Today Body pt 4 : how can Mindfulness help with pain.
Hundreds of millions of people all over the world are impacted by pain. Physical pain, chronic pain, mental pain... Living with pain is not only a physical strain it is also an emotional strain as well. Feelings of frustration, anger, depression or even despair can deeply impact the quality of our lives.
The use of highly addictive opioids to treat pain have caused a silent epidemic, every year 300 million pain prescriptions are given out by doctors worldwide, which equals a $24 billion market, 80%of those subscriptions is consumed in the United States, 15% in Canada and Europe, and the rest of the world gets the other 5%. Unfortunately, 40 to 70% of people with chronic pain aren't actually receiving the proper medical treatment for their pain. The over use of opioid is staggering. Worldwide 187000 people die from opioid overdose every year and that number grows every year by 6%.
Today Mindfulness Thoughts is about tackling our craving and addiction.
We function throughout the day thanks to habits: wake up, brush teeth, make coffee. Transforming behaviors into habits saves our brains from having to make extra effort to make the same decisions over and over, and this can work to our benefit like arriving in time at work, sporting 2 times a week etc
but we can also form habits like smoking cigarettes, stress-eating, or constantly checking our social media and that may be holding us back.
Today pt 3 of Relationships and Mindfulness: we focus now on expectations
All of us have an intense desire to be loved and nurtured. The need to be loved, could be considered one of our most basic and fundamental needs. Since we were babies we feel the desire to be held and touched.
This need is important and it isn’t surprising that most of us believe our happiness is whether we feel loved and cared for.
Having healthy relationships, is for most of us the top goal—on par with the goal of leading a happy and fulfilling life.
A relationship has two parallel streams at the base: one that moves constantly and is about desire, wants and needs
and another more deeper and slower that is about the conscious feeling of love for the other person.
Every long term relationship goes through 3 stages:
- The first stage is solely based on needs; you are in love and the neurological storm in our brain enhances the strong desire to be with the other and
you need physical touch and want constant affirmation the other feels the same. This is all about you and your own needs.
- In the second stage a more healthy exchange appears where both partners try to meet each other’s needs and have mutual respect
and love for each other, behaving like equals, the relationship is now about you and him or her.
- The third stage is conscious love, where you love even when your needs are not met and where the love for the other becomes part of your
identity. Unconditional love, the love you feel naturally for a child or a pet, also comes into play. Here the relationship becomes all about him/her and no longer
about you.
Some people have serial relationships one after another, staying in stage 1 forever and driven by this constant urge to search for love.
A relationship that reaches stage 2 has a bigger chance to succeed and become committed and fulfilling. If partners evolve through the stages
differently the relationships can be very painful for one of them. For example one stays in stage 1 and the other one grows in stage 3.
Love is so awesome until it is not,
Love is the best feeling in the world until it’s the worst.
Love feels eternal in the moment till you break up.
There is a lot in love that feels very contradictory.
When we get into a new relationship we always arrive with high expectations, we project all our wants and needs onto the other and ignore the red flags just to surf the wonderful storm of feelings going through our minds and bodies.
Who of you has felt disappointment in his/her relationship in the past or now?
Not so long ago all marriages were arranged by parents to serve economic and social ends, by the 20th century
the feeling of romantic love became the base for making a lifelong commitment
Our current expectations are based on our culture's concept of romance
Hollywood's happily ever after romantic comedies carry the implicit message
that if your relationship isn't ideal in all ways then it is second rate.
For many people, a relationship is considered successful only if all of their sexual and emotional needs are fulfilled,
or their economic and social status aspirations needs to be met.
Obviously, most of the time things don't work out in this manner,
and often there is a feeling of disappointment in the relationship.
Many men and women have very unrealistic expectations about relationships and they
make themselves miserably by comparing their situation to how they think love is supposed to be.
There is no connection to the idea that love itself could be the actual reward.
Human beings are designed to get used to the good things and get used to the bad things,
it has to be this way or we would go crazy.
Unfortunately this has an effect on our long term relationships. What first was exciting and wonderful we take for granted
after a while, we get bored and get back in stage 1 thinking.
Our hardwired negativity bias kicks in, we start to focus on the flaws of our partner, we ruminate on things from the past, the story
of our relationship changes and that story can become anxiety and toxic. Most of us have experienced it, nobody is immune to it.
So how can mindfulness help in this?
