Now that you have begun to identify your pain cycle, and have put language to it, it is time to move into practice.
Insight alone is not enough to make change in our lives, but insight must be accompanied by practice. It was common to hear in our Restoration Therapy community years ago conversation around the idea that maybe we need something like 70% insight and 30% practice to achieve change. But that has shifted and what you hear these days is more in line with needing 20% insight and 80% practice.
People that I work with in my counseling practice don’t change because they lack insight, but rather because they don’t practice what they know.
In the Restoration Therapy model practice begins very simply with walking through the two steps of our pain cycle. In my experience it is a very “deliberate practice” (if you want to dive into this concept, I recommend Peak by Anders Erricson and Robert Pool).
The Practice
Step 1: Say what you feel
“To interrupt the old pattern of behavior and start working on a new neural state, we have the client or patient actually say out loud which primary emotion he or she is feeling. This saying the feeling out loud does several positive things: First, the fact that the client say the feeling out loud requires that the client identify the feeling from past information (using cognition) and move that information to the let hemisphere of the brain, where the language is actually processed, formulated, and activated. Further, when the clients hears him, or herself speak the words of the primary emotions, it brings into play new brain activity and focuses the client’s attention differently. These actions of speaking and hearing, actually call the attention of the brain away from the emotional heavy-handedness we mentioned regarding the executive operating system taking the client down the same old patterned pathway an giving him or her the attention needed to make the change possible (Arden & Lindford, 2009). Second, we would argue that the process of naming the feelings helps the client actualize the feeling.” | Restoration Therapy: Understanding and Guiding Healing in Marriage and Family Therapy by Terry D. Hargrave and Franz Pfitzer, pp. 158.
Step 2: Say what you normally do
“After the client or patient has named what he or she feels in Step 1, it is then necessary to say out loud what he or she normally does when he or she feels that way. We have the client or patient ay the actions out loud for the same reasons we did in Step 1; it greatly assists the cognition of the brain in the ability to stand up to the overwhelming emotion. But, it also offers a paradoxical deterrent to the behavior. When the client or patient actually names his or her normal pattern of self-reactivity, it makes it less likely that the client will repeat those same behaviors (Haley, 1987).” | Restoration Therapy: Understanding and Guiding Healing in Marriage and Family Therapy by Terry D. Hargrave and Franz Pfitzer, pp. 160.
Rhett’s Example
Right now I am feeling alone/abandoned/not good enough and inadequate (Step 1), and when I feel that way what I normally do is become anxious (Step 2)….
(and here is where I add an extra layer)
And in my anxiety I try and manage it by performing and achieving and if that doesn’t work, I will withdraw and numb out.
That is how I practice my pain cycle. The context may change along with the variables, but at the heart of every situation my pain cycle is pretty much the same.
It is a pattern I know well as I have said it dozens of times a day since 2010. And it’s in these steps that my awareness of my pattern puts me in a position to move into some new and healthy behaviors, rather than stay stuck in my anxiety.