Author: Holly Mae Haddock

Categories
Therapy

Three Art Therapy Exercises for Learning to Let Go of Perfectionism

Perfectionism and the Burden of Control

Are you a perfectionist? If so, you may have a hard time relaxing and enjoying making art just for its own sake. Expressing yourself can be extra hard because of the need for the results to be amazing. 

Yet it is the wild and wonderful nature of life (and art) to be unpredictable, wayward, and unforeseen. We cannot control it and it can never, ever be perfect. 

For those of us imprinted with the burden of having to seem perfect at all times, art projects that are designed to be experimental, exploratory, and a little bit messy can be very liberating. We don’t have to control the outcome perfectly because chaos is supposed to have a role. 

I share the following three activities hoping you may recover a little bit of your right to not know what exactly is going to happen. No one should have ever given you the impression that you could or should control life completely. It cannot be done, and if it could, it would be a shame, really – life would be pretty boring. 

Have fun!

Abstract Collage

What You’ll Need: 

Construction paper or brown paper grocery store bags, modge podge if you have it, or glue stick or glue 

If using construction paper, pre-select the colors you like and set any aside that you don’t resonate with today. 

The Process:

Begin with letting yourself rip up many, many pieces of paper, into different sizes and shapes, with the rule that you must tear with your hands and not use scissors. 

If you are able to, enjoy the process of tearing up paper. This activity can be therapeutic in and of itself.

When you have a large pile of shredded paper of different sizes and shapes, start gluing them onto a large blank piece of paper in whatever arrangement feels right to you. Go piece by piece, intuitively adding pieces where they seem to want to go. It can be helpful to use a brush to smear the glue over the top of the pieces to keep them matted in. It’s done when you say it is.

Washes

What You’ll Need: 

Watercolor pencils, watercolors, ink, and/or water-soluble markers. The thickest paper you have, ideally watercolor paper, can also be cardstock or cardboard. Brown paper bags will also work well enough if you don’t have any other thick paper.

The way to find out if a marker is water-soluble: make a mark on a piece of scratch paper and then dribble some water over the mark. If the ink bleeds, you’re good to go. If the ink is impervious to the water, choose something else. 

The Process: 

Make many expressive, intuitive marks on your page with your water-soluble mark-maker. The suggestion is not to draw anything in particular, but rather to have the line indicate how you’re feeling. You might think of it like a polygraph – the line expresses your state of being. 

Leave a fair amount of white space between your lines – don’t fill the whole page.

Using a brush dipped in water (or watercolor or watered down ink), generously distribute water over your whole image, so that the colors bleed and drip. You can change the direction of the drip by tilting the paper if you like and turning the image around.  

A fun experiment is to use coffee instead of water or ink, which gives it a pleasant stain. Again, it’s done when you say it is.

Ink Blot Butterflies

What You’ll Need: 

The largest paper you have and relatively thick paint, such as acrylic, oils, or gouache.

The Process:

Fold a large piece of paper in half and then open it up again. Squeeze or thickly paint some color onto the left or right side. 

Fold the paper back over, and squeeze the two halves of the paper together, pressing firmly until all of the paint has been squished flat.

Unfold the paper. Some of what you did on one side will be imprinted on the other. It may look like butterfly wings or a Rorschach ink blot. 

Dropping the need for it to stay symmetrical, work the image further. If it looks like something specific to you (such as a face, a tree, whatever), feel free to develop the image in that direction to bring out the resemblance. Again, allow yourself to sense the moment of it being done, and trust that.

Art is Always a CoCreation

Art is always a collaboration between us and life. It is never just “me” making art. This means I  also don’t have to take it so personally if it turns out “bad” – both life and I are responsible for the outcome! May these exercises feel freeing. 

If you or an important woman in your life are struggling with perfectionism, and substance use, consider treatment at a holistic program that is designed to heal the whole you—body, mind, and soul. Reach out to us today to learn more about how we incorporate art therapy exercises into our treatment programs. Call (866) 950-0648 to learn more. 

Categories
Lifestyle

How to Change Habits and Embrace a Healthier Lifestyle

The Remarkable Power of Habituation

The power of the human brain to form a habit is remarkable. Research tells us that if you do anything every day for three weeks, on the twenty-second day you will wake up expecting and perhaps even wanting to do the activity again, no matter how much you may have resented and resisted along the way. 

Repetition anchors behavior so deeply within us that the behavior starts to take place almost on its own. Activities that were once new to us and required conscious thought become fluid, effortless actions driven by the power of deep neuronal grooves.

Every time we take a certain action, we scratch a little deeper into the same groove, deepening and deepening. Like paths cut through a forest, these neuronal pathways become ever more familiar and easy to follow without thinking about it. 

Here’s how to change habits and embrace a healthier lifestyle.

