Podcast Episode 39: Self-Regulation
Introduction:
Thanks for clicking on Conversations with Crosswinds Counseling. I’m Curtis Smith and I invite you to subscribe to our podcast and to like and share it as well. I hope you enjoy today’s episode.
Podcast #39:
Curtis: Hi, everyone and welcome to Conversations with Crosswinds Counseling. I’m your host Curtis Smith. Today on the podcast, joining us for the first time is Shaun Hardie. He is one of the newest counselors here at Crosswind Counseling. Shaun, thanks for joining us.
Shaun: Thanks for having me on this podcast.
Curtis: Yeah, absolutely. Today we are talking about self-regulation, and as I do just about every podcast, with every counselor who brings a topic to us, I start with the obvious question. For those of us who aren’t counselors, Shaun, what is self-regulation?
Shaun: Yeah. Self-regulation is having the control over your thoughts, behaviors, and emotions. And a lot of us are self-acting, and so that means that we choose the behaviors that we do and kind of go about life, but sometimes our emotions, especially, kind of overwhelm us and we kind of feel like we’re losing control. If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed it kind of, kind…
Curtis: No, never. What does that feel like?
Shaun: Yeah. It’s – it’s, you can’t think quite right. You can’t – can’t really trust your emotions, and your direction, and so having the ability to calm yourself, to soothe yourself, to kind of get a step back and take perspective, that’s kind of what self-regulation is all about.
Curtis: Okay, I suspect, even as you described it, between self-acting and self-regulation, that most people think, ‘Oh, I self-regulate. I’m in control of my thoughts and feelings and emotions and actions,’ and that may be true a lot of the time, but it is hard for that to be true 100% of the time. So how do you get – I assume the first step is to get people to be aware of the fact that they’re not always self-regulating, how do you go about that?
Shaun: Yeah, so when a person comes to counseling it may be for a variety of mental health conditions. Maybe they’re experiencing some panic attacks. Maybe they’re in a depressive state. Or maybe they’re just really uncertain about direction. And for children and adults, maybe ADHD is part of the picture, and so they kind of feel like they’re not quite in control all the time. And we all relate to that. And so, what I do is I teach basic self-regulations skills, and there’s three of them that kind of combine for self-regulation. And so, I’ll go over those with you if you’d like today.
Curtis: Yeah. Let’s go through them. What’s the first one?
Shaun: Yeah, the first one, you kind of hit it right on the head, and it’s the notice.
Curtis: Nice.
Shaun: We kind of take that for granted, but noticing is kind of that first initial step to say, ‘Hey, there’s something going on.’ And so, when we’re talking about noticing, I try to keep it to the five senses for children and for adults. You know, we’ll talk about the five senses as well as noticing thoughts. That’s actually one that can be very new and challenging for people to say – to kind of slow down and notice what they’re thinking. You know, so, for children and adults, I’ll start with you know five senses – of you know what are you seeing, what are you hearing, you know what are you know, I guess seeing, hearing, tasting, touching, smelling – you know, we kind of know what the five senses are. And so, I’ll start with the simple one you know, of you know – see five, or call out five things in the room, listen to four sounds, you know, and three things you can touch, two things you can smell, one thing you can taste, and I always say, you know, don’t you know don’t taste me or anything like that, taste you know, you can – some people lick their hand, it’s kind of harder to do that.
Curtis: Right.
Shaun: But we’ll take some time, and just for them to get into their sensory experiences, and that’s kind of that first step to kind of slowing yourself down when you’re in a big emotional storm – is to just get into your five senses, and maybe call out five things and kind of go through that.
Curtis: Because the emotions can override all of those things. Right. We’re not noticing even what we’re seeing, much less what we’re smelling or tasting. Our emotions just get carried away. Right?
Shaun: Yeah, we – and I’m not here to be a neuroscientist or anything, but you know we kind of have two general modes. We have that rational mind, and we also have that emotional mind. And so, when we are triggered by stress, maybe something somebody says, feeling a little bit threatened or attacked by life, we get into that emotional mind, and we start making decisions that maybe aren’t in our best interest long-term. They’re for short-term, and they work, but not in the long term. And so that rational mind is kind of where we usually are, but emotions you know, they can take over real quick, and so being able to kind of transition into a noticing your experiences is kind of that first skill that we need to get good at.
Curtis: So, to notice is number one. What’s number two?
Shaun: Yeah, so number two is to name. So, to name our experience. And so that’s why I have them call out their five senses, to kind of get used to naming those things, but with thoughts especially, and feelings, a lot of people have low awareness of those. They just don’t – it kind of just goes past the radar. You see everything else in the room, except really your experience of thinking and feeling. And so, for kids I will start with the six core emotions, and I have like little color cube that kind of helps as well as a book, if you’re interested for children’s book, The Colored Monster is what it’s called, by Anna Llenas – that begins with two L’s. Kind of a interesting last name.
Curtis: Yeah.
Shaun: Yeah, but I kind of start with that to kind of help them understand what emotions are. And then, for adults, you know, we kind of maybe use the color wheel. Have you ever seen one of those?
Curtis: I have. Yeah.
