Regulate & Rewire: An Anxiety & Depression Podcast

4 Healing Reframes for Anxiety & Depression (pt 2)

• Amanda Armstrong • Episode 75

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This is the second part of a two-part series that's all about healing reframes. I'll break down the final 3 helpful reframes, or mantras, that can change how you look at and navigate your healing journey.

In this episode, we’ll take a deeper look at how these reframes—originally shared in a parenting context—can be applied to all of us trying to live more regulated lives. Hit play for the full conversation.

Here's the 3 takeaways:

  1. Firm but kind – Look for a moment today or this week to offer yourself the reflection of, “what would it look like in this moment to be firm, but kind with what I need to do right now?”
  2. Find an anchor in the storm. – it’s not your job to fix your feelings but instead to find an anchor that allows you to make space for them. Reminder that next week I’ll be sharing with you a lesson I filmed a few years ago on emotional fitness and regulation.
  3. Connect before correcting – how can you connect with the part of you engaging in a behavior you don’t love or that isn’t helpful before correcting. With another reminder that we’ll have a bigger change about our internal parts in a couple weeks.

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Welcome to regulate, and rewire and anxiety and depression podcast where we discuss the things I wish someone would have taught me earlier in my healing journey. I'm your host, Amanda Armstrong, and I'll be sharing my steps, my missteps, client experiences and tangible research based tools to help you regulate your nervous system, rewire your mind and reclaim your life. Thanks for being here. Now let's dive in.

Welcome back friends. Today's chat is a natural extension on the last two weeks of conversations. So in case you missed those, here's the quick recap. Two weeks ago, I did an episode in direct response to an email I got from an overwhelmed mom, asking for support with hypervigilance overwhelm, and feeling like she always had to micromanage and control situations and parenthood. And as part of that I offered my four guiding regulated parenting reframes that I use in my life as a parent right now. And as I finished that episode, I thought about how much I wanted to expand on each of those reframes not just in how they apply to parenting, but in how they apply to healing, anxiety, depression and the nervous system in general. So last week, I unpacked the first reframe being, quote, "how developmentally appropriate of you to that." And I reworked that a little bit to apply specifically to you working with yourself with that reframe. So how appropriate of me to insert a behavior or a tendency that feels annoying or unhelpful, given that and then inserting the context, why you might have that behavior that pattern, that tendency, and then following it up with the action, the work the, so now what? What are you going to do to shift that pattern, not just have compassionate awareness of it, but actually start to rewire and repattern the way that you interpret the world engage with the world show up in the world. 

And today is going to be a conversation on those last three reframes. 

So quick reveal, the first will be "firm but kind." 

The second is "I am the anchor, while they storm, it's not my job to fix feelings, but to make space for them." 

And the third is "connection before correction." 

So unpacking this first reframe, again, I offered it in the context of parenting, we are going to recontextualize this, reframe, or I think I use the word mantra a couple times, in terms of your own healing journey. So "firm but kind" and this is another place, I find this perfect balance of accountability and compassion. An example of this might be I know, I don't want to go to therapy today. It's hard. And it's important to go kind oftentimes shows up as validation. I see you, I hear you, how human of you for that to feel hard. And here's the boundary. Here's the firm, we're doing it anyways, I know you don't want to go. I know this is hard. And it's important. So we're doing it. And honestly, what works best for my self talk is actually to use words like we and you. Almost as if my authentic self, my adult self, my regulate itself is talking to all the other parts of me that are feeling kind of sticky or unsure about something. 

So this might sound like, you know, I know, you don't want to plug in and get off your phone at 8pm. That's what we're going to do. I talked to myself, almost like I'm talking to somebody else. Maybe it's it's okay that you don't enjoy going for a run. We're going anyways, because it's important, because you always feel better after you go. Yeah, you lost your temper, and you owe them an apology. It's okay that it sucks, but we're going to do it anyways, we're going to say sorry. And this language might feel weird to you to talk to yourself in this third person or conversationally in this way. But it really, really works for me. And it works for a lot of our clients, especially when we realize that so many of these default patterns of ways that we think and behave and feel are rooted in our past lived experiences. 

So there really almost is this inner child who experienced something hard got stuck in this pattern. And it's just replaying this pattern over and over and over again in adulthood. So you do you have this inner child who is running the show, in this feeling or this experience or oftentimes this fear and what each of you is doing here and listening to a podcast like this is trying to also find your center to call up and out your authentic self, your regulated adult self, who can help you stay steady. Even when you feel triggered. And the practitioners inside Rise As We, inside my mental health coaching practice are also all trained in a modality called ifs internal family systems or parts work. It's really similar to and incorporates a lot of inner child work. And I will actually do an episode on this in the next few weeks on why this particular modality of healing anxiety and depression through a nervous system lends layers so beautifully. With the regulating work that we do. It is a combination that works well for our clients. It's worked well for me and my healing journey, especially for those who have felt stuck with other methods of therapy or coaching. 