To Make a Change, Make A Habit

Because of the power of habituation, the easiest way to anchor a positive change into your lifestyle is to make it a habit. To make a new, healthy behavior a habit, you just have to do it over and over again, consistently, until it becomes second nature. 

Making a personal daily ritual out of a positive behavior can help it become even more anchored into the body. That’s why those who meditate, have a creative writing practice, or are long distance runners, for example, often have a routine that they stick to, rain or shine. 

We can admire such a person’s discipline, but in fact, that is the easiest way to get past the stage of having power struggles with oneself. Building a routine engages our inborn habit-formation tendencies to work in our favor. 

You know you’ve successfully formed a strong habit when the body comes to expect the behavior to take place and may prepare for the behavior on its own without you needing to think about it. The body will wake up at the right time without an alarm clock, wanting to do yoga, ready for green juice. 

Addiction is a Bad Habit

Whatever habits we have now, we formed them in the same way. We formed our bad habits one day at a time by repeating negative behavior over and over again. 

Even addiction is just a really, really strong habit, one that’s extra hard to break because of the way that mind-altering chemicals hijack our brain chemistry to cement a behavior with more than the usual adhesive force. 

But even addictions aren’t possible unless we continue to do a behavior over and over again.  And no addiction can survive if we can just find a way to stop doing the behavior. 

Switch Out the Reward

The addict within, or the side of you that is concerned with avoidance of pain as well as going after pleasure, will not easily give up its go-to survival strategies without a believable and effective replacement plan. If you give up substances, how will you numb your overwhelming feelings when you get triggered into shame, fear, guilt, anger, or unworthiness? It’s a sincere question.   

If there’s no strategy for replacing the reward we have been getting from a bad habit, we often fail. Therefore we will do best when we negotiate a realistic plan with ourselves, with goals that are truly achievable and an arsenal of support to help us do in a better way what the bad habit has done for us until now. 

When looking to replace a habit, identify what the bad habit does for you, then find another way to experience that effect that isn’t destructive to you. 

To kick you off, a little assignment: see if you can write down 100 ways to create pleasant sensations that don’t involve anything overly self-destructive. 1. Take a nap. 2. Go for a brisk, 20-minute walk. 3…?

Don’t Let Addiction In, No Matter What It Says

No matter what the addict within says to you, remember addiction requires YOU to take the destructive action again and again for it to live inside you. If you stop the destructive action, the addiction will have to leave you, sooner or later. It may circle around you for a long time, hoping you’ll let it back in, but as long as you remember that your body and soul is yours, and it’s your choice whether or not to let addiction in, you should have what you need to live life in peace, addiction-free. You are allowed to say no to addiction.  

If you or an important woman in your life is ready to say no to addiction, reach out to us today to learn more about how to change habits through our treatment programs. Call (866) 950-0648 to learn more. 

Categories
Higher Power

Spirituality and Addiction: The Power of Connecting with Something Bigger

A Spiritual Cure for Spiritual Pain

Recovery almost always requires allowing the spiritual side of us to have more say in our lives. For many of us, to stay sober we’ve needed to completely surrender the course of our lives to God, Spirit, the Universe, our own Higher Selves – whatever name we use to refer to the deepest dimension of ourselves, where we are deeply at peace and connected with all of life.

This makes more sense if we understand that the negative ego (the part of us in charge before we decide to put spirit in charge) is always going to attract addictions. The negative ego is not a completely bad character but has some baked-in problems, namely that when we are too encapsulated within ego’s confines then we are doomed to a life of painful separation and alienation.

Negative Ego Attracts Addictions

The psychological structure we call the negative ego was formed in reaction to pain, as a kind of stop gap mechanism for defending us against intrusive forces that invaded our beings and threatened our lives. It also served to keep us all in one place, psychologically. 

Egos are a developmental necessity. To grow into who we are, we do need lines around us that keep out the things that don’t belong inside of us, and to keep that which does belong to us, inside of us. 

The trouble with ego is that it creates separation, often to point of no longer being able to contact our deeper, sweeter, and wilder natures. Therefore we experience a thorough, heartbreaking loneliness owing to our state of disconnection. 

Only when we are in good-enough reunification with ourselves, with God, with Spirit, are we really happy. We need to have God filling us up from within, not only to feel good but also to feel safe. If we don’t have that, we will have the kind of psychological pain inside that drives a person to look for solutions in all the wrong places.

In other words, ego, as well-intentioned as it is, the manager part of our personality who runs our life every day, is the same reason we feel disconnected, shut off and in pain. That condition, as a chronic state, is a breeding ground for addiction. 

Spirit is Our Ruby Slippers

What we need to replace the negative ego with is a kind of boundary keeper and protector structure around us, a benevolence that can stop us from being harmed and overwhelmed by oceanic psychic forces, but does not violently tear us from life, nor wall us off in loneliness.

