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CRISIS ~ DISTRESS ~ EMERGENCY SITUATIONS |
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TOPICS |
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Practicing
Radical Acceptance (a
video that may be viewed to calm your emotions).
Taken
from the website: dbtselfhelp.com (Lisa Deitz) |
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Being in crisis or distress can be as jarring as these colors used here ! Situations look black, with thoughts zig-zagging like neon lightning across the brain. Been there. A good suggestion would be to have a plan without reaching the sirens-in-the-brain/strobe lights flashing zone. Read on. |
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Develop a Safety Plan for Mental
Health Emergencies: How to Create a Safety Plan
by Kristalyn Salters-Pedneault, PhD, (About.com
Guide) This article covers the steps in making a clear and comprehensive safety plan. This is not something that can be done when you are already in the midst of a mental health emergency (e.g., planning to commit suicide or to harm or kill someone else). If you or a loved one are currently at immediate risk of harming yourself or someone else, do not read this article. Call “911” (in the U.S. or Canada) or get to an emergency room immediately. If you are not at immediate risk of harming yourself or someone else, but this has happened to you in the past (or you are concerned it might in the future), this is a good time to create a safety plan. Ask Your
Therapist About A Safety Plan Target Your
Safety Plan: Evaluate Your Risk Behaviors Along with evaluating your risk, you should evaluate whether there are factors that may be increasing your risk of completing a suicide or harming others. For example, are there firearms in your home? Are there medications in your house that could be used in a suicide attempt? Are there other items that might make it easier for you to harm yourself or others? If you answered yes, you need to work with your therapist on a plan to get rid of these items or to reduce the likelihood that you will use them. For example, can you get your medications prescribed in smaller quantities? Can you leave firearms at the police station? Identify
Triggers for High-Risk Behaviors For example, many people with BPD have abandonment sensitivity, which makes experiences of real or perceived abandonment very painful. For those individuals who suffer from this symptom, abandonment experiences may trigger suicidal thoughts or thoughts of harming others. Think about the events or thoughts that tend to trigger urges to engage in harmful behaviors for you, and create a list of triggers. Make a
Safety Plan for Coping Resources Make a list of coping skills that you are familiar with and that work for you, as well as sources of social support, and people/places that can help you if you need it. For example, do you use mindfulness skills when you are starting to have negative thoughts about yourself, and do these skills help you to let go of negative thoughts before urges to harm yourself begin to happen? Do you have a friend you can call who is a good source of support when you are down? Next, write down things you will do if your coping resources do not work and you experience a mental health emergency or crisis (e.g., your urges to harm get to the point that you are at immediate risk of committing suicide or to harming or killing someone else). Is there a hospital nearby that you can drive to? Do you have an emergency phone number on hand (e.g., in the U.S., the National Suicide Hotline: 1-800-273-8255)? If you are not sure what you could do in an emergency, read this article:
What To Do In A
Crisis For each risk behavior, write out the triggers for that behavior, the coping responses you could engage in if you experience a trigger, and what you will do if the coping responses do not work and you begin to experience an emergency situation. Continue until you have a safety plan for all of the risk behaviors you identified. Make a
Safety Plan Commitment |
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BPD and Crisis
© A.J. Mahari What is a crisis? Often many people with BPD (or not) think that having what feels like more feelings than you can hold is a crisis. They often also think that changes in distance between themselves and others (we all flow in and out, closer and more distant as there is an ebb and flow to relationships) is a crisis as well. Anything that seeks to separate the borderline from cognitive-distorted beliefs and the accompanying feelings is often experienced as a crisis. Most see being in crisis as a negative thing, an undesirable painful 'out of control thing'. While there are times when a crisis brings forth danger, trouble and or the threat of unpleasant consequences more often than not a crisis is a chance to make needed change. It is a turning point. What we often identify as a
crisis is actually a turning point of opportunity presenting itself
in the course of whatever we are dealing with. While it can be a
painful attack of a disorder, or a painful living example of coping
skills that one may lack, or an insight about oneself that brings
with it a lion-share of grief, each turning point is an opportunity
to learn, grow, recover and to heal. Every time you let one of these
opportunities pass you, you are making an active choice to continue
to suffer. In Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) even just feeling something can constitute a perceived (or real) crisis of some sort. If one has been dissociated from feelings for a long time those feelings are then perceived as being more outside of oneself than a part of oneself. This can be very frightening and overwhelming. Not being able to sit with, hold, work through and come to an un-distorted place with the thoughts that drive those feelings (often) leads a borderline to believe and to feel he/she is in a crisis. At the heart of each and every borderline crisis is the pain of the Core Wound of Abandonment. The challenge here is to learn that the presentation of a lot of emotion does not have to be so overpowering. Whether it is overwhelming or not, however, you can learn ways to cope with it so that you do not end up feeling and or being in crisis each time your feelings rise up. It is the processing, understanding, and integrating of these very feelings