143. Staying Steady in Difficult Times: Psychological Flexibility

If I could gift everyone one psychological skill right now, it would be this: psychological flexibility.

Because when the world feels overwhelming — when the news is heavy, systems feel broken, and old wounds get stirred up — rigidity doesn’t help. Avoidance doesn’t help. Doom-scrolling doesn’t help.

Adopting a stance of Psychological Flexibility does help.

In this episode, I step back from the headlines and talk about something deeper: how humans historically respond when widespread trauma is exposed. We look at the psychology of denial, backlash, and disbelief — and why our nervous systems sometimes push away what feels unbearable.

Then I teach you the skill I rely on most in my clinical work and in my own life: psychological flexibility.

It’s the ability to stay present, make room for difficult emotions, and choose actions that align with your values — instead of reacting from fear or overwhelm.

This isn’t about consuming more information.
It’s about staying steady enough to make a difference.

If you’ve been feeling anxious, discouraged, or emotionally flooded by the state of the world, this episode will help you ground yourself, protect your energy, and move forward with intention.

Because we don’t need more reactivity right now.
We need clarity, compassion, and values-based action.

Welcome to The Modern Creative Woman.

Transcript

 If I could gift everyone one thing. I would offer you psychological flexibility. And I think the whole world needs it right now. Psychological flexibility involves attending to the present moment and maintaining or changing your behavior to live in alignment with your values. I want to talk today a little bit about what's happening in the news, not the details itself. Rather, I'd like to speak about historical context, about what happens when people learn about widespread traumas that are happening around them. It'll give you some context and some historical references that allow you to understand how trauma processing happens and the inevitable backlash. After that, I want to give you some more information about psychological flexibility, and I believe it to be the one thing that will really allow us to navigate this incredibly stressful situation right now and be able to keep our composure and keep our eye on the prize, which is a peaceful environment and democracy and justice and all of the things that collectively we believe to be important. 

