking so my teacher wrote my name on the board.
So I stuff embarrassment, anger and injustice (because my friend started the conversation) into my emotional backpack.

I finally figured out that math concept I’ve been faking that I understood for days but couldn’t celebrate because I wanted everyone (including my teacher) to think I already got it.
So I stuff frustration, deferred pride & self-hatred into my emotional backpack.

My best friends were pulled for a special project and I wasn’t so I had to hustle all of recess to find new kids to play with.
So I stuff sadness, loneliness and feelings of inferiority into my emotional backpack.

Some kids like to verbally unpack their emotional backpacks and a feelings chart can be helpful. You can ask which of these feelings did you feel today? Encourage them to list more than one and then say, “It was important enough for you to carry (enter their feeling word here) with you all day & you brought them home. What do they want to say?”

Some kids like to creatively unpack their emotional backpacks. Encourage them to build paint or journal their feelings. A prompt that might help would be, “It sounds like you felt really proud of yourself today but you didn’t get to shine. Can you show me that shine with your markers & glitter or magnet tiles.”
PSA: Playdough is great for cleaning up glitter 

Some kids like to physically clean out their emotional backpacks. You can offer the opportunity to write out difficult feelings and tape them to a punching bag, trampoline or bury them in the back yard.

Cleaning out our emotional backpacks should help mitigate meltdowns, sibling squabbles and rigidity after school.
Parents might want to try cleaning out their emotional work bags too!