A lot of people when they think of mindfulness they think of meditation,
or some pro guru sitting legs crossed on a cliff overlooking the ocean meditation all day
But that is not what it is, mindfulness is an approach to life, it's an approach that says whatever experience I have I try as much as possible to be present for that experience to be focused in the moment and to non judgmentally accept that experience.
There is nothing that I experience that is good or bad it is just an experience.
What will serve me, my survival and happiness, is to see that experience clearly.
Today second part of relationships and Mindfulness. This part shows a light on how we often mirror our family culture and how that can negatively impact our relationships and life.
In the 60's and 70's a lot of groundbreaking research was done about attachment theory (Bowlby and Ainsworth to name a few) and from that many psychological researchers have examined the different ways secure and insecure attachments with our parents or caregivers affect our attachment style as adults.
If your parents showed you love, responded to your needs and validated your feelings, you will more likely develop a secure attachment style. You then seek out and desire the same attachment style as an adult.
If you had an insecure attachment with your parents, then you may have a fragmented sense of self, which leads to low self-esteem, anxiety in relationships, doubt to trust others.
You will seek out relationships that mimic that same attachment style, not because it feels good but because it feels familiar.
The relationship with your parents is the very first one you have and the most influential example how to interact with others and communicate in a romantic relationship. The way love is expressed between parents, the way parents show love to their children. Playfulness, hugs, word of admiration, affection.
Those similar patterns you use to show love to your partner.
The ways in which anger and conflict were managed in your family plays a large factor in how you communicate with your partners today..
Whether or not you express your emotions openly or hold emotions in, especially negative emotions, parallels how your parents communicated with each other and with you as a child. For example, conflict may be dealt with in the family by talking openly and assertively or by not talking about it and perhaps expressing the negative emotion in passive aggressive ways.
Conflict may be expressed in direct yet verbally aggressive ways like yelling or name-calling.
Your styles of communication are formed by observation and direct experience of your primary role models in childhood.
Poor conflict management is the number one predictor of divorce in couples.
Same-sex parents serve as a model for your own behavior and opposite sex parents are projected into potential partners. This also works in reverse, in the sense that you may search for the opposite of a father who was stoic and uninvolved. Another example, a person may be very sensitive to criticism and argue frequently with partners because their same-sex parent had difficulty advocating for themselves and became a "doormat" in the relationship. We tend to want to emulate our parent's relationship when it is perceived as healthy and positive.
Are we doomed to play out these patterns or can we change this?
Yes! Change starts with self-awareness! Start to identify where patterns of communication, thoughts, and feelings originate. Reflect on your childhood and try to remember the patterns you had in interacting with your parents. How was love expressed? How was conflict dealt with? How were negative emotions expressed or not expressed? Therapy is a great tool for this process. Problematic reactions and behaviors can oftentimes be traced to unhealthy parental interactions. External messages from our families about communication, self-worth, and a host of other issues become internalized and assimilated into our own thoughts.
When you have negative thoughts and self-criticism, ask yourself: Whose voice is that?
Is this what you think and believe, or does it come from somewhere or someone else? If your parents are still living, you can also start to notice how you interact with your parents today, and then see how those patterns may be playing out in your romantic relationships. After you become aware of your patterns, learning about other ways of interacting is key, and then applying those new ways is imperative. This part is difficult! But Mindfulness will help you. In the first week we talked about the narrative and story
in our head and how to stop believing this propaganda and just see them as thoughts, nothing more.
Meditating will help you become more aware of those thoughts and patterns and you can train your mind to step out of it.
And because we are talking about this in the spirit of Mindfulness I want you to look at your parents or caregivers with compassion. Just as you are formed by your genes
and upbringing, your environment and experience, so are they, they are playing out their own patterns. Not fully aware of the consequences of their actions. Perhaps unable to change. Look at them with compassion and forgiveness.
You are aware, you examine and break the patterns, you grow as a person and that is something to be grateful for ♥
Anyone of you listening to this that suffers great trauma, Mindfulness can help you but not give you the professional help you need. Be sure to seek out help in rl ♥
Today we explore more what emotions are and how they steer our reactions and our life.
Let's take a look at the evolution of our emotional programming and processing.
Emotional competence is a developmental process that has 3 components: 1) emotion expression; 2) emotion knowledge; and 3) emotion regulation As we grow up we go through different levels of cognitive ability.:
As a newborn baby we are not aware we exist, emotions are purely based on survival, to influence our caregivers and surroundings.
Often you can see on a baby's face how nature trains the right muscles to communicate the emotions they will need to express themselves later in life.
