Almost instinctively, we tend to fight against and struggle to avoid our human experiences of painful, distressing thoughts and feelings. Psychological Flexibility, on the other hand, invites us to change the way we respond to our distress, rather than trying to change our distress. A metaphor about ocean waves and surfing helps illustrate key concepts.
The piece of Psychological Flexibility we’re looking at here in particular is how we as humans deal with painful, overwhelming, and distressing thoughts and feelings. The one reaction we all seem to do best is immediately try to escape or avoid that hard stuff, especially by using distraction. Which works for a minute, or a while, but in the long run not only breaks down but often compounds the painful stuff we were trying to escape to begin with.
If there’s a second most common reaction to suffering that we all do, it’s to fight against it, get rigid and inflexible and steel ourselves to hold it off, judge it and ourselves critically, or try to argue it away with reason and intellect.
- “What’s wrong with me for feeling like this?!”
- “I shouldn’t be feeling this way.”
- “Ok be rational, you idiot, there’s no reason for you to think this way.”
- “But I have so many things to be grateful for, I shouldn’t be sad!”
- “Everyone else seems to have their shit together, I’m just pathetic.”
- “I’m so stupid for being afraid of this thing.”
And on, and on, and on.
How We React to Distress Often Only Makes it Worse
Problem is–and you know this from experience already–these just don’t work. Even worse, now we’re caught in a compounding vortex of distress, and distress about our distress, and judgment about us for having distress…and a general unwillingness to make room for the painful parts of being human.
No judgment here. We ALL do this, therapists included. It’s our brains doing what they think is going to be best to protect us, and it happens automatically and reflexively. But there’s a different way.
Psychological Flexibility is, in part, the skill of changing how we relate to and interact with the painful and distressing waves in our internal worlds. We learn to open up, make room for, and stop struggling against our inevitable distress.
Related Article: Explaining Psychological Flexibility: The Bus Metaphor
This does a couple crucial things: It keeps us from being as caught up and entangled in those waves (surfing them instead of fighting them), and it allows us to recover that misspent energy and apply it instead in the direction of what we value and what matters to us, which brings its own feelings and benefits.
It’s important to note that in this metaphor, nothing about the waves has changed. They are still the same height, shape, and volume of water that they always were. What has changed is our relationship to those waves, our interaction with those waves. And that is a very important part of building more resilience and psychological flexibility.
Psychological Flexibility is a Skill that Takes Practice to Develop
It’s not easy to do, of course. The danger of cute little metaphors is that they over-simplify something that’s going to take work and practice. I suppose to extend the surfing metaphor, no one learned to surf by reading an article about it or watching a video…they ultimately had to get out in the water and accumulate actual experience.
Practice noticing or catching more quickly when you harshly judge your negative internal experiences. Strive to adopt an increased willingness, an attitude of acceptance toward the negative things you’re going to feel. It’s not resignation; you don’t have to pretend to love them! But make room for them, be more willing to have them and experience them without getting caught up in trying to overly control, escape, or judge them.
Of course, this isn’t a magic trick. I’m not giving you some simple way to turn off all waves of pain and suffering in your life–in fact that gets us right back into the original problem of trying to change or avoid the waves, rather than adjusting how we respond to them. Instead, I’m inviting you to open up a bit more to the pain and suffering in your life so that it doesn’t have to knock you completely over every time, so that you can learn to surf it, navigate it resiliently, and flexibly respond to it.
Practicing the skills to increase psychological flexibility can be helpful to most anyone. It’s a particularly valuable skill for people who are experiencing significant or clinical levels of distress and impairment in their mental health. This could include, for example, people who are overwhelmed with depression, stuck constantly in highly anxious thoughts, caught in patterns of disordered eating behaviors, or experiencing acute distress from trauma. The professionals at Full Color Psychology also specialize in working with faith transitions and the mental health problems they can create, another area where the skill of Psychological Flexibility is very helpful. The skill can also help athletes and performers improve their performance.
If this is helpful, check out our other videos and articles about Psychological Flexibility, and feel free to reach out to us with questions or to inquire about our therapy services.
Photo by Grant Durr on Unsplash