that feel so threatening that is the way to find your true self and to recover. Borderlines often are dependant upon others to mirror to them who they are and what they need and should do, feel and say. Often borderlines find themselves in crisis when they somehow threaten the security of the connection to the people that they feel they need in their lives to be safe and okay. Yet, just as often, borderlines feel compelled to break these connections out of some maladaptive protective attempts or the simple reality of the very complex need to sabotage these connections in order to re-play out past experiences, usually of abandonment. There is a co-dependant neediness, often, that sees many borderlines manipulating to meet their own needs through others. This is ripe territory for an inevitable crisis, not to mention a very valuable one. If you can hold your frustration, anger, abandonment etc long enough to endure the loss of any relationship in your life (and borderlines usually lose quite a few over time) and learn to meet your needs and soothe yourself then you can begin to turn your life around from being needy to being much more healthy. This is an example of how a crisis can be a very worthwhile challenge that can result in much positive growth and change. A well-managed crisis can also bring about a rather sudden insight that can lead to just as sudden a recovery over time. When things change quickly as they often do with new insight into oneself it can absolutely feel like a crisis of sorts. So much new information and often some of it that leaves a person with a lot of grief can feel just as devastating and difficult as a crisis of negative and isolating or disconnecting proportions. What a crisis actually is (more often than not) Many a crisis is, in actuality, a shifting and separating from old beliefs, old patterns of thought and behaviour, pain that was clung to and in fact kept you stuck with it often alienating you from those around you, illusions, delusions, and maladapative coping skills that no longer work but only serve to make things more painful in the long run. Simply put many a perceived crisis is actually learning, discernment, growth, change, risk, new feelings to hold and work through as one begins to break free of old lifetime scripts or patterned ways of thinking, feeling, and acting. Borderlines must experience some crisis in order to heal and to recover. It is not so much the crisis or the fear, anxiety or pain that are the biggest challenge. The biggest challenge is how you choose to deal or cope with all of these feelings, insights and changes. In the truest meaning of a crisis - a turning point - each borderline must realize the value of the lostness of all of the pain and grief and let that teach him/her how to make new choices. For if you continue to make the same choices, you will not only continue to go through the same crisis over and over again, but you will inevitably get the same results - the same negative, overwhelming, annihilating borderline thoughts and feelings that lead you to act in ways that only perpetuate the very crises you seek relief from in your life. |
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11 Tips for Cooling off After a Confrontation We all try to keep our cool and stop anger and hostility from infiltrating our sense of inner peace, but sometimes—whether we rashly lose our tempers or are provoked into a righteous confrontation—we find ourselves in an argument. During the fight, our endorphins pump, our faces flush, our hands might shake, and our hearts pound. But what about afterwards? How can we harness our endorphins, faces, hands, and hearts and re-assemble that inner peace that was shattered when the argument reared its ugly head? We asked you, Beliefnet’s readers, for your best tips, and combined them with some ideas from experts. So take a deep breath and click on for 11 quick ways to calm down after an argument. 1. Take a Recovery Walk I take a walk. While I am
walking, I think about the situation and what just happened. After
we both are calm I recoup myself and talk to him ask: was that even
worth it to argue? Did it really need to go that far? And what was
the whole argument about again? Then we talk, laugh it off, and
become one piece again. The simple activity of
shredding up paper with both hands can keep you distracted and help
relieve those fleeting thoughts of anger.
I have this big orange plastic
bat, and I beat the couch until I am laughing. I just moved, think I
need to find it again…. Vanilla scents are calming and
soothing, while lavender also encourages sleep. Taking a whiff of
these powerful scents can help you de-stress and remove yourself
from the tension just long enough to simmer down.
After a recent argument, I
vented about what happened to my sister. Then my mother. Then my
mother-in-law. Then some friends. Then (again) to my husband. I
think that was a mistake--not a mistake to share the story, but a
mistake to repeat it again and again. All that did was get me worked
up and indignant all over again. Instead, tell the story to a very
inner circle, and to others who know you had an argument, either
have a one-sentence summary or just ask them to support you in
calming down. Most of us collect tension in
the areas in the back of the neck, shoulders, and upper body. Next
time you're having a tense moment, notice how your shoulders may be
hunched in and how the muscles are contracting. Shaking your
shoulders will give you a much-needed posture adjustment, helping
you breathe naturally and calming you down. I remind myself: Hiss, spit,
and get over it. I find that it is hard
sometimes for people to realize that an argument is an expression of
difference of opinion, and we all are entitled to our own opinion.
That doesn't mean that either of us is wrong, just different. I try
to remind myself of this: it is not always what you say, but how you
say it, so I try to say it with God’s guidance and a pure heart.
That helps me to remain calm during and after an argument. I count to ten, then twenty,
and if I'm still not calm, I have to literally run until I'm out of
breath. First, realize when you simply
can't change a thing...then pick the battles that are important to
you...that's it! People can be difficult, even yourself...so stop it
early! I do Reiki, put my hands over
my heart, and can't possibly stay angry that way. |