Therapy Tool/Exercise Tips
People love to share what mechanisms they use (meditating, physical activity, journaling, making art, etc.) but people don’t talk enough about how to approach them in general so I have some thoughts:
They can have side effects! My old psychiatrist told me (but didn’t actually link me the article... rude) about a study in which almost 50% of the participants had negative side effects to meditating. Therapeutic tools and exercises are honestly a lot like medicine and they can have harmful side effects. If a tool or exercise is bringing you harm, there’s nothing wrong with you, it’s just not the right one for you, at the very least not for now!
Which great segue, is that sometimes a mechanism that didn’t work for you before can help you later on! As you heal you will realize your needs will change. Something that was more pressing may be managed to the point where something else may now be the bigger issue and sometimes old tools/exercises that didn’t work can come in handy now! You can and should revisit old mechanisms as you advance in your healing.
Some mechanisms are good only in the long term. Like for me, exercising is helpful and if I don’t do it for a day I’ll still feel fine. But go a week without it and suddenly I don’t feel as good! And it can be hard to pick it back up because I won’t immediately feel better afterwards. But when I get back into walking daily, I do eventually start to feel better!
Conversely, some mechanisms are only good in the short term. Sometimes you’ll feel good with a mechanism and start to feel like it’s not helping anymore after a while. It happens! It was good while it lasted but maybe it’s time for a new one. And again, maybe you can revisit it in the future, but don’t force yourself to do something if you truly believe it’s no longer doing anything for you.
On the other hand, sometimes a mechanism can help you but you need practice with it before you actually start to feel any benefits. This happened to me with breathing exercises where following the instructions as I interpreted them left me feeling light headed which was not great. But with time, I kept trying it and doing it differently until I found ways to breath that were ACTUALLY calming!
Another segue, it’s cool to personalize/modify a mechanism if you think it’ll be more helpful. For another personal example, I used to HATE positive self talk because it felt like I was lying to myself and just reinforced my negative thoughts. So instead, I started doing NOT negative self talk. Instead of saying “I’m a good person” it was a lot easier and helpful to say “I’m not a cruel person” Good person was hard to quantify and felt like a lofty thing to accomplish. “Not cruel” was easy because I could just think “when was the last time I insulted someone until they cried? Never? Great!”
Sometimes individual mechanisms don’t work for you, but pairing them together does. Admittedly I don’t have much experience with this, but just today, my therapist recommended that in addition to exercising, I should also journal as the two together she thinks will help me in a way neither could individually.
That’s all I have for now but there’s probably so many more intricacies to it that haven’t even occurred to me. For the record I’m not a psychology expert or anything, I’m just someone who has been in therapy for..... honestly getting closer and closer to half my life! Therapy is a long and hard journey that doesn’t really ever end; the best you can honestly hope for is for it to be so normalized it no longer feels like therapy and just feels like living your life. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing! And therapy tools and therapy exercises are to me the building blocks of wellness. But you can’t just get them, you have to know how to really use them! Hope this helps. :)