Thrive Therapy Blog

5 Ways Families Can Practice Gratitude

11/22/2020

I am a firm believer in gratitude practices, not just for individuals and adults, but for whole families. And while I am sharing this blog the week before Thanksgiving, I think we can practice gratitude all year long. Here are some of the favorite ways I have heard of families doing just that!

A Gratitude Jar - Periodically, maybe weekly, you write down something you are grateful for as a family and put it in a clear jar. Then, you can get it out to read it either next Thanksgiving or on New Year’s Eve to remember the great parts of the year before.
“Roses and Thorns” - Or some variation of this idea of sharing about the highs and lows of your day or week. A lot of families do this at dinner but you could do it at any part of the day. Sometimes kids are open to sharing more at bedtime so that is also a good practice to get into.
Gratitude Notes to Each Other - Some families enjoy writing down the things about each other that they are grateful for and sharing them. You could even put them in your kids’ chrome book so they see it in the morning when they log in for virtual learning!
Frequent noticing of enjoyable things - So this is not really a whole family practice but perhaps something parents can initiate more. I think that the more we slow down to notice great parts of the day, the more we are showing our kids how to enjoy ourselves and be grateful for what we are doing. For example, if you are outside and it is one of those ideal weather days, commenting on it out loud and sharing just how nice it is can help your child also notice that.
Mindfulness Activities - Any chance we have to slow down can help us appreciate life a bit more. So taking some deep breaths, paying attention to our five senses, and walking ourselves through a list of 5 things we are grateful for can be really helpful in building more intention around both gratitude and developing mindfulness.

Something I try to keep in mind is also that how we approach spending money can impact gratitude and our feelings about what we have. Kids are much more likely to keep good care of their belongings if they are not easily replaced when something happens to them. So, when a child accidentally breaks a toy, it can be easy for many of us to quickly replace it (and often with Prime Shipping!). I would encourage you to consider waiting to replace things so that your kiddo can learn that when things break, it is not readily replaced. This can lead to more gratitude for the things we have.

I hope this quick post is helpful for you and your family! In the days of easy technology and quick everything (2 hour delivery anyone?), it can be easy to fall into the trap of not remembering just how wonderful these things are. I personally keep a gratitude list daily where I write 10 things about my life or my day that I am grateful for. I notice that this practice helps me notice more throughout the day that is going well or enjoyable and I end up enjoying those moments more. Plus, I reflect on the day before bed in a positive way which is helpful in terms of managing stress particularly during a year like 2020.

At Thrive, we take a positive, client centered approach to therapy that is focused on creating a genuine connection with our clients. If you would like to talk with a Thrive Therapist about yourself, your child, or teen attending therapy via video sessions, please reach out to us by phone at 858-342-1304.

As always, thanks for reading and comments are always welcome regarding any issues around child or teen psychotherapy services in San Diego by Thrive Therapy Studio.

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5 Action Steps To Work on Changing Your “Programming” or Unconscious Bias

11/14/2020

So often, there are messages all around us that we take in unconsciously. These are messages about gender roles, what life “should” be like, perhaps what people “should” be like, and even more insidious messages about people who are either different from us or who live their lives differently than we do.

The idea of understanding our unconscious biases and “programming” seems to be a hot topic and popular idea lately particularly with the rise in awareness about the divisions in our country and resulting reckoning many of us are having about race and privilege.

Interestingly for me as a psychologist, helping people work on their programming is something I have done for a long time. We learn in undergraduate psychology classes that we are influenced easily by the world around us. I remember this being discussed a lot around topics like violence in the media as well as body image.

However, in my day to day work with clients, the topic of messages and narratives we have taken in from the world, our parents, our communities, the media, etc. comes up all the time. The truth is, on a personal level, we all have some unconscious ideas of what we should or should not be doing or what we should or should not be like. The programming around being “good” or “bad” is something that I have talked about for years as I find it to be so problematic for kids and teens to feel shame around their mistakes or challenges (which is often what “bad” behavior is).

If you are someone who is interested in doing deep work about your unconscious bias or programming you might have taken in about others or yourself, good news, therapists are here for you and can definitely help. If you want to try to do this work on your own, here are some suggestions to help you get started.

