CONSOLIDATING THERAPY GAINS
Session 11.1
You are entering the final phase of ERT, and it is clear that you have worked hard. This handout offers suggestions on how you can best consolidate the progress you have made and steer clear of falling back into a rigid and reactive security-focused orientation.
Emotions and Motivations are an important part of a healthy life
A consistent message throughout ERT is that experiencing emotions, even ones that we do not welcome into our lives, such as fear, anxiety, sadness, and anger, are a normal part of being human. Emotions are critical in helping us be productive members of a society, a family, a romantic relationship, a friendship, a classroom, or an office. This idea runs counter to the message we receive from society telling us that our emotions are a nuisance and that there’s something wrong with us if we experience difficult emotions. The truth of the matter is that ALL emotions, even difficult emotions like anxiety, play an important role in our lives. Similarly, even when things are going well, we are always making choices in our lives based upon our motivations. Even in the best of times, all of us have to negotiate how we want to live and decide how much to tune into security motivation, reward motivation, both, or neither.
There will be times when, despite using the skills you have learned, you will notice yourself becoming rigidly and reactively focused on security or having difficulty connecting with an action’s rewarding aspects. It happens to all of us at some point. We have a lapse and lose touch with our wise mind. However, by practicing your ERT skills, you have learned to notice triggers and can practice ERT skills to get back on track.
A healthy life
is full of ups
and downs:
“Surf the wave”
Continued Skills utilization:
“Use it or Lose it”
Perhaps the thing that will give you the single best chance to maintain your gains, and perhaps to make further gains, is to keep up with your skills practice and utilization. One of the big changes that we’ve focused upon throughout ERT is to move away from a reactive way of being and instead approaching lives in a counteractive and proactive way. Continuing to use your skills is the best way to keep your momentum. It’s like exercise. When you are training for something, you work a muscle or group of muscles. The training is hard work at first, but after a while, that muscle has a “memory” and the hard work at the beginning gets easier to maintain your gains once you have invested in that work.
Albert Einstein, the famous scientist and physicist, once said, “The significant problems we face cannot be solved on the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.” In a way, the quote speaks to this issue. The change you have made in your life cannot be understated. You have really opened yourself up to a universe of possibilities that seemed opaque and unattainable when viewing life through the lens of reactive responding. Instead, by viewing the world from the perspective of a proactive life, we can see this brave new world more so for the possibilities it may bring rather than the challenges it will impose on us. Seeing the possibilities makes the challenges worthwhile.
Opening Ourselves to new levels of challenges:
“Taking
larger steps”