How can that happen? There is one aspect of our own nature who can do that, and that is our spiritual side. Spirit can simultaneously keep us safe, and keep us filled up, replenished and restored, held safe and sound in deep and comfortable companionship. 

Spirit has a higher level perspective that can help guide us in all kinds of scenarios that our normal mind has no way of truly understanding. Spirit, in other words, is our ruby slippers, the pot of gold we’ve been sitting on this whole time. 

How Our Own Spirit Heals Addiction

Addiction attaches to us because we like what it gives us, at least in the beginning. To replace the powerful function it has had in our lives, we need an even stronger force providing an even better solution.

Spirit, infusing us from the inside, can make contact with all the alienated trauma states that live hidden in different rooms inside the mansions of our psyches. Like a perfume that fills the whole structure, Spirit can softly go into all of the walled off sections of our being and create unity out of fracture. Spirit creates the self-reunification that cures all sicknesses of heart. 

Spirit is our fierce protector, as well as a nurturer, guide, and companion. Our perennial witness and comforting friend, the one who laughs hardest at our jokes and stands up for us when no one else will. 

Recovery is Ours for the Asking

If we genuinely and consistently ask our own highest nature to remove our addiction, recovery can be ours.

This works in part because if we really want to be freed of addiction we will reorder our lives to match that intention. We will do everything we can. This means we will go to meetings, stay away from friends who use, give up all we have been attached to that runs counter to the presence of Spirit. 

But most of all it means we are ready to meet our own whole nature again. This is the beginning of the end of psychological pain. 

If you or an important woman in your life are struggling with substance use and are taking steps towards recovery, reach out to us today to learn more about how our treatment programs incorporate healing of the soul. Call (866) 950-0648 to learn more. 

Categories
Higher Power

The Importance of Finding Your Own Higher Power

Introducing Higher Power

The thing I love most about 12 Step is that it recognizes the vital importance of each person having their own direct and very personal relationship with God. 

When I say God, I don’t mean any particular religion’s definition of God. You can substitute many words for God – Source, Spirit, the Universe – to refer to the eternal, loving presence dwelling in us. 

In 12 Step circles, people traditionally say “Higher Power” – two words chosen for their relevance to what exactly we need to be able to recover in a more permanent fashion. We need a benevolent force that is an authority above our egos, and it needs to have power superior to our own. 

A Power Greater than Ourselves can be All Our Own

It was in 12 Step that I was introduced to the idea that I didn’t have to follow what anyone else told me about what God is like, nor do I necessarily have to take on the common ideas of how I am supposed to be in order to be worthy of a relationship with God. 

Rather, the idea of God was summed up with the irreverent anecdote that you can pick anything as long as it’s not your ego or your addiction-even a doorknob can be your Higher Power. If you start praying sincerely to a doorknob to take away your addiction, that’s enough to begin the journey of extracting pain and misery out of your life splinter by splinter. 

How do you feel about God, Source, Spirit, the Universe? How do you think God feels about you? 

If you’re not sure you like your Higher Power, or you’re not sure your Higher Power likes you, I would gently suggest that looking a little harder for the Just-Right Higher Power for you could be a rewarding endeavor.

A Call for Spirit

An exercise that I wholly endorse is to make a Higher Power want ad, exactly as if you were going to take out an ad to look for someone specific. 

Seeking personal Higher Power. Must be loving, patient, and know how to take away addictions. Must be able to help with burdens and struggles of daily life. 

My Higher Power has a great sense of humor, is hugely affectionate, and cares about the same things I care about, like the beauty of nature and the tender innocence of all human hearts.

My Higher Power has endless patience to listen to me express my feelings, even when I’m angry, dark, or self-destructive. My Higher Power is kind and soft, but also has a great, sunny disposition and a keen sense of celebration and fun. My Higher Power holds the answer to any question I may ask, and can bring me practical solutions to any real world conundrum that has me stymied. 

It’s not an accident that my Higher Power is just what I, personally, need – my Higher Power showed up in my life as a response to my very ardent and heartfelt call for a Higher Power who could really help me.

The Higher Power You Need

Your Higher Power will be the exact right one for you. God has many faces. We may resonate with, connect with, or need certain sides of God at certain times. We are allowed to connect with different sides of God, to look for what we most need in God. My God is what I need God to be – your God will be what you deeply and most desperately need.

Those of us who need more of a loving mother energy to come to us may do best with a feminine expression of God, one who holds us patiently in warmth, safety and softness. At other times, we may crave the fortitude and protection of a paternal warrior presence, a fierceness who will blast his fiery breath to blow away all the things that hurt us. 