Accept that this work is intense and challenging. You will need to exercise so much self-compassion and grace to help yourself through it that you should probably start some of those practices now before going any further.
Recognize that we inherently hide the parts of ourselves that are viewed as less desirable. This “shadow” part of ourselves is the part with the most bias and will be brought to the surface and to consciousness so that you can directly work on it. This is difficult but totally part of the process of integrating so that you can live your life more intentionally. Oh and by the way, this is just a part of being human and not something to be ashamed of. Repeat all self-compassion activities and practices throughout this!
Once you are on board with the above two, start paying a lot of attention to your reactions, thoughts, and feelings. Most of us suppress the part of us that is hard for the world to love and it bubbles up in strange ways. Sometimes it is through a reaction that seems to not match the situation. Sometimes it is through what we hide from the people we trust the most. Often, a rule for me in therapy is that when my clients start to tear up or shy away from a topic, that is the most important topic for us at that moment. It is the things that scare us and that we hide that are most important to explore.
It could also help while you are trying to increase your attention and awareness of yourself to try not to numb or at least reduce numbing activities like TV, emotional eating, alcohol, drugs, sex, gambling, etc. Even if you continue to do these things (which is totally understandable of course particularly during an ever lingering pandemic), make sure to just notice why you are doing them and the feelings and thoughts and reactions you have about them. Most of us have shame about our less healthy coping strategies.
After you are getting used to paying attention to your reactions, it is helpful to figure out how to put them into words and try to connect them to things you learned in your family, society, or within your relationships. Connecting the dots can help you understand how you got where you are. Articulating exactly what you think, feel, and are reacting to is helpful in learning to intentionally choose a different narrative either for yourself or others or the world. This part is sometimes best done in thinking about the narrative you have around who or what you think you should be like. For example, with parents, myself included, it can be hard to recognize that despite our best efforts, we are going to screw up sometimes. We are going to say the wrong thing or miss something we later feel we should have understood. That’s honestly part of the parenting journey but I think most of us have an unconscious expectation of ourselves that we need to be perfect at parenting. Especially in whatever way we feel our parents failed us.

For example, my parents were not always great at managing my willful spirit as a kid. I mean, the book “raising a difficult child” was often on my mom’s nightstand and we had numerous power struggles a day. So, here I am years and many hours of therapy later plus experience working with parents and kids in therapy… you might think I would have this figured out and know just exactly how to approach my son, who is also quite willful. And here it is… I don’t. I think sometimes I do a great job at understanding him and sometimes, it is harder than I like to admit. I realized when he was a baby that I had this unrealistic expectation of myself that because I am who I am (therapist, fellow sensitive human, parent “expert”), I would never screw up particularly around managing his behaviors and emotions, or even just my reactions. And the truth is, nope. I screw up too. The important thing is that I know this is okay and have recognized that the shame I feel is just because I have programming around both being willful and sensitive as a child, but also around who I should be as a mom.

All of these concepts are a lot to put in one blog but I wanted to try! I think it is so important that people not familiar with therapy can understand a lot of what those of us practicing deep work with our clients are working on week after week. Building self-awareness is honestly really intense and challenging work but so rewarding. I have seen so much growth and change not just in my clients, but in myself by challenging myself to become as integrated of a person as possible. If you would like help doing the same, please feel free to call us at Thrive!

Chaos Creates Change

11/6/2020

What does that even mean? Let me go back a bit to the beginning of my career in the field of psychology to share more about how I learned to relate to struggle, chaos, and challenges a bit differently.

I still remember sitting with one of my first mentors and discussing some of the challenges I was seeing in the homes I worked in with parents of autistic children. I was at times so overwhelmed with the struggle I witnessed and the limitations of what I could truly do in the time I spent with them each week. This feeling of powerlessness in the face of humanity and deep struggle was something that was not new to me and was actually the reason I went to grad school at all. So, finding it yet again while I was in grad school, trying to learn how to fix things for people, was a surprise. You see, I was pretty young and pretty unfamiliar with how change actually works.

My mentor, with so much compassion and grace for me and my immaturity in this area, had so many long talks with me about chaos. What he taught me was that chaos creates change. Change doesn’t occur in a vacuum where things are going so well that we just decide to make positive changes. Change often is bred on the wind of conflict, pain, and deep struggle.

What he explained was that change is so difficult for us as humans, that we have to literally be forced into it by the nature of our situations being so deeply unmanageable or painful that we just have to change.

This framework and way of thinking about struggle was different than I had been taught to think about suffering. You see, I, like most Americans, was taught to consider struggle something to overcome if not to avoid entirely. Even my deep and complicated feelings were considered something I should suppress or not have.

I was never taught that our struggles, pain, feelings, and suffering are guideposts to help show the way towards something different. Towards change and new possibilities.

Time and time again, I have seen this in practice. Chaos truly does lead to change. This is a belief that has helped root me in optimism about my clients, about myself, and about our world. I truly believe that by leaning into our challenges and simply just seeing them as messages about what we need or want to cultivate in our lives, we can lean more strongly towards change in a positive or healthy direction.

This is the hope that roots me even when our world feels so tumultuous, challenging, and overwhelmingly chaotic.

Days like today, Election Day, this is my mantra. Chaos creates change.

5 Ways Families Can Practice Gratitude

5 Action Steps To Work on Changing Your “Programming” or Unconscious Bias

Chaos Creates Change

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