So welcome into the Modern Creative Woman podcast. Doctor Amy Backos I am a licensed psychologist. I'm a registered and board certified art therapist, and I've been doing this for 30 years. And when I say this, what I mean is working with people who've experienced trauma, and that has been my expertise and focus on trauma recovery and also resolving substance abuse. I'm not talking about the details of the traumas, just our reactions to them today. So if you're not really in a position where you want to take in some perspective on what's happening in the news, you can join back in next week. Or you can save this for another time. And I want to remind everyone to take really, really good care of yourself right now. With all that being said, let's get into this. Let's get this started. Historically, we have dealt with the unearthing of terrible traumas, in particular sexual traumas. And I'll give you two examples from psychology's past where rampant abuse was exposed and then the information was promptly squashed. There are many examples of people being unable to tolerate something horrible, and instead of understanding that it could be unfathomable to them, unthinkable, unconscionable. They decide that it couldn't possibly be true because they couldn't imagine themselves thinking that. And so they don't believe that anyone could have thought or done that. And it's a confusion in the mind. It's a psychological defence. It's the wish for it not to be true because it's so terrible. And these psychological defences are designed to prevent us from going into an overload of anxiety, and people will argue against the facts and the reality because they are so distressed about what they've learned. You've likely heard of this example with Sigmund Freud where, upon reporting that his patients had experienced widespread sexual abuse, he reported this and then immediately recanted it, saying, no, it must just be fantasy. People speculate that he realized that it was not well received, or he was pressured to recant, or he worried about finances and sharing this information. Experience of working on and reporting sexual abuse and then recanting it happen with many other researchers, including his mentor Josef Breuer. Furthermore, recanting the story is often. What is experienced when a child or an adult. Reports and abuse. They may decide, oh no, this is too terrible. I shouldn't have told and then say no. Never mind. It didn't happen. And so it's a psychological defense to try and like, take back the story. There's a famous book by a doctor, Judith Herrmann, called Trauma and Recovery, and I think it's written more for clinicians. However, she's highlighting the social reaction to sexual abuse. Revelations are often one of disbelief, denial and victim blaming. And all of these are a secondary trauma to survivors. And they're this defense that people can't deal with the horror of it. There's family denials. There's all kinds of myths that have been pervasive in the medical community, the legal community, the police. There's victim blaming in both legal and societal contexts. There's silence and institutional denial. And Harmon really highlighted, especially during the late 19th and early 20th century, that the incestuous abuse was really dismissed by medical and legal communities, and they started to call it a hysterical fantasy. And Herman worked really hard to undo that, in particular the institutional denial. There's other aspects of her book about. Victim blaming and the perfect victim just simply doesn't exist. And the stereotype of what a victim, quote unquote, should look like can have a big impact on how they're treated. And all of this is simply the psychological defense of people who don't want it to happen to them, are overcome with their own anxiety. And that, coupled with the systems that maintain and support abuse, make it really difficult and challenging for people to come forward. There's many examples in the news about the government saying things aren't true, that we see with our own eyes, and that kind of telling a different narrative, telling a story about what really happened. Denying the truth. The gaslighting aspects of it are often present in institutions that want to cover up and deny that abuse exists. It's a very specific strategy. One thing that I found very personally helpful. That I've added to the work that I do with individual people, is to work further upstream and continue to speak out about systemic injustices in the legal and in the social sphere, the discrimination and the harassment, as well as the overlapping intersections where people are not believed when they report their abuse. So I'm talking about how, um, the system is, as well as the discrimination that a woman may experience or a woman of color may experience and the overlapping intersections of denial and abuse. For example, some of the things that I really focus on for me to try and work upstream is to write about cultural humility. Whenever I'm writing about trauma, to write about these intersecting identities race, culture, class, sexual orientation, the ways that people are showing up in the world, and those discriminations that their experiences are experiencing also impact how they are treated when they report their abuse. I would like to encourage you to not look too closely at the details in these files that are being released. You are not obligated to read them. You are not looking away by choosing to focus on another aspect of how you can help. Besides reading these horrific details, and I'll tell you why. When I'm working with clients around trauma in particular, I know them as a person and I'm not inviting their stories on day one or month one. I'm knowing them as a whole person, and all of these terrible stories are in the wider context of that one person's entire life, and it can feel horrifying to read through these Excel sheets with the details. We're simply not able to tolerate reading horrible detail after horrible detail. There is nothing wrong with choosing to not bring those things into your mind. Instead, I want to encourage you to see about working upstream. Like I said, being able to educate yourself about the systems that allow abuse to happen is a place where you can really make an impact. And I know many people have said, I feel like I have to read some of these stories so that, you know, they suffered, so I should be able to tolerate it. And I don't know that that's true. I don't know that that's a helpful way for you to become an ally or an advocate. By reading these details, we can be quite disturbed by them. And if you just read a little, you