In my personal relationship with God, it is ok to express anything, including anger, towards God. God doesn’t mind if I am resentful, afraid, rebellious. That’s because the aspect of God I connect with has a deep and total understanding of trauma and what it does to the human being. My Higher Power knows exactly how much I need to be heard and understood, witnessed and allowed to say all I have to say about what life on planet earth has been for me.

Finding one’s own relationship to a Higher Power is a sacred journey. I would say it’s THE journey we’re all on, one way or another. To be conscious of the fact that we are on that journey at all times, lends a sweetness to life that is otherwise missing. Safe travels, friend. 

If you or an important woman in your life are setting out on a recovery journey and want to know more about Villa Kali Ma’s holistic mind, body and spirit treatment program, reach out to us today. Call (866) 950-0648 to learn more. 

Categories
Mental Health

8 Steps on the Journey of Healing the Inner Child

The Inner Child

The Journey of Healing the Inner Child is the quintessential healing epic. That’s because the Inner Child is at the core of our Self. 

Like the center of a flower, the petals of our life’s purpose all unfold from the Inner Child. Even when we grow up, there is always a part of us who is still the Inner Child. 

The Inner Child is an original. She is our gemstone, our butterfly wing pattern, our snowflake.

Inner Child knows the way to our highest potential. When we rescue the Inner Child from the harm that was done to her – the memory of which lives on in our bodies as trauma – we can at last become who we really mean to be.  

Meeting Our Wounds

Even though the Inner Child is where our joy, our creativity, our presence, our happiness and satisfaction at being alive lie, she is also connected to our deepest pain. 

Before we can get to the original, unscathed Inner Child, we first have to meet the Wounded Child, the one who shows us how we got hurt by the world.

It’s painful to encounter the Wounded Child. But it is also deeply meaningful when we witness that the Inner Child recovers, and returns to her original nature. 

8 Steps on the Journey of Healing the Inner Child

1. Make Contact

The Journey of Healing the Inner Child begins with getting to know her, and creating an environment of such safety and acceptance that she begins to trust you. Much like adopting an animal who has lived in a shelter and might have some reasons not to trust human beings, your Inner Child also has some reasons not to trust human beings. Therefore, have patience and be gentle as the sunrise. But say to yourself, “Hi Inner Child. I want to get to know you. I’m here”. She’s listening.

2. Build a Relationship Based on Trust

Children respond to love and attention like plants to sunlight and water, so if you give love and attention to your Inner Child, she will bloom. Build trust through using kind, loving words when you sense her showing up within you, taking time to check in with her, and letting her have some influence on your day. “Inner Child, I’m so happy you’re here. I love you so much, you’re the child I always wanted. Do you want to read our book or watch a movie tonight?”  

3. Play!

Children need play. They die without it. So whatever it is that feels like fun to you, do that, do it a lot, and your Inner Child will be able to attach to you and feel safe at last. Read children’s books. Draw. Play games. Make pancakes. Take baths. Pick flowers. Collect rocks. Do puzzles. Take time to be together, and let her choose what’s fun.   

4. Adopt a Learning Mindset

Being allowed to explore, to try new things just for the experience, is important for the Inner Child and might not have been fully allowed during your actual childhood. Adopt a learning mindset: you have a right to try things just because they sound fun. You have a right to fail or change your mind. You have a right to grow just through experiences themselves.

5. Protect the Child

Children need protection and to not have to think about overwhelming, adult things. It’s ok to shield yourself during this process, from topics and people that make you feel less safe in the world. Picture tucking your Inner Child away in a deep inner chamber, safe from the outside world. 

6. Celebrate the Child’s Spontaneous Nature

Children are delightful and surprising even if they’re a handful sometimes. When impulsivity, loudness, unruliness, messiness, a desire to follow fun rather than do her homework shows up, celebrate that Child Energy bubbling up in you, as much as you can. If encouraged, the Inner Child can lead you to a brighter, deeper life.

7. Get ready for the Wounds

The Inner Child has wounds. She has to cry, she has to scream and throw tantrums, because a lot happened to her that was both devastating and out of control. Her feelings of victimization, fury, and grief are all natural human reactions to situations that hurt the soul. Validate her.

8. Support the Inner Child

Support your Inner Child. Help her find words, draw pictures, run it out, hug it out. When the feelings are over, change focus to something that gives her joy. A capable adult who loved and cared about her should have been there back then, to show her how to release overwhelming feelings out of the body. Ok, so it didn’t happen then. But you’re here now – better late than never. 

If you or an important woman in your life are struggling with substance use or a history of trauma that continues to affect daily life, reach out to us today to learn more about our treatment programs. Call (866) 950-0648 to learn more. 

Categories
Therapy

Get to Know Yourself with these Writing Therapy Exercises

Creative writing, like any art practice, can be used also as a therapy to help you heal your psyche. 

When it is used primarily for a non-artistic goal, the point of the writing becomes the process itself, the effect it has on you.

