resilience – Lantern Psychotherapy

When someone we love is struggling with their mental health, it can be hard to know how to help. We might feel anxious and out of our depth, worried about what might happen in the future. We might feel guilty, like we’re not doing enough. We might feel like we are going round in circles, and that nothing we do or say is right. We might feel sad about the change in our relationship. We might even feel angry and wish that our friend or relative could just ‘pull themselves together’.

It’s horrible to feel powerless when someone we care about is suffering. And so it’s easy to get sucked into trying harder and harder to make things better, using up more and more of our time and energy, and putting our own needs at the bottom of the list. Sometimes it might even feel like we don’t have a choice.

We’ve all heard about putting our own oxygen masks on first, right? We all know that if we don’t look after ourselves, we’re unlikely to be in the best position to look after anyone else in the long run. But even though we know this, it can be hard to put it into practice.

So how do we get the balance right? Here are some ideas:

Remember your own emotions are valid, and important, whatever they might be. You’re allowed to feel them.
Be there for your loved one when you can, whether this is to help out with something practical or just to listen, but don’t hold yourself responsible for their happiness – you can’t control how other people feel.
Encourage your friend or family member to seek out and make use of other sources of support, or help them to do this if necessary. Don’t feel you have to do it all by yourself.
Be persistent in providing opportunities for your loved one to improve their wellbeing – invite them out for a walk, or round for a cup of tea, or offer to go with them to do something they find difficult – but remind yourself that it’s up to them to take you up on these opportunities.
Ask yourself what your oxygen mask looks like – what do you need to do to look after yourself or recharge? And then take time to do these things!
Prioritise identifying and building your own support network – whether that’s family, friends, your doctor, a community organisation, or other services – and ask for help when you need it.
Try not to criticise yourself, or hold yourself to impossibly high standards – you are human, and you are allowed to make mistakes.

Useful Links

Carers UK Website

Guided self-compassion exercise by Kristin Neff

‘How can I stop feeling so stressed all the time?’

‘I just don’t want to feel low any more’

‘How do I get rid of this anxiety?’

As therapists, we hear things like this a lot. This isn’t surprising – after all, nobody wants to go around feeling terrible all the time, and people don’t usually come to therapy because they’re feeling good! The whole point of therapy is to help people to overcome difficulties in their lives, so it makes sense to focus on those difficulties. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is particularly good at this, helping people to understand what the problem is, what’s keeping it going, and how to tackle it.

We all do this naturally in our day-to-day lives as well. If something’s gone wrong, or we’re in a threatening situation, it makes sense to focus on this so we can try to do something about it. In fact our brains do this automatically, as a way of helping to keep us safe. You don’t want to be focussing on how lovely the sunshine is if you’re being chased by a bear!

The problem with this approach is that it can sometimes lead us to overlook the positive experiences we have – and while it’s easy to see why we might need to pay attention to negative emotions, research shows us that positive emotions (such as happiness, excitement, and contentment) are just as important.

Positive emotions help us to think more creatively and problem-solve more effectively. They can make us feel more secure and closer to other people. They even help us to recover from the physical effects of emotions like anxiety. In fact, research suggests that positive emotions play an important role in resilience, and that people who can continue to experience positive emotions during difficult times are more likely to be able to ‘bounce back’.

In other words, it’s important to pay attention to our positive emotions – especially if we’re struggling, and especially after what has been a very difficult year for a lot of us.

So we’d like to invite you to have a think about how you can make more use of your positive emotions. Here are some ideas to get you started:

Make a deal with yourself to notice your positive emotions (however small or fleeting) and allow yourself to experience them fully
Keep a record of your positive emotions – use a notebook, your phone, your diary, or whatever works for you
Dedicate some time each week to identifying the things that have made you feel good that week and re-playing these situations in your mind
Use your phone to take pictures of things that bring up positive emotions for you, and look back through these later on