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The Mindful Self-Compassion Workbook

“The Mindful Self-Compassion Workbook” by Kristin Neff and Christopher Germer is a comprehensive guide to developing self-compassion, which involves treating oneself with kindness and understanding rather than criticism and judgment. The authors provide a step-by-step program for cultivating self-compassion and building resilience.

One of the key insights from the book is that self-compassion involves three key components: mindfulness, self-kindness, and common humanity. Mindfulness involves being present and aware of one’s thoughts and feelings without judgment or criticism. Self-kindness involves treating oneself with kindness and understanding rather than harsh self-criticism. Common humanity involves recognizing that everyone experiences life’s difficulties and challenges and is not alone in their struggles.

The book includes numerous exercises and practices for cultivating self-compassion, including guided meditations, journaling prompts, and self-reflection exercises. The authors also guide overcoming common barriers to self-compassion, such as perfectionism, shame, and self-doubt.

Some of the exercises from the book include:

  1. Loving-Kindness Meditation: This meditation involves directing loving-kindness towards oneself and others. The authors guide how to practice this meditation and suggest incorporating it into a daily routine.
  2. Self-Compassion Break: This exercise involves taking a few moments to offer oneself kindness and understanding during a difficult moment. The authors provide a step-by-step guide for practicing this exercise and suggest incorporating it into daily life.
  3. Soothing Touch Exercise: This exercise involves using touch to offer oneself comfort and compassion. The authors provide guidance on practicing this exercise and suggest using it during stress or anxiety.
  4. Self-Compassion Journaling: This involves writing down thoughts and feelings related to self-compassion, such as moments when one has been kind to themselves or times when one has been self-critical. The authors provide prompts for journaling and suggest using this exercise to build self-awareness and self-compassion.
  5. Compassionate Body Scan: This meditation focuses on different body parts and offers oneself compassion and understanding. The authors guide how to practice this meditation and suggest using it to connect with the body and cultivate self-compassion.
  6. Affectionate Breathing: This meditation focuses on the breath and imagining oneself inhaling and exhaling love and compassion. The authors guide how to practice this meditation and suggest incorporating it into a daily mindfulness practice.
  7. Self-Compassion Letter: This exercise involves writing a letter to oneself offering kindness, understanding, and support. The authors guide how to write this letter and suggest using it to cultivate self-compassion and self-awareness.

Here are the steps for the Soothing Touch exercise from “The Mindful Self-Compassion Workbook”:

  1. Find a comfortable and quiet place where you won’t be disturbed for a few minutes.
  2. Take a few deep breaths and become present at the moment.
  3. Begin by placing your hand on your heart or another soothing part of your body. You might choose to place your hand on your cheek, your forehead, or another part of your body that feels comforting.
  4. Allow yourself to feel the warmth and comfort of your touch. If it feels helpful, you can imagine that you are offering yourself love and kindness through your touch.
  5. Spend a few moments simply noticing the sensation of your touch and allowing yourself to feel comforted and soothed.
  6. If your mind begins to wander, gently bring your attention back to the sensation of your touch.
  7. When you feel ready, slowly release your touch and take a few deep breaths.
  8. Take a moment to reflect on how the Soothing Touch exercise made you feel. Notice any changes in your body or your mood.

The Soothing Touch exercise is a simple and effective way to offer oneself comfort and compassion during moments of stress or anxiety. By practicing this exercise regularly, individuals can cultivate a more positive and compassionate relationship with themselves.

Here are the steps for the Self-Compassion Letter exercise from “The Mindful Self-Compassion Workbook”:

  1. Find a quiet and comfortable place where you won’t be disturbed for a little while.
  2. Take a few deep breaths and allow yourself to become present.
  3. Imagine that you are writing a letter to a close friend who is going through a difficult time. Offer this friend kind and compassionate words of support and encouragement.
  4. When you feel ready, begin writing a letter to yourself, using the same kind and compassionate language you would use with a close friend.
  5. In your letter, offer yourself kindness and understanding for any struggles or difficulties that you have been experiencing. Acknowledge that these experiences are a natural part of the human experience and that you are not alone in your struggles.
  6. Consider including phrases that resonate with you, such as “I am here for you” or “I am proud of you for facing this challenge.”
  7. Take your time writing your letter, allowing yourself to feel the emotions as you write.
  8. When you are finished, read the letter back to yourself, allowing yourself to fully absorb the kind and compassionate words that you have written.

The Self-Compassion Letter exercise is a powerful way to cultivate self-compassion and self-awareness. By offering themselves kindness and understanding, individuals can shift their inner dialogue towards a more positive and supportive tone. The exercise can be repeated regularly, and letters can be saved and revisited during moments of difficulty or stress.