You may find yourself writing a piece you really like, but the emphasis is on creating bonds of connection with yourself. 

Here are a few Writing Therapy exercises that you may want to play around with. For the side of you that resonates to poetics, stories, and the wonder of language! 

  1. Freewrite

The simplest writing exercise is the freewrite. As the name implies, there is no rule to what is written, but there is a rule that whatever comes out, you keep flowing and do not stop writing for the entire time.

How to do it: 

Set a timer for seven minutes and write the entire time. Don’t worry about spelling, grammar, sense, meaning, or beauty – if you keep writing the whole time, you have done it correctly. 

Why do this? 

Freewriting gets out the crusty goop. Imagine turning on a tap that hasn’t been used for a while – the first things that come out mainly just need to be blasted out of the way so the pure water can flow. 

  1. One Minute Story Starts

One Minute Story Starts are another way into the fountain of words within you, and are especially good for sneaking past the Inner Critic, because the short time box is too fast for judgment.

The result will be several writing starts (like plant starts). Not all of them will be great. But the point isn’t to make good writing but to get into the thick abundance of ideas that’s always within you.  

How to do it: 

Set your timer for 1 minute, and start writing a story.  When the timer goes off, start a completely new 1-minute story about something else entirely. Do this 12 times (12 minutes total). In 1 minute you will likely have a small paragraph of a couple of sentences, tops, so at the end of the 12 minutes you have 12 short paragraphs – the opening paragraphs of 12 different stories. 

Why do it? 

It’s important when doing any kind of creative practice to get past the self-editing urge (editing can happen later). The Inner Critic shouting judgments in our ears is what makes us get tight & end up with no ideas at all. To sneak past the Inner Critic, sometimes the best approach is to run and cannonball into the water.

  1. Lists

How to do it:

For each category I name below, list 12 things that belong in that category. Don’t overthink it, it’s ok if you have “Big Bird” and “hummingbird”, and “Larry Bird” in the bird category – that all works. The goal is to get 12 things down, as quickly as possible. 

  • 12 mammals
  • 12 plants
  • 12 inanimate objects from nature
  • 12 activities a person could to do
  • 12 colors
  • 12 shapes from nature (the shape of a fern, etc)
  • 12 very big things
  • 12 human-sized things
  • 12 very small things
  • 12 birds
  • 12 things in the sky
  • 12 moods a person could be in

Why do it?

Similar to Exercise 2, this is an exercise that focuses on quantity over quality. You are looking for a high number of distinct ideas – whether those ideas are good or not doesn’t matter.

  1. 777 Poetics 

How to do it:

Using your answers from exercise 3 (your lists) as inspiration – just the jumping off point – make up 7 similes, 7 metaphors, and 7 personifications.

Similes compare two things using like or as. “Life is like a box of chocolates.”

Metaphors equate two previously unrelated ideas by saying one thing is another thing. “It is the East, and Juliet is the sun.”

Personifications take human qualities and ascribe them to inanimate things. “The flower shyly turned her face to the sun.” 

Your lists can help provide an interesting mishmash of ideas. “A hummingbird (from the bird list) is like an asteroid (things in the sky list)”. 

Why do it?

The psyche loves poetics. Using them nudges us into dreamy, image-soaked creative reverie, a state that saturates us with depth and color. 

  1. All Together Now

How to do it:

Look over everything that you have written across all 4 previous exercises. With a highlighter, pull outlines, words, and portions of text that seem worth exploring further, and write these out on a new piece of paper or in a new document. 

The only criteria for choosing is if something is curious or interesting to you. With all your excerpts on a new page, see if you can come up with a new piece that integrates all or most of these selections. It can be a poem, song lyrics, a story, an essay – just let yourself weave your ideas together. 

Why do it? 

This is the stage when you get to enjoy all the weird, unexpected, delightful things you came up with. Integrating them into one piece is just another creative frame for thinking in a new way. 

Have fun!

If you or an important woman in your life are struggling with substance use or a history of trauma that continues to affect daily life, reach out to us today to learn more about our treatment programs. Call (866) 950-0648 to learn more. 

Categories
Wellness

10 Steps to Overcome the Inner Critic

The Negative Narrator

Do you often get the sensation that maybe you’re inferior to other people somehow? Do you treat yourself like you’re bad-hearted, stupid, a loser, ugly, selfish…..and and and?

A stream of constant, self-generated psychological abuse is, sadly, completely normal.  

It’s like being forced to listen to someone narrating the movie of your life in a very unfavorable way. Everything we do, think, and feel is subject to unkind, unasked for negative commentary coming from our own minds.

Who’s the Wizard Behind the Curtain?

Have you ever looked into who exactly inside you is being so harsh on the rest of you? 

