AND ENGAGING INTERNAL CONFLICT
You may have already taken some proactions between sessions. Maybe you worked on getting more sleep, eating better, increasing exercise, or some other personally relevant aspect of your life. However, for some valued areas of your life, these actions may feel much harder to engage. The thought of acting on these values may raise your anxiety level and accompanying security pull or perhaps, you don’t feel that the action would be rewarding; or maybe you may feel very distressed about taking an action because you feel so excited about it but, at the same time, scared that you won’t be able to attain it—a situation like when you want to ask someone you like out on a date or when you want to ask an employer for a deserved raise.
For these harder proactions, we encouraged you to envision the proaction you wish to take and make it imaginally rich in your mind’s eye, to the point where you could sense what it would feel like in your mind and body to take that proaction, what the environment would be like, and what actions you would take—beginning with the safest and most content place you can then imagine and then mentally walking through the day until you take the action.
After engaging in this imaginal exercise, you were asked to take a few concrete and achievable goals that do not rely on things you can’t control—such as the actions of others. Your therapist asked you to notice when you imagine taking this proaction, whether it was provoking strong emotions, which were correspondingly affecting your security and reward motivational pulls. Sometimes even just imagining taking hard proactions can increase our anxiety (I.e., high security pull), make us feel deflated (i.e., high reward pull), or make us just feel overwhelmed and conflicted (i.e., simultaneous high security and high reward pulls). When we bring up a difficult proaction that is accompanied by intense emotions, we can draw upon our mindful regulation skills of orienting, allowing, distancing, and reframing to help us respond to these motivational pulls and take the valued proaction. So, as you consider taking another proaction before the next session, see if you can richly imagine the steps of taking the action and how you would engage concrete goals that are congruent with your value. Imagine how you would use the skills to help you remain clear and take effective action.
Despite an interest in engaging a meaningful proaction, you may experience conflict in your mind between a part of you that wants to take the proactions, because it’s important to you or because it feels potentially gratifying or rewarding, and another part of you that feels apprehensive and unsure about taking the proaction and what negative consequences might arise.
You also may find it hard to gain clarity because your mind gets busy with self-talk. Maybe you hear a voice saying “you are not worthy” of this good thing or that “you will never do anything right.” Perhaps you hear a voice listing off all the things that could go wrong or a voice recounting all the things that have gone wrong in the past. There may even be voices who are encouraging and wanting to see you move forward!
Here, we encouraged you to not only imagine taking this challenging proaction but also to anticipate all the voices that might speak up in your mind that leave you feeling conflicted with respect to whether and how you take this proaction. You were asked to embody each of these voices and their influence on taking a proaction, even though it can feel hard or upsetting at first. Remaining in contact with these parts of our mind can feel challenging and uncomfortable, but it’s for a good reason!
When we increase our comfort with emotions related to these conflict themes, we are better able to tolerate distress without resorting to efforts to self-protect, withdraw, or get caught up in damning self-talk. Instead, it helps us find clarity to engage proactions. By exposing ourselves to these feelings and their related meanings, negative emotions often decrease in intensity, which can increase a sense of excitement and interest for the proaction, and help us see all the options available to us during times of distress.
In this exercise, you were encouraged to not only gain clarity around the different voices that may influence your willingness to engage in a proaction but also to listen as these voices speak to one other. You were asked to imagine what the part of you that wants to engage the proaction would need from the part of you that feels it’s important to hold back. Listening to all these voices, it’s important to remember that there is no “right voice”. Rather, it’s important for all the voices to be heard, and ideally, for a softening of security voices or reactive response voices that may be interfering with your clarity for proaction.
The hope is that you were able to express and understand both sides of this dialogue to determine the proaction you agree to take. But, it's also ok if you were not able to get to this step. In these difficult moments, when finding common ground among many loud and disagreeing voices, it can help to draw on your “on the spot” skills to help you gain clarity and these voices and increase a willingness to take this proaction. These skills include breathe and notice (orienting; attention regulation), pause and allow (allowing; attention regulation), see from a distance (distancing/decentering; metacognitive regulation), speak back (reframing/reappraisal; metacognitive regulation), and act with clarity (choosing contextually appropriate behavioral actions).
Remember to use the SYA forms, to facillitate preparation before proaction (“SYA: Preparation”) and post-processing after taking the proactions (SYA: Debriefing).