Election 2020 - 4 Steps to Process - a podcast by Terah Harrison, LPC

What I want to do is just share a four step process that I use and that I have my students use, my clients use. And that process I think gives us some insights into how mindfulness can work every day, every moment in some very helpful ways that are useful. All right, so the four step process. Let me, let me just give you some basics here of the major categories. Um, the force that model has these pieces. Notice who were pause, breathe, reflect, and choose. And let me go into each of those a little bit more specifically so that you know what that means. The first one is to notice or to bring awareness of a negative feeling or the trigger as quickly as possible.
And practice recognizing the early warning signs of emotional reaction saying or reminding yourself this feeling is a reaction that I can pay attention to right now. Right? Oh, I just got triggered. Oh Gosh, I'm feeling this anger, or I'm feeling this emotion. Or, ah, I'm noticing in this moment that something is coming up for me. That's number one. Number two is to direct attention to the breath. Now lie the breath. The breath is really important because think about what you do when you get triggered. I don't know about you, but when I get triggered, the first thing I do is I go and I stopped breathing, which is horrible because my heart starts going crazy. My central nervous system thinks that I need to fight something and it's just terrible, so allowing yourself a sense that you can breathe in that moment and just take a breath and let go of any physical tension and I know that that's easier said than done, but just take a moment and breathe and we can do that right now.
Wonderful, and allow that natural quality of the breath to be a calming source of comfort where you're just breathing and allowing a very natural sensation of the air coming in and out of your body and just relax. Then the third step is this idea of reflection and reflection is just taking a moment to ask some very important questions. One is, is there a pattern in this reaction? The second one is, have I seen this reaction before, or what is this reaction about what's going on here? Um, the next one might be how does this reaction come up?
And in response to all those questions I might find, for example, ah, there's anger, or I'm feeling hurt or I'm feeling nervous, or whatever it is. So let's just go with anger. I'm feeling angry and usually I'm feeling angry because there's something underneath the anger and underneath the anger might be a feeling of hurt or frustration or not being seen. And then once I realized that, once I say, ah, there's this anger, I can then do step number four and make a choice, choose all right, what am I going to do with this anger? What can I do that is under my control to make a positive change? Or what would be helpful in this situation? What would be useful? What might I do to make things better? And then I just pause. You can just pause and give your mind and your body of woman to think, ah, maybe I need to take a break.
Maybe I need to hit the pause button and say, Hey, listen, I feel very angry right now and I just don't think I can continue the conversation. So can we talk about this later? Or Hey, I'm really feeling angry right now. Can we? Can we just have a conversation about that? Or can you just pause for a moment because I'm feeling triggered or attacked or hurt by what was just said. Those are all different ways of choosing to speak in a way that doesn't amplify the anger but acknowledges it and then allows it to be okay or to pause. I'm one of the things that is very important to realize as we talk about anger, for example, is that sometimes we just need a break. We just need to hit the pause button. There's no name to continue a conversation to its logical conclusion, especially in the midst of anger because anger, you're likely to say things that you might regret or that come from the voice of anger and not from the voice of love or compassion or understanding.
So hitting that pause button, taking a break, letting your partner know, hey, listen, I care about you. I'm concerned about you. I, I, I want to have this conversation, but right now I just feel angry and I just need a break, so let's circle back to this conversation in 20 minutes or an hour or maybe tomorrow or let's watch a movie so that when we come back to have this conversation, we can come from a place of caring about each other and using our language in a way that is helpful to the relationship. So those are the four steps I'm noticing. Reflect a great breathing, reflecting, and she was a notice. Pause, breathe, reflect, and choose. Does that make sense?
It does. And what I really liked that you would like to point out and what you said is in the last step of how to communicate this to your partner, where a lot of times what I see as people say things like your making me angry, you're making me so frustrated and it's really more directed to the other, but what I want to highlight, what you're saying is taking responsibility and acknowledging your own feelings. Not Directing it towards the other end saying, I'm really feeling angry. I'm feeling disappointed. I'm really feeling frustrated with this situation. Doesn't happen. Not necessarily you with the situation and being really mindful of how you communicate that back to your partner and then letting them know that you need a break. Not that your creating the break that everyone has to take, but you need it. And then also that you're going to get back to them and 20 minutes or an hour or tomorrow, but letting them know. Because a lot of times with couples where the situation happens, where one person wants to resolve in the other person needs a break, is that person that wants to resolve, fills, abandoned, but if that person needing a break is able to say, I need this amount of a break and I'm going to come back to it, then that has a much better resolution. So I just wanted to highlight those things that you pointed out. I think those are really important.

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