Shaun: Yeah, so it kind of help[s] them to identify their feelings even more, and the better you can identify what you’re feeling, and what you’re thinking, the more you begin to have a little bit more control, and that’s what we’re – we’re not really trying to control everything, but when it comes to being out of balance and overwhelmed, naming kind of helps us to get back into that driver’s seat.
Curtis: Yeah, okay so step one to notice. Step two, to name.
Shaun: Yeah, and the last one rhymes with name. And the last one is to tame.
Curtis: Ah, I was going to guess it started with an ‘N.’
Shaun: Yeah, we got – kind of throws you off, and so maybe that helps it stick in your mind a little bit more, but yeah we want to notice, name, and then tame. And that’s kind of that final skill of being in control. And so when we’re talking about tame for children they love this idea of, ‘Can you tame a tiger?’ You know. And then to try to imagine taming something that’s really out of control.
Curtis: Yeah.
Shaun: For adults, I may ask them maybe what their panic attack, what animal their panic attack might be, or what animal their depression – so forth. And sometimes they’ll give some good ones like uh a lion, a tiger for some of the anxiety focuses one ,and for depression they may pick one like a rhinoceros or a sloth. I think that’s a good one. And then I ask them you know what would that be like to tame that animal, and then that usually get some laughs, but when we’re talking about our emotional experiences, you know, trying to get into a different kind of relationship with it – where you’re almost domesticating it, you’re maybe having it on a leash, or if you’ve ever been to a zoo, or not a zoo, a circus, or you remember those, you know where the zoo or the circus master has a chair.
Curtis: Yeah.
Shaun: Have you ever wondered why they use a chair?
Curtis: I’m sure I did wonder at some point.
Shaun: Yeah, so like a lion or whatever, they’re right there but they use that chair because it has four legs, and four different points that the lion gets disoriented, and they don’t know which of the four legs to attack. So, that’s how they uh start to tame that lion. And so, when we’re talking about our emotional experiences and some of those really problematic automatic thoughts that are typical with depression and anxiety, we need to get into a different relationship with it. And so, this relationship is not like a power, like you would with another person, like, ‘Hey, I’m stronger than you,’ or, ‘I’m better at this than you.’ It’s actually a different relationship of with our thinking, and instead of trying to control it, we have we notice what it’s there for. Our anxiety is serving us in some way. It’s trying to get us out of danger. Maybe something that happened in the past that you ruminate over, or something in the future that you worry over. Your anxiety is there to help you and a good anxiety is there to get you out of – basically to advert disaster, and you want that, but the bad anxiety has a different kind of focus, and that’s to overly protect you and actually keep you away from your values. And keep you away from the type of person that you want to be, and so a lot of the taming skill is to try to help them to have a different relationship with their thinking and feeling, but we really need those first two skills to set that foundation, being able to notice, and name, and the taming will naturally come out of that.
Curtis: Yeah, the chair for focal point thing is really interesting and I wonder if notice and naming help us do that. Get away from, because it can maybe feel like there’s too much for me to focus on if there are all these focal points, so noticing and naming is kind of doing what the lion can’t do. Get the four down and focus on, ‘Okay, now I need to attack this one thing.’
Shaun: That’s a great segue to that. Yeah, and I did think that there is a lot of parallels with that experience. If you’ve talked to somebody who’s overwhelmed, or you’ve been overwhelmed it’s not usually one thing. I kind of I like the book. There used – there’s an old book about you know, men are waffles and women are spaghetti. I don’t know if you remember that one.
Curtis: I remember the Mars and Venus one. I didn’t remember waffles.
Shaun: Well, it’s a good it’s a good generalization of men are typically compartmentalizers.
Curtis: Yeah.
Shaun: And so they kind of keep it in their square, and then when somebody brings something in, they’re like that’s just not the square I’m in.
Curtis: Right.
Shaun: I’m in the garage. But when life gets overwhelming it’s kind of like that butter and syrup that kind of gets into other things. Women typically have more of a spaghetti experience where just things touch everything, and so when you get the spaghetti sauce on it kind of it touches a lot.
Curtis: It goes everywhere.
Shaun: Anyways, the overwhelmed experience can definitely feel palpable with people, and so yeah the notice and naming kind of helps you to kind of get a little bit more of a focus on what it is that you want to do so you have some flexibility in your behavior.
Curtis: Yeah. The picture is of spaghetti sauce kind of going all over spaghetti is in my head now, and that’s sometimes how it feels like. Just it’s gone everywhere. It’s overwhelming. I don’t know how to deal with this. So great thought Sean on self-regulation. If you would like to discuss self-regulation or perhaps any other uh issue that you’re going through Sean is one of the wonderful counselors we have here at Crosswinds Counseling, and there are many others. You can find them all at crosswindscounseling.org, and you can schedule appointments there as well. Shaun, thanks so much for being on the podcast today.
Shaun: Yeah, and if you’re interested in learning more about what I do, I have a YouTube channel called Act on Mental Health, and I talk about Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and more things like self-regulation.
Curtis: Great way to get to know Sean, as are these podcasts. We hope you go through all of them, check out some of our other counselors, see who you might be comfortable with, and then again go to crosswindscounseling.org. Thanks for joining us on the podcast. We will see you next time on Conversations with Crosswinds Counseling.
Outro:
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