Another Lesson: Bring Self-Awareness to Your Struggle

One of the first things that I attempted when first starting my journey was to seriously inspect the struggle I was having with being healthy. It's an incredibly common experience to feel at a total loss with our own struggles - even as trained and experienced counselors, we have our own blind spots with our own issues. I knew that I wanted to be healthy, so why couldn't I adopt the strategies to get there?

This is me balancing academic work and being a mother. I'm working hard and caring for everyone.  Wonder what could be my struggle? Anyone, see who I am not taking care of here?

As a counselor, when someone tells me that they are struggling with a behavior, there are many approaches to looking at that struggle - some approaches are gentler in their techniques than others, but many steer the counselor and client towards looking at the function of the behavior. The idea is that the behavior, no matter how much you WANT to get rid of it, has an important function in your life that you are unaware of at the moment. One of my favorite approaches is a technique born out of Depth Oriented Brief Therapy, what is now called Coherence Therapy. It has a brief technique that gets you from no insight to insight in a matter of minutes. It's pretty amazing. It basically consists of the following.

First, ask the client to describe what the behavior is that they are struggling with either getting rid of or adopting.
When it applies to myself, I thought about that I wanted to eat healthy foods and work out. That meant getting rid of junk food, sticking with healthy food, and exercising. In this part, the counselor (or the counselor healing thyself) looks at is this a realistic expectation? Is this something tied to their own values and something that the person TRULY wants. If yes, move to next part. In my case, yes, all were true.

This is me presenting my research and being a mother...

Second, ask the client to describe a complete day - what it would look like and what they would be doing from start to finish with incorporating the desired behavior/actions and/or giving up the negative behaviors/actions.
When I did this I started my day getting up, working out and doing some kind of video while extremely tired, taking care of the boys, getting ready for work, eating "healthy" foods, and then working all day, coming home, and eating more healthy food and going to bed.


As the client describes this day, pay attention to their body language and emotion seemingly expressed in their narrative. Where is their negative emotion? What is the positive function of the negative behavior?
When I did this, I could feel the negative emotion in my body - I felt completely exhausted and deprived. I could picture being so tired after working all day to come home and eat a stupid salad. I wanted ice cream. I wanted comfort. As I explored it, I realized that what I wanted, and needed, was self-care. It wasn't emotional coping or anything like that for me (although in doing this technique with clients and other counselors in consultation on this topic, it has been a variety of things, including emotional numbing), it was just PURE self-care. I was so tired of taking care of everyone else constantly and working so hard, and none of my own self-care needs were getting met. I was exhausted!

This is me balancing professional development and being a mother.

Come up with a plan on how you are going to replace the function of the negative behavior.
I realized that because the food was my self-care and I had no good strategies for self-care, I was actually working against myself. And because I was fueling myself with unhealthy food AND had little self-care, I had no energy to incorporate movement into my life. So the first thing to tackle WAS my self-care. I made it a priority - taking breaths throughout the day, getting into daily routines (like a relaxing bath every night), and I even got an iphone App (called Balanced) that reminded me to do things all day like - like feel grateful, take a deep breath, or take a quick walk, etc. I had to deal with some mama guilt and some resistance from others when I made this switch (another post will tackle this). But, I found self-care to be so worthwhile and even, addictive, in a positive way. I wanted to respect and nurture myself! And it ultimately made me a better mother. This plan was in place for a bit before I was ready to let go of food as my self-care.

I'm still balancing my roles, but now self-care has taken centerstage;
and the kids are learning from me, that this is important! And fun!

Word of caution if you use this technique with clients (for those of you in the helping professions); this is a technique more for adults, and it can be very upsetting and unnerving to gain this insight - even having sadness when you realize what has really been happening. Make sure you have trust and rapport with your client, and that you are ready to provide some validation and comfort after the realization.