What is Distress Acceptance:
Everyone of us will experience pain in our lives. We will all go through stressful periods, times of challenge and get knocked down. But it’s never these experiences that define us, but how we choose to move through them and, hopefully, grow.
To cope with distress in our lives, we need to learn skills that centre around healthy tolerance, instead of avoidance of stressful situations.
When we don’t have healthy tolerance or coping skills, we use avoidance to cope. THis often means we turn to unhealthy mechanisms kike drinking, drugs, food, shopping, toxic relationships all in an attempt to stuff down out emotions.
But embracing distress is actually really healthy for us. This is called distress acceptance.
Paradoxically, we feel better when we can practise distress acceptance
This can look like swapping our language from “I can’t handle this,” or “I’m not going to be able to make it though,” for “I will make it through,” “I might not like this but I can handle this”.
Distress tolerance is a skill we can practise over time until it becomes second nature. If you struggle to cope with distress, start to unpack the language you use and the ways you avoid uncomfortable situations or feelings. This will give you clues on where you can start to make changes.
How to develop distress acceptance skills
Learning how to accept distress in our lives involves knowing and accepting that we will have negative emotions and experiences. The first step in this process is learning how to be nonjudgmental about any negative emotions we feel.
Rather than using distraction methods like drinking, food, drugs or anything else, or ignoring our distress, we place no more specific judgement on this.
“We can say” “it's OK that I feel like this, “I have space for these emotions “it is what it is for now”
Distress is fueled by us being convinced that stress is inherently wrong or that we cant handle it. But the truth is, we can handle negative emotions. Emotions can't physically hurt us.
Next time you have negative emotions surface, practice viewing them non-judgmentally - they are not good or bad, they just are.
Here are some more ways to practise distress acceptance:
Express your emotions to someone you can trust
Get curious about them describe them, notice where you feel these emotions in your body, journal about them
Use mental imagery or meditation to see them either leaves on a tree gently falling to the ground, or water rushing in a stream next to you, or clouds in the sky that gently move above you.
See them as ball of energy that is external to you. Practice breathing into this ball of energy until it gets smaller and smaller and disappears
Practise being the observer of your emotions, they are not you and they don’t define you
Practise slow diagrammatic breathing to settle your fight or flight response and relax your nervous system
What does this do?
Instead of magnifying these negative emotions, accepting them leads to less distress and reduced rumination over our negative state.
We don’t suppress them so they don’t bubble up and explode or come out in other ways.
It also helps to disassociate ourselves from these feelings, so we can say ‘they don’t define me.’
It’s not wrong to feel negative or uncomfortable emotions, we can learning to simply feel them and then let go of them.
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