It’s the great and terrible Inner Critic. Also known as The Mean Voice In Your Head, and to psychologists as Superego (not nearly as fun as that sounds, unfortunately). It’s the Part who makes sure you fit in. 

Outdated Management Needs an Upgrade

Inner Critic is an artifact from the past, a member of the legacy management team that got us through our childhood. 

But now that we’re not living with our parents, dependent on their every whim for our physical survival, we don’t have to please them or anyone else anymore as a condition of staying alive. 

If you’d like to see what life is like without an inner PA system blasting horrible pronouncements about you all day long, this post is for you!

10 Steps to Overcome the Inner Critic

  1. Write down what the Inner Critic says

Start a log in which you record what your Inner Critic says about you. A transcript of everything that’s said will help you see these statements as opinions, not facts. You will also have an easier time seeing how brutal these comments are. 

  1. Defend Yourself

Looking over the Inner Critic’s allegations, identify what’s unfair, unscientific, untrue, cruel and over the line. The Inner Critic is a bully and a liar. Fight for justice like you’re Atticus Finch defending Boo Radley.

  1. Identify the Double Binds, Gaslighting, and Abuse

Inner Critics love damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t scenarios. Call out these double binds. Notice how the Inner Critic gaslights you, and abuses you psychologically, like a narcissist. Call it what it is.  

  1. Identify Your Parents’ Voices

Does your Inner Critic remind you of anyone? Inner Critics are tape recorders replaying the worst things our parents told us, in their worst moments. Feel free to consider that this is their baggage, not yours.

  1. Use Your Values to Disagree With the Critic

Your true values are a resource for disagreeing with the Inner Critic’s antihuman, patriarchal, misogynistic messages. Get grand, get high and mighty. Rise above.

  1. Identify the Trigger

Ask your Inner Critic what it’s scared of. What horrible thing will happen to you if you don’t do what it says? The Inner Critic is, in its own demented way, trying to protect you. By letting it tell you what it’s worried about, you can often say “Ok, thanks for your input” and let it all go. 

  1. Connect the Inner Critic’s Worries to Events of Your Past 

If you’re able to find out what triggered the Inner Critic to go chicken killer on you, ask yourself: “When and where did I learn this particular rule?”. Realizing that this rule was learned in a very specific setting can help you see that perhaps it does not apply to your current situation. 

  1. Remember Who put the Inner Critic in Charge

It might not feel like that now, but it’s actually us who long ago empowered Inner Critic with the mandate to constantly remind us of the expectations that others have of us, the requirements we need to fulfill in order to keep being loved by our parents. But the Inner Critic can only rule by consent of the governed. How about some regime change?  

  1. Send the Inner Critic into Retirement

You are absolutely, 100% allowed to retire the Inner Critic. They’ve been doing this job for as long as you have been alive, which is a long enough career. You can replace Inner Critic with an Inner Guardian who will help you survive, but in a nice way. 

  1. Dominate the Inner Critic

Take a Cesar Milan approach to your Inner Critic – be calm and assertive and just say no. You are in charge now. The Inner Critic will eventually respect your authority and happily let you take over the task of keeping you safe. You being all grown up and safe from the things that nearly killed you in childhood is actually what it was after, all along. 

Thanks for reading!

If you or an important woman in your life are struggling with substance use or a history of trauma that continues to affect daily life, reach out to Villa Kali Ma today to learn more about our treatment programs. Call (866) 950-0648 to learn more. 

Categories
Therapy

Unlock Your Creative Self with this Easy Art Therapy Activity

Unlock Your Creative Self with this Easy Art Therapy Activity

Looking for an inner wellspring of happiness? Unlock your Creative Self. 

Your Creative Self is a reservoir of riches. Creative Self will help you feel better when you’re down and ground you when you’re happy. 

Most of us locked Creative Self away at some point during the education process, as we gradually learned to stiffen and repress the unpredictable, spontaneous aspects of our nature. We did this to fit in with society’s expectations and requirements of us, which generally involved making us more boring and docile. 

But now we’re grown up, and we can revive Creative Self for our own reasons – because we miss our juicy aliveness, the surprise and delight of play, and the satisfaction of self-expression. 

The following easy activity can help you get in touch with your Creative Self. It’s important not to judge or have high expectations, because Creative Self doesn’t like that, so make sure you make it an ego-free zone as best as you can. It doesn’t have to be good art. Just doing it is the point.  

Expressive Mark Making: This Easy Art Activity Unlocks Your Creative Self

What you’ll need: markers, crayons, pencils or pastels and paper

  1. Let Your Body Choose Materials 

Choose some mark-making tools, such as markers or crayons. Test the tools and see which ones you want to use. Rather than choosing from the mind, see if you can let your body sense decide what colors and materials it wants to play with today. If you listen, body sense will have very clear preferences.

