One Life Only Counseling Services
Center for Recreating, Energizing, Activating, Transforming, and Empowering Lives! – C.R.E.A.T.E.L., Manila!
Hi everyone!
In this episode from MakiAlam with hosts Pelita Uy and Angelo Almonte, I discuss the recent reports about an irate employer who physically abused a housekeeper. For all of you who have anger issues like I do, I hope you learn a few things here.
At One Life Only, we always endeavor to help you find the kind of therapy that will be most helpful to our clients!
We believe that therapy should be brief (as possible) and effective in moving our clients’ lives in the direction that they want.
There are some of you who want to know what sort of packages we recommend for individual, couple, and family therapies!
Well, we are now publishing it here for your guidance in making a decision that can prove life-changing not just for you but even your loved ones!
The packages are now available in our FAQ pages, the general one and the one for personal inquiries.
Here is the update that we just introduced to these pages:
What are your suggested packages for individual, couple, and family therapy?
Note: You may still choose to schedule one session at a time and decide if you wish to continue anytime during your series of sessions.
by Nathan Chua
“Let’s slow down here for a moment.” These are some words you would often hear me say to my clients. It sounds like a weird request. I can almost hear the client mumbling inside, “What does slowing down have anything to do with counseling? I am here to get some kind of resolution to my concerns and I only have just under an hour to talk about it!”
A big part of mindfulness-based therapies like ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy) is developing the capacity to slow things down. If we follow the news, we’d see how fast our minds work and how critical it is to slow down. We might have been witness to some incidents where a cop who has had a spotless record, all of a sudden commits a violent crime that upends a lifetime’s work and dedication. How does this happen? Well, I guess a more apt question to ask is “How quickly does this happen?” It’s a split second between our thoughts and actions. Unfortunately, without the functional understanding of what mindfulness is all about, it is easy to equate our feelings with bad behavior. I use bad behavior here because growing up, we normally get messages like, “Don’t get angry at your sister!” The statement implies that anger is something that inevitably leads to harmful results. In other words, anger predetermines hurtful behaviors. If put this way, it begins to sound a bit silly right? We cannot be exonerated for hurting someone physically simply by saying, “I just couldn’t help it. My feelings took over me.”
The problem with treating anger as if it were a bad emotion is it often ends up with a paradoxical effect of actually making us even more victimized by our own emotions. How many times have you and I heard statements like, “Won’t you do the same thing if you had to deal with such a stupid person?” Our minds love to give us reasons for what we do because without the ability to reason, we would not be able to solve our day-to-day problems. For example, reasoning can tell us that if we stay long enough under the sun in sweltering conditions, it can cause us to suffer a heat stroke. That reasoning ability is useful in that context. Unfortunately, if we use it with our anger, we can draw a conclusion that our anger can cause us to “feel bad” (like being baked under the sun) and consequently make moves to remove the anger from our system by hitting someone or yelling and screaming. Causation is logical and can be helpful for us to know how we can avoid external threats, but when applied to internal threats like emotions and thoughts, it can cause us to do things that do not match our deepest aspirations for ourselves.
So how do we handle our emotions of anger? Doesn’t spewing it out or running away from the contexts that produce our anger make sense? Yes, it does work at times. We can remove ourselves from the company of people who hurt us. But sometimes the very same people who can hurt us, are the same ones we care about deeply. And although we can say that staying away from such people who instigate our anger can be effective, there will always be situations when we meet other people who remind us of the same people we try to avoid. There is that old ACT saying that goes, “Where are you gonna go, where your thoughts don’t go.”
So here’s my tip for dealing with anger, think of it as a two-step process. There is that familiar feeling of anger, and that split second reaction that we do in the face of anger. If we can slow down and notice what just happened to trigger our anger, what we do in the presence of our anger, and the consequences of such, then we have had a mindful moment. Another mindful practice is to just notice the anger for what it is. It is something that we experience, not what we are.
Then we go on to noticing or minding what is important for us in those moments. What do we want to be about in those challenging moments? Are we going to do what our minds tell us will get us out of the angry feelings, or are we going to stay with the anger and still be what we set out to be in those moments? In other words, we as humans are capable of long-term thinking and seeing the bigger picture. If something or someone truly matters to us, then all else can fade into the background. We can stay grounded and be kind to the people that we love, who can also be the very people who can make us feel angry. Mindfulness of values tells us that there’s something more important here than just trying to get rid of the angry feelings we have. Like maybe your most cherished relationship is on the line…and it’s all worth the pain of anger. Pause, slow down, stay with it, and be kind.
Hi Friends!
Here’s my version of explaining the ACT Matrix!
Hope you like it!
by Nathan Chua
I am quite certain that most if not all of you, my readers, have experienced being caught in a difficult situation and having to focus mainly on the problem at hand. When there is a crisis, we often develop tunnel vision and end up doing greater harm to ourselves and others. For example, when your teenaged child comes home really late, tunnel vision can lead a parent to think that the child doesn’t care and that the only solution is to show your anger in order to keep them in line. These situations don’t usually end up well. Often, what could have been a moment of tenderness and bonding, turns into a messy fight.