And coming back to this reframe, of "firm, but kind," I want to invite you to just pause and reflect on how in your life right now, can you be firm but kind? Can you find this balance of validation, compassion, allowing yourself to feel seen and heard, while also holding yourself accountable to what it is that you know you need to do? Because too often, I have been a total jerk to myself, my self talk has not been kind. Until the last few years of my life, I have shared plenty of examples on this podcast in the past of what my Inner Mean Girl has sounded like, not kind, not kind. Or what I have often found is myself, to the point of burnout, where I do not have the capacity to be firm, I make excuses for why I don't need to do the things that I know I need to do to be my most regulated and healthy self. It's right. It's these Hallmark card quotes of like, don't let temporary feelings dictate your actions, or make the choice now your future self will thank you for. And I know these quotes are cliche, but quotes become cliche for a reason, because there's usually some truth in them. Look for a moment today or this week to offer yourself the reflection of what what it looked like, in this moment to be firm, but kind with what I need to do right now. 

All right, jumping to our second regulated reframe for today, which is, quote, "I am the anchor. While they storm. It is not my job to fix feelings, but to make space for them." So while I originally shared this with you in the context of regulated parenting, this also applies to me to you as we navigate our daily emotions. And I think sometimes we can get confused with this topic of emotional regulation, that when we have emotional regulation skills, when we're really regulated, we are going to feel predominantly the good stuff, that it's all about feeling happy and grounded and calm. But actually what emotional regulation means is that we are able to feel all of this stuff without being overwhelmed without shutting down without getting stuck without getting trapped without spiraling out or exploding. emotional regulation skills and capacity mean, huh, this sucks. This is hard, this hurts. And here's how I can make space for that. Here's how I can navigate this. So much of emotional regulation, I think comes when you can stop making yourself wrong, for feeling angry or sad or overwhelmed. And instead create greater capacity to be in and with those emotions to just let them be part of the pesky human experience. 

As I'm sharing this, I have an old course actually, that I built and it has a whole module on emotional regulation. And what I'm actually going to do instead of unpacking a lot more about emotional regulation, today, I am going to share the audio of this module with you as next week's podcast episode. I will also link in the show notes next week, the worksheets that go along or went along with that module when it was a live course. And I will offer the context. I'll probably repeat this next week too, that while there are some concepts that I might teach a little bit differently in the context of nervous system regulation or parts work or the way that we practice. There is still a lot of value in that module. So we're gonna table that for a minute for today's chat on how you can apply this particular reframe. 

"I'm the anchor While my feelings storm" How you can apply that to your healing today? I want to invite you that the next time you're feeling something big, big overwhelm big annoyance, big anger. Ask yourself, how can I find an anchor in this storm? The overwhelm annoyance, anger or anxiety are not wrong or bad. They just are. They're human. If the goal isn't to fix them, but instead to make space for them, what do I need? What does it look like? And maybe even take a moment to visualize a storm, you cannot stop the storm. And there's nothing innately wrong about the storm. It's not wrong or bad. It just is. It's there. It's happening. This feeling it's here it's happening. What can you do to feel more anchored until it settles. And anchors can be your breath. It can be sunlight, it can be movement, another person a gratitude practice, anchoring in big emotions could be simply placing your hands on your heart, or some other somatic tool or practice. So maybe pausing to write down or journal later, or just reflect when feelings are big for me. What helps me anchor 

And the third and final regulated reframe that we're going to unpack today is, quote, "connection before correction." Now, to illustrate this, I am going to share a parenting experience that we had recently and then reflect it back into what this might look like in your own healing in working with your relationship with yourself. So the other day, my one year old, and actually side note to this, I am absolutely gonna throw my husband under a bus for a minute for the sake of the example. So sorry, hon, I know you listen to my podcasts. For every one thing you get wrong, you get 10 things right. And you are so often my anchor when I storm. But in this case, I handled this moment better than you. So here we go back in. We were both in the kitchen. And we looked out and we saw our one year old in the sunroom like scooping water out of the dog bowl onto the floor. And my husband immediately went into the sunroom, took the cup out of his hand and like threw a towel down on the floor. And immediately Lachlan, which is my son's name is mad and screaming. So within a split second of seeing this play out, I rushed out, I looked at my husband, I think I said something like bro Come on, like there was a better way, there was a better way to handle this. So what I do is I quickly handed my son back his cup, I took like three seconds if that to do like, oh, like, this looks fun. Let's go play in the water outside. We currently have a blow up pool set up outside. And I offered him this moment of connection. And then correction, connection. Oh, yeah, this looks fun. And here's how we need to do it instead, here's where we need to do it instead. Because here's the thing, what my husband did made absolute sense, based on his adult context for the situation. He doesn't want water all over the sunroom floor. And some of you might even have heard this example and be like, Why is the big deal? And you'd be right, this particular example, it wouldn't have been a big deal. If this would have just played out the way my husband did it, taking it away, my kid would have survived, he probably wouldn't have been traumatized by the situation. But if there is a pattern of misattunement that does impact the development of our children. 