It’s important for this exercise that you like how the mark-making feels. If you have very saturated pens, you may like how the paper soaks up the ink. Or you may like the waxy resist of a crayon, the dry chalk of a pastel. Ask the body sense within you to choose based on what feels interesting or appealing today.

If you’re not sure what is meant by “body sense”, imagine closing your eyes and touching two pieces of material – tin foil and velvet. With your eyes closed, how can you tell the difference between the materials? 

Feeling the differences, does it make you want to do different things with the material? Crumple one piece, or touch it to your cheek, for example? That’s the body sense that tells you exactly what it wants to do with materials, and it’s very connected to Creative Self.

  1. Express Yourself 

Once you’ve chosen your mark-making tools, start making marks on your paper without making anything specific (you’re not “drawing”, just making marks). 

Just like you did as a kid, before you knew how to draw “things”, circle and move around the whole paper, following your urges of movement. Notice the sounds of your mark-making and the feeling you get from scraping your tool across the surface. 

If you start to feel an instinct to move faster or slower, to make heavy or lighter marks, go with that.

Allow yourself to create at least 3 full-page scribble creations before you stop and reflect. 

  1. Look at Your Work

After completing at least 3 pages of expressive mark-making, stop and look at what you’ve done. Allow yourself to gently take in the cloudy, liminal, abstract beauty you’ve made. 

See how much speed, weight, and energy is recorded in the marks you made. Can you detect the motion, direction, and feeling of your own emotions, reflected there? What does looking at your drawing feel like to your body sense? 

  1. Name Your Pieces and Find out More

Give each of your pieces a title. Now write a short paragraph from the point of view of your drawing, giving it a chance to speak to you. Start with the words “I am…” 

For example, if I named my silver, greenish bluish crayon piece “The Silver Tide”, then I would begin “I am the Silver Tide. I hold the secrets of your dreamworld, what you have forgotten but comes back to you, unbidden…”  

Try it and see what your drawings have to say to you!

How does this Easy Art Therapy Activity Unlock Your Creative Self?

When you play in the pre-verbal, pre-symbolic realm of expressive markings, you return to how you were as a young child, before writing and representation taught you to focus on abstract concepts over felt experience. This exercise, therefore, is a direct line to the Inner Child. And in the words of Picasso, “every child is an artist”. 

This childlike realm of feeling, impulse and body sense is where Creative Self thrives. 

Enjoy!

If you or an important woman in your life are struggling with substance use or a history of trauma that continues to affect daily life, reach out to us today to learn more about our treatment programs. Call (866) 950-0648 to learn more. 

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Wellness

The Life-Changing Power of Authenticity

When we make the decision to be authentic, we course correct towards very different coordinates. We head towards more adventure and more vividness, deeper friendships, and greater meaning. 

Leaving behind the conditioned habit of being externally sourced, we set off to become sourced from within.

The color of life comes from inside us. Things outside of us can stimulate us, support us through resonance and mirroring, to feel what we already are, but it is always our own nature and subjectivity that makes up our lives. 

When we embrace this, and decide to live from the richness of our own insides, emanating outwards, rather than outside in, life returns to magic. 

Authenticity Goes Against our Conditioning

The external conditioning has been a trick of some sort, like a captured dolphin doing a flip to get an external reward. We have been trained and controlled to perform a stereotyped, predictable, templated appearance of a human being, rather than to express and be what rises up in us organically. 

The world would look quite different if we chose to connect first to what is within us, and worry secondarily about whether or not other people approve of who and what we are, and whether it resonates with them.

When we are externally sourced, we are very open to manipulation and social engineering. We have no inner authority. We are vulnerable to being gaslit, bossed around, shamed and blamed. Living our lives as though we belong to someone else: to whoever and whatever we take as an authority. 

Authenticity is the Truth That Sets us Free

Authenticity is the truth that, as promised, sets us free. When we are authentic we choose kind words, but don’t dally with falsities about ourselves and what we know. 

We speak words meant to illuminate, rather than words meant to confuse, mislead, and cloud. We do not play games or manipulate. We set ourselves and everyone else free from the psychological burden of lies. 

There is an enormous psychological benefit to telling the truth. Parts of us suffer when we say something that the body knows to be untrue, as the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance illustrates. Incongruence harms us, and it opens up the door for negative things (like addiction) to sit in our being, regardless of our original intentions. 

Addictions don’t like the truth, as you may have noticed. The truth sets us free from addictions and all other kinds of possessions and bindings. Not unkind words or bluntness to others – but rather our honest admission, to ourselves, in the privacy of our hearts and among trusted friends. 

Authenticity Is the Root of True Friendship 

The first result of being authentic is that those who cannot stand who and what we actually are by nature, will realize they don’t like being around us, and will move on out of our sphere. This can be frightening, or bring on heartache, but it is actually good. 