Now don’t get me wrong. Tunnel vision is not always harmful. There are plenty of times when you and I need it. If your toddler suddenly feels the urge to go towards an open window and tries to climb over it, tunnel vision will help you get your child out of that precarious situation. In these instances, following the dictates of your mind works well for you and the survival of your child. If there was a wild animal chasing you thinking you are prey, tunnel vision is what you need in that moment to come out of it alive.
The topic I’d like to discuss here is about the times when developing tunnel vision and instantaneously acting on it, may not be a move in our best interest. A timely example would be that incident when we saw a famous actor in Hollywood come up to a comedian in front of millions of people watching the Annual Academy Awards for motion pictures. We can say that Will Smith developed tunnel vision in the heat of the moment. Although the context of the moment would certainly make hurt feelings understandable, standing up and committing a violent act is the proverbial solution that becomes the problem.
On a larger scale, think about the war in Ukraine. That tunnel vision can cause egregious acts done against our fellow humans. To use an example closer to home, how many times have we seen road rage cause tunnel vision, rendering someone who has no record of violence helpless enough to physically or emotionally harm or even kill someone for a slight.
So here are some ways that I borrowed from Dr. Steven Hayes’ book, “A Liberated Mind,” that could be helpful for us to cope with tunnel vision when it occurs. In my opinion, it is but natural for us to get into that mode of mind, it only takes some mindfulness in the moment to avoid as I had mentioned earlier, making the solution become the problem.
That’s all for now folks. Hope this will give you a wider perspective every time your mind gives you that urge to go into tunnel vision.
by Nathan Chua
The title of this post is not an original, at least the part that counts most. Many times in my graduate studies, I had wondered what, bottomline, counseling was about. I mean, what is it basically that we are trying to accomplish? At some point in my graduate studies, I thought it was forgiveness. It turns out that I will find an answer to this in my readings of Kevin Polk and his co-authors. It’s about helping clients to become more aware, to act courageously, and to do so lovingly.
Let’s take them one at a time.
Awareness:
Much of what we regret doing stems from acting in ways that are automatic. How often have we seen people commit homicides in this country, only to see them realize that they had lost control over their actions for a split second? There was even a case of a police officer who had a sterling record of service, who now has an indelible audiovisual account of him shooting a hapless middle-aged woman dead. His promising career that took him years to build was upended by a brief moment of rage.
Awareness is a word that I often heard around the graduate classes I attended. In ACT or Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, the word that is more often used to describe awareness is noticing. For me, the gerund form makes it an active pursuit that we can do from moment to moment. If we learn to practice noticing, then there’s a chance for a split second that the police officer I earlier mentioned would be able to choose more effective actions in that moment of rage. It could have averted the loss of two lives. One ended by a shot in the head, while the other was left to languish in prison.
Courage:
One thing ACT has taught me is that noticing is not just noticing or being aware of the difficult thoughts and feelings that we have. It also involves noticing the rest of us. By that I mean, we also notice other facets of the context that can move us in the direction of what is important to us in each moment. Being a complete human being with all its history and complexity involves noticing that part of us that can move towards important ends.
Over involvement in avoiding and controlling difficult inner experiences can lead us to tiring out of life and learning hopelessness is just around the corner anytime. The peculiar thing about us is that we are capable of doing things that we don’t normally expect from ourselves when the stakes are high enough to respond in ways that go beyond our own urges to be self-protective. We seem to be capable of running towards difficult inner experiences rather than run away when it matters. That shy, unassuming classmate of yours can all of a sudden show up in the news being called a hero for saving a complete stranger from a burning car. As Dr. Steven Hayes, the instigator of ACT, loves to say, “That’s just the kind of monkey we are.” So we are capable of doing courageous, selfless acts. It’s just built in. It can resurface in our consciousness if we become more noticing.
Love:
And as we do those courageous acts, we are also capable of seeing the world from other people’s perspectives. We are capable of empathy and acts of kindness in the face of challenging circumstances. You, my readers, do it every day! We can do inconvenient acts for the sake of someone we care for. We come to the side of those who mourn. We help out without anyone knowing. We care for our kids even if it means sacrificing our own convenience.
That in a nutshell can sum up what we do in counseling. Making us the whole human beings that we were meant to be based on how we were wired. It’s not easy being human because we have a very handy tool that can also cause us much suffering. The mind is there to do its job. Objectively noticing that it is neither a boss nor an enemy makes a big difference. We just need to learn to notice it doing its thing, face our fears and do things that matter anyway, and then do it with love and care for ourselves and others as well. In other words, we are all capable of awareness, courage, and love, but sometimes we are not aware, or aware that we are not aware sometimes. And this my friends, takes practice!
Have a more noticing new year to come and thank you for coming to this place for the past 2021.
Listen to this post on Spotify! Click here!