In this situation, there was a better way that was more attuned to our young son's experience of the situation. So again, while the way my husband reacted made perfect sense based on his experience of the situation, my young son was having a different one. He was out there having the time of his life. And this is what we call a moment of misattunement, where the adult with their context, their agenda, their needs, went into action that didn't meet the needs or context of the child. So a moment of misattunement is when an adult takes action from their context from their experience that doesn't match the experience or context of a child, especially that doesn't meet the child in their need. So like I said, my kid was thrilled to be playing in the water. He has no context this is problematic in any way. And later when I chatted with my husband through this I said can you imagine if the next time you were sitting on the porch, or the couch like reading a good book, someone just came up to you and like ripped the book out of your hand and pushed you into a different spot like you'd be pissed. My son's anger and letting out a scream was appropriate for his experience of this situation. 

Attuned parenting means that we meet our children and their experience of the world connecting before correcting. And it takes awareness and practice and capacity to do this. So how does this apply to you and your healing? We not only have misattuned moments with our kids or our partners, but we can also have misattune moments with ourselves moments where our body gives us subtle cues of stress or fatigue. And we push through anyways, either because we don't know how to assess those signals for what they are. Or maybe we're just more focused on achievement. We have moments where we deeply want connection, but we choose isolation, or in the direction I want to take this, there are moments where we may feel like continuing to sit and mindless scroll, or skip out on a workout or bail on our friends. How can we connect and then correct these behaviors that might be less helpful? This could be I know you're feeling overwhelmed. I know you're feeling overwhelmed, it makes sense. And it's time to get up and go for a walk by default. With that example, I used the wheeling which again, this is another place where parts work feels really intuitive for me. And ensure like I said, we're going to do a whole episode on this in a few weeks. But in case I'm saying these terms like inner child work ifs or parts work and you have no context for it. Parts work really helps us to make sense of our multiplicity as humans, part of me wants to work out but part of me wants to sit on the couch and keep scrolling part of me is really hurt by what they said and other part of me is angry and other part of me understands, you know, with what they've been through or where they're coming from. It's this idea that each of us has these various parts that are made up of past versions of ourselves. 

Some of our hearts are much younger. They're the wounded or burdened parts of us, the parts of us that didn't feel safe or secure, seen or heard, our needs weren't met. Other parts of us are what we call protector parts, who makes sure that those painful things never happened to us again, those are the parts of us that are really hyper vigilant that are perfectionistic that are procrastinating. And then at the core of each of us, is our authentic self, our regulated self. And I'll expand on this concept in a few weeks. But for the sake of applying this particular healing reframe of how we can connect before we correct that context might be helpful. So just like a parent might try to first connect with their child offering validation or compassion for their experience of something, well, then correcting with a boundary or redirection, we can do the same with ourselves, we can recognize that we're showing up from a place of wounding from a place of protectiveness from survival mode. And maybe we call that our inner child, like a parent might connect with their child, we can first when we're triggered when we have an outburst. When we're procrastinating doing something that we know we need to do. We may 1 offer validation or compassion to our inner child, and then offer this guided correction or boundary. And the other examples. I'm going to share in context of this reframe, I want to come from you. 

So a few weeks ago, on my Instagram stories, I asked folks to share with me a particular behavior that they had that that frustrated them. I gave the examples of you know, do you have a behavior of procrastination scrolling at night instead of going to bed etc. And I got so many beautifully vulnerable shares. One of them was, quote, "I lose my temper when overstimulated."

So connect to that part of you. And then correct. You can validate the feeling the overstimulation and then correct the behavior. This might sound like who yep, yep, you're overstimulated. Why don't you take a beat, walk away, go grab some water. It's tough to be overstimulated. And you created a rupture by losing your temper. It's tough being overstimulated. But here's what you can do next time. Here's what you can do instead. Or here's what you're going to do. Here's what we're going to do to repair this rupture. Instead, what this sounded like so often for me, was spiraling out into the shame cyclone of I'm the worst. Why do I always lose my temper? I'm a terrible friend or a mom or partner or whatever. We can connect and then correct, Lou Yeah. That was really hard. And you messed up, here's how we're gonna fix it. 