have more than enough information about how disturbing the details are. It's unnecessary for all of us to continue reading. And if you decide you want to read, I would encourage you to do it at a really slow pace and take really good care of yourself. It's really upsetting to have a look at some of those things. Suffice to say, everyone is seeing the systems that were in place that allowed and continued to allow this abuse to be ongoing, and there's systems in place that have allowed this abuse to happen in the medical field and in universities and in theology offices. The system of not believing a victim of sexism and how women are treated is part of this, and the systems that keep it in place are often around protection of perpetrators and keeping silent, seeming somehow easier to protect the system than to protect an individual who's experiencing abuse. I talk more about the psychological defenses that people are using in these cases where they're in denial. They're projecting, they're avoiding. And I talk more about that on the Instagram that I did last Friday. And you can learn a little bit more about how to understand. People, the nuance of their defenses, and the extreme denial and hate that has allowed all of these things to take place. I'd like to get into psychological flexibility as really a solution for us to deal with what's happening and to feel like we're not looking away. If even if we're not reading the documents that have come out to feel like we're engaged with what's happening in a way that is possible for us to persist in advocacy and speaking up in volunteering or writing our congresspeople. It's the numbing out that can make everything feel worse. And for people who are survivors of these kinds of traumas, it can be a trigger. And a trigger is different than a push button. We all can have our buttons pushed where we feel upset and angry and overcome with a rage about what we're reading or fear or anxiety. But it triggers specifically, is feeling like the past abuse is happening again. And so for people who are experiencing that, I really want you to know there is so much help available. There are incredible therapists and resources and crisis centers that are trained to listen and be respectful and believe what's happening and allow you to express what's going on and learn new ways to cope with the kind of reactions that happen when a trigger takes place. Psychological flexibility is one really important way for us to engage with the present moment. When we're psychologically flexible, we're able to either maintain or change our behavior to stay in alignment with our values. I have a value of being of service, so I do this podcast. I usually talk about the positive psychology aspects, and even today I hope that I'm being of service. And I am talking about these things even though there's a lot of pressure to stay quiet when abuse is talked about, making contact with the present moment really means accepting what is happening in the moment. And those are the things outside of us, but also our inner private experiences. So it means accepting our thoughts, our feelings, our bodily sensations, without trying to change the experience by pushing it away or overly examining or overly focusing on them. In other words, if you're aware of the experience of sadness, you're willing to allow that feeling to be present without trying to get rid of it. And subsequently, psychological flexibility helps us really adjust to our constantly changing inner and outer environments. You can be having a perfectly lovely walk and have a thought about something that gives you sadness or upset. And being psychologically flexible allows us to say, are thinking about this thing and it's giving me the feeling of sadness. You can recognize it. Flexibility essentially begins with awareness of the present moment as well as your personal values. And after that it's really followed by aligning or behaviors with our values. Here's why flexibility is so important. It matters because flexibility involves mindfulness and curiosity. Psychological flexibility enables us to observe each situation and its constantly changing dynamics, and then align our actions with what's most important in that moment. So in other words, decisions are made when we're being psychologically flexible based on our personal values instead of making decisions because we feel like it or we don't feel like it. In other words, your inner feelings, like motivation or motivation, are not really a part of your decision to take action. You might set out your gym clothes the night before as a visual commitment to working out in the morning. You might schedule a conversation with your boss as a commitment to give feedback on a particular project. But feelings come and go and they change all the time. You may might wake up and not want to go work out, but you've already given the intention with your values. Oh, I want to work out today. I want to be healthy. And so instead of changing your decision to act based on your feelings, you maintain your value based behavior. Feelings come and go, and they're not really a constant on which we can rely. We can't really base our decisions just on feelings. I talk here a lot about mindfulness, and that's because it creates this really hospitable environment where we can make the best choice for ourselves and others based on what we've already decided, our predetermined values. For example, my son is applying to college this year. I know he would much rather play video games instead of writing his essays. However, because he has learned to value education through his experiences at school and at home. He set aside time to write and submit his portfolio. So while he did not always feel in the mood to write, he persisted in this value based behavior. Let's talk about the opposite psychological inflexibility. This involves reacting to situations as they arise, but reacting in these automatic ways, habitual ways. For example, your value of healthy eating can be quickly forgotten when a friend drops by with donuts. Now, in this case, you might have conflicting values that of appreciating your friend's gift of donuts and spending time with them. Putting on a pot of coffee versus limiting your sugar intake for your health. Now, this is an example of what our values might be in conflict. Now, we can still be psychologically flexible by choosing the value we want to prioritize, and then deciding we're going to be all in on that decision. You can choose to sit with your friend and have coffee and skip the donut, or you can sit with your friend and have the donut. Note if