As a trauma-informed therapist, I believe that cultivating self-compassion is an essential component of trauma recovery. Trauma can often leave individuals feeling disconnected from themselves and others, leading to self-criticism and self-blame. By cultivating self-compassion, individuals can begin to heal from the effects of trauma and develop a more positive and compassionate relationship with themselves.

In addition, organizations can benefit from becoming more trauma-sensitive by recognizing the impact of trauma on individuals and creating a safe and supportive environment. The practices and exercises outlined in “The Mindful Self-Compassion Workbook” can help individuals and organizations become more trauma-sensitive by promoting self-awareness, compassion, and empathy.

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Just Like Me…

In a recent training on Trauma-Informed Care, I led the group through a mindfulness exercise that explored the nature of suffering. The goal was to bring a higher level of compassion for others in emotional pain.

Suffering refers to the state of undergoing pain, distress, or hardship. We know, in our heads, that everyone goes through difficult times but in our hearts, we neglect to connect with others, in their pain. This is because we are in pain too!

Professionals, who work with hurt people, are double-agents. They provide trauma-informed care and services to others AND they have experienced trauma too. We can be triggered by others pain and this will result in a distancing of emotions in order to keep ourselves safe. We sometimes call this a “professional distance” or “objectivity.” It might help us feel safer but it will also disconnect us from the heart of what we are trying to do in serving others. How to maintain this balance is the subject for another discussion. In the meantime, try this mindfulness exercise called “Just Like Me…” Examine how you feel before and after reading through it. Use it weekly or as often as you need to reconnect you with others who have experienced trauma and loss.

“Think of someone you like or dislike that you want to expect positive feelings and forgive. It help to think of that person who is similar to you. Take deep breaths and repeat after me…

This person has a body and a mind, just like me.
This person has feelings, emotions, and thoughts, just like me.
This person has in his or her life, experienced physical and emotional pain and suffering, just like me.
This person has at some point been sad, disappointed, angry, or hurt, just like me. This person has felt unworthy or inadequate, just like me.
This person worries and is frightened sometimes, just like me.
This person has longed for friendship, just like me.
This person is learning about life, just like me.
This person wants to be caring and kind to others, just like me.
This person wants to be content with what life has given, just like me.
This person wishes to be free from pain and suffering, just like me.
This person wishes to be safe and healthy, just like me.
This person wishes to be happy, just like me.
This person wishes to be loved, just like me.
Now, allow some wishes for well-being to arise:
I wish that this person have the strength, resources, and social support to navigate the difficulties in life with ease.
I wish that this person be free from pain and suffering.
I wish that this person be peaceful and happy.
I wish that this person be loved.
Because this person is a fellow human being, just like me.”

Need a therapist or trainer on healing from the hurt of trauma? Contact Ron Huxley today at rehuxley@gmail.com.

Take an online course on Trauma-Informed Care dealing with Trauma, Anxiety, Parenting, and more at http://FamilyHealerSchool.com

 

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Healing the Special Needs Child

Many foster and adoptive parents have children with special needs who require specialized care and skills. According to Wikipedia, the term special needs “is a term used in clinical diagnostic and functional development to describe individuals who require assistance for disabilities that may be medical, mental, or psychological.”

In the United States, more than 150,000 children with special needs are waiting for permanent homes. Traditionally, children with special needs have been considered harder to place for adoption than other children, but experience has shown that many children with special needs can be placed successfully with families who want them.

This can put more of a strain on families than they realize. Just loving a child really hard is not enough to manage the requirements of a special needs child. It takes special knowledge and a support system from other parents of special needs children and professionals who “get it!”

Being unprepared is one of the reasons foster and adoptive families disrupt. Disruption is a term that refers to the ending of a foster placement prior to the finalization of an adoption. The rate of disruption has traditionally been10-20% nationally. Post-Adoption services and education can decrease this rate dramatically!

Perhaps the most challenging special needs issue, for parents and professionals, is Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD). This is defined as a “continuum of permanent birth defects caused by maternal consumption of alcohol during pregnancy. It refers to a group of conditions that can occur in a person whose mother drank alcohol during pregnancy. Problems may include an abnormal appearance, short height, low body weight, small head size, poor coordination, low intelligence, behavior problems, and problems with hearing or seeing.” (Wikipedia)

Fetal alcohol syndrome

In addition to the physical symptoms of FASD, there are several corresponding mental health problems, such as attentional deficits, clinical depression, anxiety, or other mental illness. As you can imagine, many of the problems show up in the child’s school experience. Suspensions or expulsion from school occurs in 90% of children in the united states. For teenagers, this can result in dropping of out of school, experienced by 60% of the subjects (age 12 and older).