Another example that was shared was scrolling at night instead of going to bed. So let's say you did it. The next morning, you wake up and you're annoyed, because you're tired. And the mindless scrolling cost you an hour that you could have been sleeping. What connection before correction could sound like in how you work with yourself? It's like, oh, yeah, that behavior makes sense. I was feeling pretty burned out at the end of the day. And those little social media dopamine hits were nice. And in the long run, it's unhelpful. So while the behavior makes sense, it's unhelpful. So tonight, we're going to do something different. Tonight, we're going to set an alarm for 8pm. I'm going to plug my phone and charge it in another room. And I'm going to let my partner know if they see me on my phone in bed, they get to take it from me. 

And the last submission that I will share with someone who said, quote, I'm not able to sit still, while doing things like watching TV. I'm always picking up my nails or something, connect them correct? Oh, yeah. Picking up my nails again, sitting still is tough for me, I'm going to take a deep breath. And try to just be still and be with the show without picking for a little bit. And you can connect and redirect and connect and redirect and connect and redirect as many times as you need. For this particular person. I'm somebody who struggled with skin picking. Nail picking I'm sure is very similar in its compulsive nature, you might have to pause to redirect yourself 15 times in a 30 minute show 30 times in a 30 minute show. That's okay. It's okay. Oh, yeah, this is tough. But we're going to do something different. It's like gentle parenting, but but with yourself. 

So if you really resonated with that parts work or that inner child paradigm, think about it like connecting first to the inner child or that inner part of you that's feeling hurt, scared, overwhelmed by whatever's happening in that moment. How can you offer that part of you validation and compassion while still correcting and redirecting to what needs to happen in that moment? What would be more helpful in that moment? And this is actually something that I am trying I have been, I have been blamed in relationships, rightly so for sometimes being critical. And in my mind, it's like, no, I'm just like offering feedback. But oftentimes, actually, the only thing I've told you all this, the only really corrective feedback in my career that I can think of right now, was actually with my job in college, I was managing a ton of group X instructors and personal trainers and making the schedule. And my director, the woman who oversaw my position, pulled me into her office for performance review. You're doing great here, great here, great here. And some people don't like the way you communicate with them. You're really blunt. And she's like, I understand again, oh, I didn't even intend for this to happen. This is a moment where she did this. Right. She connected with me. And then she corrected. She said, I understand why you're so straight into the point. And you need the information that you need. You're juggling a million things right now, it makes sense. And would it kill you to go up to somebody and say, Hey, how are you doing? How are things going? By the way, by the end of the day, I'm going to need your availability for the group exercise schedule. And I remember walking away from that I was in a place in my life where I didn't have a lot of capacity for feedback. And I was like, people are so stupid. Why can't they just like, get me what they need, and then we wouldn't have this problem did. I was in a place where I did not have the capacity to be the person who was wrong in this situation. And I absolutely was. Because I don't like necessarily when people communicate with me like that. It feels good when somebody says hey, how are you? By the way? How can we get this information? Connect, Before we correct and so this is something that not only do I apply to myself and my healing journey, to the way that I engage with my children, but also in my relationship with my siblings or my husband offering connection before correction. 

All right, let's bring it back from that wild tangent that I I hope made sense in the context of this conversation. Either way, it is time to summarize the conversation with three takeaways. And what I'm going to have these takeaways be is one for each of these healing journey mantras or reframes that we went over today. 

So number one is firm but kind. This is an invitation to look for a moment today or this week to offer yourself the reflection of what would it look like in this moment to be firm, but kind with what I need to do right now. 

Number two is to find an anchor in the storm. It is not your job to fix your feelings, but instead to find an anchor that allows you to make space for them. And this is my reminder that next week, I will be sharing with you the audio from a module that I filmed a few years ago on emotional fitness or emotional regulation. 

And TAKEAWAY NUMBER THREE is connection before correction. How can you connect with the part of you engaging in a behavior that you don't love or that isn't helpful, before correcting and redirecting, while also knowing that that correcting and not redirecting needs to happen for you to see progress in your healing journey. This is where that layers with the firm but kind. 

And another reminder there that we're going to have a bigger conversation around internal parts in a few weeks, if that is something that you're curious about learning more about. 

So thank you. Thanks for being here, sending so much hope and healing your way and I'll see you next week. 

Thanks for listening to another episode of The regulate and rewire podcast. If you enjoyed what you heard today, please subscribe and leave a five star review to help us get these powerful tools out to even more people who need them. And if you yourself are looking for more personalized support and applying what you've learned today, consider joining me inside Rhys, my monthly mental health membership and nervous system healing space or apply for our one on one anxiety and depression coaching program restore. I've shared a link for more information to both in the show notes. Again, thanks so much for being here. And I'll see you next time.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai