Hi, folks. So today I'm going over Opposite Action.
This skill quite literally refers to acting the opposite to whatever urges that you have associated with an emotion, whether that's to do or to say something, we use this particular skill to change or reduce unwanted emotions.
Here's the important part, when your emotion doesn't fit the facts of a situation, okay? If it fits the facts of a situation, then you're going to do something else. So in this particular, for this particular skill, there's four main times when it can be helpful. So the first is when you know facts about the situation, but it doesn't change your emotional response. So for example, if I am, if I know something is not dangerous, like needles, it doesn't mean that if I have a phobia of needles, that I'm not going to be terrified when I go into the doctor's office, right?
I can know that I am completely loved and accepted by my friends, and still feel shame about my appearance in front of them sometimes, right.
So the facts are, that the situation isn't dangerous, that these people completely love and accept you. And yet those emotions can still be pretty intense, that's when you would use this skill, time to if an emotion or an emotions intensity, or how long you feel that emotion isn't justified by a situation. So when we say justified that shift shorthand for fitting the facts of a situation, all emotions are valid, all emotions make sense on the basis of some history, some experience that you've had some part of a way that you interpreted a given situation.
Not all emotions fit the facts of a situation. So for example, if you're told that a person said a bunch of really mean and not true things about you, you might feel anger, and then later find out that that person actually didn't say that about you. Um, if your boss is introducing a new manager, to you and your workgroup, and she says kinds of things about everyone, but you, you might feel afraid or hurt by that, only to later find out that she didn't say anything, because she spent literally the last hour singing your praises. These are times when an emotion isn't justified by a given situation, or if it is justified maybe the intensity that you're feeling it or how long you're feeling, it doesn't fit the facts, okay.
Number three is when an emotions, or its intensity or its duration isn't effective at meeting goals. So to use the boss example, again, if your boss criticizes you in front of feelings of people that you're trying to impress, and then asks your opinion, on a certain point, it would not be effective to respond in anger in that situation. To impress these people, you're going to want to have sort of the most thoughtful, level headed response that you can have in that situation. Alternatively, let's say that you're in the middle of driving in an area where there's loads of construction, and maybe there's sort of like a drop off on the side, you look down and you realize who boy, this road is really narrow, I have nowhere to go.
Freezing, and locking up in that moment in the middle of the highway is not going to be effective at your goal of getting to your destination safely. And in fact, my results in your feared outcome coming through, okay?
Finally, when you are avoiding what needs to be done, so let's say that you are feeling really depressed, and you just want to stay in bed all day and isolate yourself, chances are, that's only going to lead to more depression, because you start to feel guilty or sad or whatever, about all of the things that you're not doing that need to occur. Likewise, let's say that you're so anxious and I know this is going to be true of a few of you that at times you don't want to engage in a treatment that you know will reduce your anxiety in the long term. acting on your urge would actually lead to more anxiety. So this is a case where you're avoiding what needs to be done.
So let's talk a little bit more about what this looks like in real time.
Here is how we do opposite action. So I often use an example, some of you guys know that the household that I grew up in, intentionally tried to use shame and guilt to get specific behaviors out of me. As a result, by the time that I got to grad school, shame was very much a conditioned response for me something that I went to easily and quickly in a variety of situations.
An example of me using opposite action was realizing that as a novice therapist, there were mistakes that I was making, which makes sense, given my level of training. And yet I was feeling really ashamed to tell my mentors, my supervisors about those mistakes. This is a case in which it was not effective for me to act on that shame. And I had to figure out step one, that it was shame and had to check the facts to go in and say, okay, based on where I am in training, should I be making these types of mistakes, does it make sense.
I'm going to go through the rest of the steps. But needless to say, opposite action was the thing that was needed. And look at it all of these years later, I am super comfortable talking about any and all mistakes that I make in therapy, because it turns out for all fallible, so in therapy and in life. Um, so step number one, identify a name, the emotion that you want to change.
Step number two, check the facts. This is what we did last week, and you can see Paul's video if you need to go over what that looks like.
Third, and this one's actually quite important, um, to actually slow yourself down and figure out what your impulses urges, desires, cravings are in a given situation, this can look all different kinds of ways it could be to shut down to hide something, to lash out at somebody to eat an entire cake to drink a lot to run away. There's any number of things that you might have the urge to do. Okay, step one, or I guess technically, step three is realizing what those are.
The next step, after you figure it out, what those are, is to ask yourself, hmm, why his mind? Is this acting on this going to be effective? Is this going to move me closer to my life worth living to my big picture goals that I have for myself, turns out, having my mistakes and not getting advice from my supervisor would not have been a thing that was effective.
Next up, what we have to do is try and figure out what does it look like to act exactly the opposite of this. So if we're talking about my experience with shame, if I was to have go, if I was to have acted on a shame, then what that would have looked like would have been hiding, never sharing that that thing happened in the first place. Or describing it in a way that was like really contrite, where I was sort of like looking down and talking about it and a low voice, and you could tell that I was beating myself up over it.
So the exact opposite of that would be to come in and like maybe even like make a joke, or just put it out there like Dang, Doctor, so and so I really messed up with this one patient.
Here's what happened, keeping eye contact, saying it clearly concisely, watching my body language and putting it all out there.
What if the emotion that you're working on is anger and your urges to lash out, then it might look like being really gentle, having calm and open body language, using a lower tone of voice instead of talking loud and fast.
So depending on what the emotion and its associated urges, is going to be what this looks like in real time.
Now, one thing that I have to point out is that a really, really important piece of this is that you cannot suppress your emotions while you do this. If you do that, it is going to lead to rebound effects, it's going to be unsuccessful, you go ahead and you feel your shame you feel your anger you feel whatever it is, while changing what it is that you do all the way.
Opposite action will take care of the emotion for you, you don't have to push that emotion down, you have to change your behavior and that emotion will decrease naturally.
An important part of this is to also do opposite action all the way. So in my example, a minute ago, if I had told my mentor, I had gone in like this to talk about it, chances are, I would not have had as big of a reduction in shame, as I did when I went in there with a super matter of a fact, matter of fact, approach to this situation. And the other big thing is that you have to keep doing this over and over and over again, practicing it until you don't feel this way anymore.
So the next time that I had to go to a supervisor for supervision, my shame was still there. It wasn't as intense I had new learning about like, Hey, I can share this stuff and my supervisor doesn't ridicule me or make fun of me, or treat me negatively for doing it. And it takes repetition to undo all of this other learning that we have about a given situation. So keep doing it. Keep practicing it in situations over and over again. Okay, so I'm going to leave off there and we will talk about this more in class. Hi, guys.