Other problems, such as legal issues, can occur for FASD children. Being charged or convicted of a crime is experienced by 60% of the children ages 12 and older. (Wikipedia)

One of the ways to help children with special needs heal is to work on executive functioning skills. Executive Functioning: “are a set of cognitive processes – including attentional control, inhibitory control, working memory, and cognitive flexibility, as well as reasoning, problem-solving and planning – that are necessary for the cognitive control of behavior: selecting and successfully monitoring behaviors that facilitate the attainment of chosen goals.”

Elevating executive functioning skills will help children with special needs make better choices, control their behavior and manage their thoughts and emotions. The simplest way to elevate them is through play.

play1

It’s been said that play is the “beginning of knowledge.” The play is a child’s natural language and how they interact with the world and learn new skills and the shortest route to helping special needs children.

Babies and young children can benefit from games of peekaboo, pat-a-cake, hiding games, simple songs, and music, copying games, and fingerplays. Example of young child games include Eensy Weensy Spider, Where is Thumbkin, Open, Shut Them. Repetition and allowance for failure is key to helping children’s brain develop normally.

School-age children benefit from reading books, music, and movement, simple imitation games like follow the leader, conversations, manipulation of objects like blocks and Legos. Allow children to set the course of play allowing them to start and stop the rhythm of play.

It would seem that play with special needs children is the same as with any other child and it is…except that the intention and purpose of the play are to build brain skills that need reinforcement. The ability to stay focus and tolerate interactions need to be increased over time. If a child can only sit and play for 5 minutes, we want to increase that time to 6 minutes, then 7, etc. Start where the child is and allow them to increase tolerance and focus.

Take into consideration that each time the nervous system starts and then stops, it learns how to persist past impulses and distractions. Each time it achieves a difficult goal, it discovers the pleasure of success and wants to repeat this experience. This provides an internal locus of control that doesn’t require an adult to always supervise the play.

Play also develops social skills, an area that can be drastically missing in children with special needs. As children get older, teamwork becomes more important and necessary both at home and school. Children become more active and like to engage in dance, sports, playing catch, and various competition games. Competition can become a way to alienate others as special needs children have tantrums/meltdowns when they don’t win. This is due to a need to compensate for low self-esteem feeling like a failure at tasks and games.

Let the play be about the process and not the end result. Be happy for others who when and concentrating on celebrating team efforts will enhance executive functioning and overall relational success.

Is this still exhausting work? Yes! But the effort will be worth it in the long run. Use storytelling and imaginary play to make the connections that are missing in social/emotional development. Role-playing and creative art can also be a powerful tool for parents and professionals. Red Light/Green Light, Simon Says, clapping rhythms, guessing games, I Spy, and Brain Teasers are also useful brain tools.

Teenagers with special needs can benefit from practicing real-time daytimers, calendars, whiteboards, mind mapping and more to develop organizational, goal setting, planning, and monitoring and studying skills.

None of these activities should be done in isolation from caring, patient adults. Attachment and brain researchers operate under the maxim that “brains that fire together, wire together.” Just giving a toy to a child or tell them to do a task will not enhance the prefrontal cortex of the brain, where executive functioning is centered. Optimal development occurs when do people interact. Adults can guide the conversation and play to specifically target the individualized needs of the child. The child’s ability to push passed frustrations and manage moods will need the adult to help them through it.

calm

Finally, children of all ages can benefit from the mental organization power of mindfulness. Executive functioning is more than academic ability. This might be the focus on many of the adults in the child’s life but life smarts are important aspects of book smarts.

According to Jon Kabat-Zinn, the founder of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), “Mindfulness is the awareness that arises through paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgmentally.” Learning to be mindful of one’s thoughts, emotions, and bodily sensations calm the nervous system so thinking skills can increase. Teaching children the importance of experiencing their breath, mindful eating, yoga, and how to ground themselves are crucial skills at all ages.

Get more powerful tools for managing special needs and trauma for your organization with Trauma-Informed Training by contacting Ron Huxley now…click here!

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Take a Brain Break – Mindfulness for Children

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Ron Huxley’s Comments: In this video, actress Goldie Hawn talks about the importance of teaching children mindfulness. Her program is called MindUp and takes only a few minutes a day. Mindfulness research is promising huge improvements in mental health. Some of it gets, well, a bit out there! For the most part, however, it holds great benefits in improving mood, increases focus, and promote self-control. What child doesn’t need that? What parent doesn’t need that?