TU115: Improving Your Emotional Health – the Challenge & the Update with Ann Kelley PhD and Sue Marriott LCSW CGP

30-Day Emotional Health Challenge Update

In this episode of Therapist Uncensored, co-hosts Ann Kelley and Sue Marriott discuss their progress in their 30-Day Emotional Health Challenge.

If you haven’t joined us in the 30-Day Challenge, you can start today by CLICKING HERE! No sales no gimmicks, just support for you to change!

Positive, Humbling, and Frickin’ Hard

• Ann discuses the positive activation around sharing and discussing the 30-Day Emotional Health Challenge.
• Sue shares about the Challenge of the Emotional Health Challenge
• A bit ambitious because it is a deeply held unconscious learning

Working on Changing Adaptations From Early Childhood

• The consensus in the Facebook group and among our Patrons is that we’re picking something that was an adaptation from our early life. It was important that we learn to do it, but it’s not necessarily helping us now.
• The problem is it was laid down in our bodies so early and really without conscious thought, so even just thinking about it doesn’t necessarily change it. Instead, we adapt to it, repress it, etc.
• This leads to a cycle of recognizing something, acknowledging that it isn’t working, and then repeating the behavior, which is induces shame.

Relief and Frustration

These behaviors are implicit (unconscious) not explicit (conscious), which makes them really hard to change.

The Process:

• Community connection
• Trying to teach ourselves to do something new
• Picking one thing, not everything, with love, compassion, and curiosity
• Examine the symptom or behavior that is no longer serving us
• Just learning about it and becoming more aware
• Not trying to repress or change it
• Try something new and continue to learn
• Are we resistant to changing? Reluctant to give up the old behavior? Etc

Adjusting the Emotional Health Goal

Sue discusses the zig-zag process of scaling her goal up and down based on her exploration process and how her thoughts about it changed after attending a conference with Bruce Eckert on Memory Reconsolidation.

Two Particularly Helpful Takeaways From the Conference

• We can’t know our unconscious
• Sue tests out whether or not The Memory Reconsolidation Technique is something we can do alone
• Because the behavior is implicit, it comes from the unconscious, so there is no way to see it by ourselves.
• But we can still move it by being curious about our responses and what comes up in the feelings of threat.
• Seeing the effects of the implicit coming out in our explicit reactions and working to get more comfortable with it invites it in more.
• State Dependent Learning
• When we’re in a regulated state, we have access to all this great knowledge and learned information.
• As we get into a dysregulated state, the neural network shifts and it becomes a different learning. We really actually kind of lose contact for a moment with that more reflective stance. Especially if we come from a neglect or a trauma background or had tough things in life or had adversity.
• We have these learnings that are on their own neural network.

Neural Networks and Changing Symptomatic Behavior

• There are 2 different neural circuits, and the only way to change the symptomatic behavior is to access the other neural circuit.
• This has to do with activation, so we have to actually feel the feelings to improve emotional health.

How Do We know What’s Changing?

• It starts with the behavior starts with the symptom. In recognizing the symptom that you want to shift, you’ve gone much more internal and you’ve named one part of it.
• In exploring it, we are un-layering it, and we’re smack dab on our which is to to go deeper and shift to more of a sense of security inside of you.

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Maybe You Should Talk to Someone– A Therapist, HER Therapist and a Life Revealed, by Lori Gottlieb.

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LIKE this episode? Please please please leave us a review and rating on your podcast player. You also may enjoy these episodes related to emotional health:

TU30: The Stages of Change: A Roadmap to Readiness

TU88: 6 Steps to Increase Your Felt Sense of Security

TU08: Understanding Emotional Triggers: Why Your Buttons Get Pushed and What To Do About It

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