Coping for Families - Continued
Happy April families!
This month, we’re continuing our exploration of something foundational: coping tools to enhance emotional regulation within our families. Specifically, we’re focusing on the second aspect of coping—the cognitive side, which involves noticing, challenging, and replacing negative thoughts.
I hope that by sharing effective, research-backed strategies, you and your family will be inspired to actively challenge negative thoughts and consequently, reduce overall stress.
Hopefully, after a stressful incident, you have employed body based coping mechanisms to calm your internal state, thereby making it easier to access your cognitive and language skills (please refer to the March blog post if you are further interested in behavioral/body coping tools). Now onto the next step….
We all experience situations that lead to automatic negative thoughts that then lead to unpleasant feelings. It is vital that we realize here that what we tell ourselves about what happened CAN influence how we feel and act. There is a simple theory, titled the “ABCDE method,” that demonstrates this further (see visual below). Most people assume the activating event causes you to have an emotional reaction or consequence. Rather, it is what you believe or say to yourself about the activating event that causes the emotional reaction.
These beliefs or thoughts we have that cause more intense emotional reactions are referred to as thinking errors. We do not want to treat these errors as facts, therefore we are going to commit to noticing, disputing and challenging them!
While there are many thinking errors, we will focus in on the core four:
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When you have rules about how you or other people should or must act, this often leads to feeling guilty or self-critical and becoming angry with others when they don’t align with your expectations.
Thought Challenging Questions: Can I accept myself and others as they are right now? I can wish or prefer something to not be the case but not demand it.
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You think in absolutes like always, never, perfect or terrible. These thoughts are rarely 100% true.
Thought Challenging Questions: Does this really happen for you or your child always or never? Try to think in the gray!
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We filter out the ok or good things about a situation and we are left only with the negative aspects. The good things “don’t count” and the negative things are magnified.
Thought Challenging Questions: What are the positive parts about your parenting or your child’s behavior today? What went ok for your family today? Are you 100% sure that there was nothing positive that happened?
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When we give labels to ourselves or someone else, we are discounting a lot of information.
Thought Challenging Questions: Are there examples that do not fit the label? Think of things as more temporary and changeable rather than a hard and fast label.
Once you have noticed your automatic negative thought and labeled the thinking error, it is now time to attempt to replace it with a more neutral, balanced helpful thought…even if you don’t believe it! For example, you may think “My son never listens” or “she is making this harder than it needs to be.” A more helpful/balanced thought or self-talk may include “This is hard for my child right now..he is a good kid, just struggling” or “I wish she handled this differently but there are things I can do to help her deal with this challenge.”
Remember from last month, that modeling coping and emotion regulation strategies are critical for our children, especially those with autism and other neurodiverse challenges. This may look like you saying your automatic and helpful thoughts out loud. For example, you can use language like “I am so frustrated…My first thought was that our day was ruined because we can’t go on our bike ride.” But then I asked myself, “is my whole day really ruined? My second thought is we can find something fun to do today even though it is raining!” Remember to praise any portion of a child displaying flexility AND to talk about thinking errors/helpful thoughts when a child is calm.
In a few weeks, I will share the final portion of practical strategies to increase helpful thoughts and a framework to put everything together - I call it the three R’s. Additionally, I will share a personal example from my own life that highlights these coping strategies. In the meantime, I encourage you to focus on challenging those pesky automatic negative thoughts in order to allow for more internal peace within you and your family.
Warmly,
Dr. Willar