When we can understand this not as a reflection on us, per se, but more an expression of those people’s own resonance or non-resonance, it can be easier to stomach. We don’t all have the same taste in music, we don’t all like cilantro, and we don’t all deeply connect to each other’s soul essence energies, and that’s ok. 

When we self-approve our authenticity, we can also permit people who don’t resonate with us to go ahead and take leave of us. We give them our full blessing, as all have the freedom to move towards what they like and away from something that feels bad to them. 

The Life-Changing Power of Authenticity

The exciting corollary of this shuffling of friendships is that those who do like us, who feel more comfortable around our truth resonances than around our well-meaning fakery, will gravitate towards us naturally, too. 

These people will be harmonious to us, we will fit well with them. These will be the type of friends we can truly prize: people who genuinely like us for who we actually are, rather than for who we have pretended to be.

Perhaps the greatest opportunity for us, is that when we stop lying to ourselves, when we stop seeming rather than being, spirit finally has space to fill us out from within. We swing the inner doorway of the heart wide open. 

We let all the good things come flooding in, the gifts spirit has been saving for us: humor, creativity, resilience, meaning, connection, and unconditional, loving presence. That’s the life-changing power of authenticity. 

Categories
Addiction Treatment

What Does Radical Empathy Mean for Recovery?

Radical empathy practices imagining what life feels like to someone else. 

When we have radical empathy for recovery, we understand that addiction serves a purpose in a person’s psychological ecosystem. Addiction has a raison d’être, a root cause that is far more tenderhearted and touching than we might realize. 

Radical empathy knows of the existence of this very good reason for your addiction. What is it? 

A protective, life-enhancing, life-supporting, and positive intention: to survive against the odds.

Addiction Manages PTSD Symptoms 

Addiction shows up where the soul has been harmed. Addiction manages the PTSD symptoms that go along with living with a broken self. It makes life livable (ish). 

Therefore, when radical empathy looks at addiction, it sees it for what it actually is: a strategy to make it through something that would otherwise represent a serious danger to the psyche’s chances of being here at all.

Psyches can be busted and broken. We are resilient but not indestructible. We need protection, ways to keep ourselves together. 

Even though addiction is no friend – in fact, it creates many, many very serious problems – your psyche was trying, in its own way, to keep you alive for the future, when it developed this pattern.

Forgive yourself, if you can, for making a deal with the devil. For what you chose to do and what kind of a bind you were in, that required you to make that contract. That set you up for walking the demanding road to recovery, now.

Radical Empathy is The Key out of Prison

The key out of the prison of addiction is to deeply self-approve, understand, and accept that addiction represented a solution for you. It met a need. And even though you don’t want to have a binding deal with the devil anymore, you must understand that the need itself was and always will be valid. 

A need for safety, for help managing PTSD symptoms, for experiencing an inner world that isn’t haunted by misery and demons every single waking moment, is completely human and not too much to ask of life. 

When you choose to have empathy for a human in such need and pain, that she would take substances into her body in a way that – deep down at least – she knows isn’t normal, you can begin to heal and find a better solution for the pain and necessity behind that choice. Radical empathy is the key out of addiction’s prison. 

Radical Empathy Acknowledges Psyche’s Needs

For parts of your psyche, it was, and is still, a matter of survival, of making it to the future. We often fail to acknowledge the very difficult, monumental job that psyche has to do. 

Psyche, sensitive and impressionable, has to somehow stay intact in the face of overwhelming, full-gale forces whose natural, unavoidable effect on the soul is to shatter it.

To prevent further fragmentation, further splitting into parts and pieces, the soul will grasp at all kinds of things that it wouldn’t, under safer, better circumstances.

Radical Empathy Works

Radical empathy means understanding that self-judgment doesn’t really cure anything. How often have you told yourself you should be like this, or you should be like that? Does it lead to change?

Most often, should-ing only leads to the appearance of change, to get someone or something off our backs. 

Perhaps it would be fine if shaming, blaming, and judgment actually worked, but all of these approaches have been proven time and time again to have zero impact on causing addiction to go away (in fact, the absolute opposite). 

Empathy, by contrast, is effective. It’s only in a space of true neutrality, in the light of true kindness, that we often open enough to see what’s really going on. 

When radical empathy embraces and surrounds us, we crack open and let life see the splinters in our soul. Soaked in empathy, these can, at last, be extracted from our psyche’s depths. 

Radical Empathy Leads us into a Positive Future

Radical empathy has a firmness – it doesn’t mean we consent to harm. It doesn’t mean letting us do bad things to ourselves, now that we know better. It means we understand the whole addiction cycle, the shape of the space it sits inside. 

Radical empathy has a path and a plan for us. It helps us know there is a future in which we not only survive but flourish. A future in which the holes in our soul become places where spirit plants its seeds, spirit-seeds that sprout into lush, fresh life. 

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