you automatically choose the donut without any thought, you've engaged in psychological inflexibility. By focusing on your values of healthy eating and friendship, you can eat the donut and enjoy it. The outcome is the same. You eat the donut, but when you're psychologically flexible, you don't experience like you can just skip over the guilt or frustration about it. And this example really isn't about donuts. It's about anything that shows up that might lead you closer to or further away from your values. Psychological inflexibility really manifests when we use avoidance behavior, and when we're using avoidance to try and control our present moment experience, we get into a lot of trouble. Now, this might occur internally. For example, I might try and stop feeling this uncomfortable feeling, or I might try and forget about a sad memory. And these control strategies can also be applied externally, where you surely know people who try and control the environment and the people around them. They are striving to make things perfect for others. For example, can be a control strategy to relieve our own anxiety. And in this case, it often emerges when someone believes that they are the ideal in the eyes of others, then they will be safe. They make everybody happy. They will feel safe. Sometimes people with that idea will go overboard in trying to overly accommodate others. So this rigidly applying rules to regulate our responses to our thoughts or feelings, our bodily sensations, it limits our behavioral options. We're essentially painting ourselves into a corner. If there's only one way to respond, we have painted ourselves into a corner. This psychological and inflexibility really involves fixation on how others might perceive us. So for overly focused on how others might perceive us, and then we combine that with actions to like, manage the impression we give other people. We end up feeling inauthentic. Checked out of the present moment. So if you've ever been in a situation where you were trying to figure out what was happening, you were trying to please someone, maybe a partner, a parent, your boss, and you're kind of doing too much to please this person you have engaged in psychologically inflexible behavior. It feels inauthentic, and it's not responding to the present situation. It's responding to our own wish to feel comfortable and safe. I have a few more examples of psychological inflexibility, and they involve overreliance on control strategies. For example, we may keep trying behaviors which are unworkable and actually cause more problems than they solve. For example, overindulgence in eating or drinking or shopping. Television. Social media. Games. Over relying on these things to feel better. And by feel better, I mean just stay away from anxiety or stress. And of course, there's much more extreme examples of these kind of control strategies like self-harm, binge drinking, eating disorders, gambling addiction, other addictions. It's often that if a response works, at one point we might try it again and then again and again, and then we're no longer psychologically flexible. We're stuck in a behavioral loop. This is psychological inflexibility. There are many ways to feel better. I already mentioned mindfulness, where you're accepting the feeling so you don't have to do anything about it. Avoidance and relying on only one action is not only unimaginative, it can become pretty dangerous when we abandon other options and adopt repetitive or even compulsive behaviors. Our behavior and our world becomes really rigid, inauthentic, forced, even compulsive. One way to practice psychological flexibility is to ask yourself what decision will get me closer to my values? What is important in this moment, and what can I do to act on that? For example, you might want to read a book. Will reading this book keep you in alignment with what's important to you? For me, yes. The value of education, of creativity, personal development, learning. But in some exact moment where I'm looking at my book, I might feel peckish and want to go have a snack. Or maybe my friend calls and I want to have a chat. So there's just some conflicting values that need resolutions. I have lots of options. I could stick to my book. I could have a snack. I could talk to my friend. I'll probably do all three in some order that feels appropriate in that moment. That is not a problem when we have to make a shift from one value to the next. We're able to use our psychological flexibility to shift and adapt according to what's important in that moment, instead of just trying to avoid feeling bad. In review, we talked about adopting a position, a posture, a stance of psychological flexibility. So regardless of what's happening around us, we can still take value based actions towards what's really important to us. And as you are existing and consuming news, it becomes even more important to be able to stop looking at the news when you realize that it's upsetting you and take a break. And you can, of course, discontinue watching the news, which I always recommend reading. It is a lot better for us, or listening to it without the visuals is so much healthier for us. There are ways that we can keep persisting in our pursuit of justice, of peace. And remember, it's really the small actions that move us towards our values, connecting with our neighbor or researching how we can easily write our politicians. There's so many ways that we can participate that are not about overly consuming the news. So now that you know about psychological flexibility, you'll be able to use it this week. You'll be able to ask yourself, what is important right now? What value am I moving towards? Am I engaged in parenting? Then I'm moving towards the parenting value of being kind and patient and allowing structure and also permission to happen. If I am working, I am focusing on clear writing, expressing what I want to have on the page, considering, um, how I might do my edits and I. I focus on the steps that will get me closer to my value of writing. Clearly. However you choose to engage in psychological flexibility. You're going to start feeling a little bit better and a little bit more in control of your emotions and your actions and your decisions. So now that you know all about psychological flexibility, what will you create? Thank you so much for joining me today on the Modern Creative Women podcast. And the show notes. Have a button? You can send me a message. Let me know what you think. I always love to hear from you. It is a pleasure and an honor to be of service. I'm excited to speak with you in the next episode.