Getting Past Your Past: Take Control of Your Life with Self-Help Techniques from EMDR Therapy is the newest book by Francine Shapiro, PhD, the founder of the Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing therapy technique. It is “about understanding the ‘Why’ in your life, and in those around you. More important, it’s also about understanding what you can do about it.”

The book is chock-full of stories of people who have been helped by EMDR, but both the author and I want to make something very clear: All of the cases presented in the book were of people who were assisted by trained EMDR clinicians. Although one may believe from the title that you can apply EMDR techniques at home, it is essential to realize that the processing of painful and/or disturbing memories can lead to a very distressing emotional state and should only be done with the assistance of a trained professional.

This is really my only concern with this otherwise helpful and interesting book – that people with severe past trauma may try some of the techniques and be caught in the middle of a difficult emotional experience without support. However, Shapiro does state frequently throughout her book that the reader with past trauma must be approach the exercises with care and perhaps not even try them without help.

Did you catch that switcheroo in the title of this post? Usually, it’s “love thy neighbor as thyself.”

But in our society, we tend to reverse that. We find it easier to be compassionate toward others than toward ourselves.

Being nice to others is a good thing, right? Yes, but it begs the question: Why can’t we be nicer to ourselves?

That Inner Critic

You know that chirping little critic you hear inside your head sometimes? Most of us have one. It’s that voice that says,

“You’ll never be good enough.”

“Why even try? You know you can’t do it.”

“You’re such a hypocrite (loser, slob, dimwit, etc.)”

Kristin Neff, author of Self-Compassion and a pioneer in the field of self-compassion research, says this voice probably developed as a means to keep us safe, a basic need that we all have.

Also, she posits that we may think we need this voice to keep us motivated. After all, wouldn’t we just be completely out of control if we didn’t talk to ourselves this way?

You know the answer to that. We don’t need that inner critic to keep us in line.

Who’s in control of your life?

Is it you or do you allow forces outside of yourself to make decisions for you and determine your path in life?

Being convinced that other people or circumstances in your environment control you – called external locus of control – can lead to feelings of helplessness, passivity, and depression.

Feeling like you have control of your life – known as internal locus of control – increases self-confidence and your ability to problem-solve effectively, both important skills in learning to bounce back in life.

What’s your locus focus?

You can bounce back from the tough times in life by using any number of skills that help improve your resiliency. Here’s a quick list of some of the most useful tips with some helpful links included.

Remember that most of these are a practice. You’re not expected to master them overnight. But go ahead and pick out one or two – or fourteen! – to try.

1. Accept what is.You’ve got a bad situation in front of you and it’s time to become completely honest with yourself and really seewhat is happening. No more denial or wishful thinking that it will get better. Take away all the emotion from it, identify the problem, and accept that it is reality.

2. Firmly grasp the reality that change is a part of life.
You struggle against change. You expend a lot of energy making sure that change doesn’t happen in your life. Save your energy for better things and accept that change truly is a normal part of life. Expect it.

You’re trapped.

You’re stuck inside your head with the same thoughts going around and around and around:

“Why do I feel this way?”

“There must be something really wrong with me.”

“I don’t have the energy to deal with things which means I won’t be able to work which means I won’t be able to support me or my family.”

“This is awful.”

“What am I doing or thinking that is making me feel this way? If I could just figure it out . . .”

The problem is, while you’re thinking, thinking, thinking, you’re not doing. Effectively, you’re stuck in the paralysis of analysis.

We frequently have opportunities to increase what I like to call everyday resilience. It’s the stuff we need to get us through the ups and downs of our daily lives and just plain make us feel better.

They can be easy to miss, though.

Let me illustrate with this story:

The other day I was walking along in a small shopping center, headed for Starbucks. My mood was blue and I was feeling discouraged. I struggle with depression occasionally and I was concerned that it might be raising its dark head.

I glanced up as I walked and saw a teenage girl about to pass me. My blue-themed thinking went something like, “Teenagers. So involved in themselves and their phones…she’ll probably just look away or give me that look like I don’t exist.”

Wrong.

1. Realize that everyone bounces back differently.

Some people literally do bounce back after the loss of a loved one. And this doesn’t mean they didn’t love the person any more than someone who is in the throes of painful grief for a long time.

Everyone has a different reaction to death. So, if you’re one of those people who bounce back fairly quickly, that’s okay. And if you’re one of those people who experiences grief for months and years, that’s okay, too.

2. Tell friends what you need.

Friends want to help, but sometimes you have to let them know the specifics of what you need. Here are some examples:

Psychology professor Sonja Lyubomirsky is the only researcher I know who has written a rap – The How of Happiness Song - about her research findings.

It must make her happy because happiness is what her work is all about.

It’s not only happiness that she dissects, it’s how we become happy.

She has found that there are three basic intentional activities that promote long-term happiness and thus bolster resilience. (I say long-term because it turns out that happiness around things like our life circumstances being improved by material items only lasts for a short period of time.)

A new approach to increasing resiliency around the onset of a chronic illness is showing promise in a recent research study.

Judith Moskowitz at the University of California, San Francisco has developed a program that is aimed toward helping people who are newly diagnosed with a chronic disorder to adjust by increasing their positive emotions.

The intervention, known as IRISS (intervention for those recently informed of their seropositive status), worked with HIV-positive subjects through one-to-one sessions to help them learn “intentional activities” that promote positive feelings.

While the study had a small sample with only one type of chronic illness, Moskowitz believes the intervention may be found to help people with other types of persistent disorders as well.

Resilience: The Beginning

Emmy Werner and Ruth Smith sifted through the mounds of data from their longitudinal study and noticed something peculiar. Of the children born on Kauai in 1955, there were a group of them that were at high risk for doing poorly as they grew older.

It wasn’t this group that caught the attention of the researchers, though. It was a subset of this group. The subset, about thirty-percent of the high-risk kids, was doing well. Really well.

They checked the data again. Yes, all of the high-risk children were facing the same types of adversity: parental issues including low education, behavioral health issues, and discord; health problems; poverty. And yet some of the children did very well while others did not.

Why?