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Notes from the conversation
Slides
Facilitator’s notes
Notes from the conversation
Are there any emotions you find distressing?
- Grief
- Shame
- Anger
- The impact of pollution affects me. The smell of it. It makes me angry and sensitive.
- Poverty and injustice lead to frustration.
Do you have ways of coping with or avoiding distressing emotions?
- Puzzles.
- Watching quiz shows.
- Using my imagination for example, that I’m running far away.
- Getting very angry about something unrelated.
- Going out, but that’s hard now because of the cognitive dissonance when people aren’t concerned about climate change.
- Hyper-focus on something else.
- Do a deep dive getting loads of information.
- Physical exhaustion can help.
- Turn off the TV.
- Deep breathing.
- Take a higher viewpoint.
- Think about young people like Greta Thunberg.
- Go to bed early.
- Think about how lucky I am compared to others.
- Physical activity – anything to get my mind off it.
- Eating.
- Doom-scrolling.
- Reading everything I can, hoping to find something that’ll reassure me.
Our thoughts about the idea of learning to tolerate emotions we find distressing instead of avoiding them.
- The problem with distressing emotions is how you express them. For example with anger, who do you aim it at? Do you just avoid a situation? How do you express it?
- Could you become immune to them?
- That might be at the opposite end of a spectrum – from avoidance to becoming immune. Maybe it’s how you accept them. You can feel emotions to learn something, or do something.
- We do detach from things (like the distancing section of Dr Panu Pihkala’s diagram). We don’t always have strong feelings about things.
- It’s hard to imagine not reacting to the suffering on TV.
- Nowadays we can bear witness to an incredible amount of suffering. We have to avoid some stuff or it’s too much. It’s horrific.
- We have no choice but to tolerate some distress.
- Avoidance can be protective. We can’t bear all the world’s distress, all the time.
- Courage – we need it to bear witness.
- Maybe if I could bear feeling angry and stuck with it it would help me to do something about the issue.
- I’ve fine-tuned to avoid acting out anger so I need to get motivation from somewhere else.
- Using mindfulness to notice what’s going on with us
- My feelings happen so quickly I’m suddenly in it.
- It feels impossible.
- Mindfulness steps you back. Just the fact of noticing.
- For me, I didn’t start by noticing how I was feeling. I started by noticing I’d just done the thing I wanted to change. Then after a while I’d notice and correct myself. Eventually, I started to notice it earlier.
Our list of pros and Cons of learning to tolerate distressing emotions.
Pros:
- Become better communicators.
- Wouldn’t need to avoid situations that might provoke the emotion.
- It’s good practice for what’s coming.
- Gives space to respond and more options.
- Be more resilient
- I’d feel more like a grown-up.
Cons:
The process of learning – it could be uncomfortable and distressing.
It takes work and time and is challenging.
Don’t overdo it – don’ want to feel too much distress.
We might need strong emotion to motivate us.
The Slides
Facilitator’s notes
Introduction: Climate change and distressing emotions
Learning about and responding to the climate crisis can bring up emotions or states of mind that are unpleasant or difficult for us.
There’s a whole range of emotions we might feel at different times including grief, anger, and despair. Which emotions (or combination of emotions) we feel most strongly, which ones we struggle with or feel the impulse to avoid will be different for each of us, and can change over time.
Although it’s natural to want to avoid distress and suffering, trying to push away those strong emotions isn’t always the best thing for us in the long term. Today we’re going to be looking at one way of learning to increase our ability to tolerate our own distress.
Even though we might agree that avoiding our emotions isn’t the best idea in the long run, I think it’s important to remember that we’ve all got our own circumstances to deal with. Maybe now isn’t a good time to tackle distressing emotions and that’s fine.
This is where I think the peer support principles of choice and control are important. If this doesn’t feel right for you it’s fine to listen, or skip questions.
Or, maybe you don’t have a problem with distressing emotions. If that’s the case, I’d ask that you stick with working through the problem together to support the people who are struggling with it. It’s inevitable that some weeks the topics will be less relevant to what’s going on for us. Sometimes we might be listening more, and other times we might have more to say.
The Compassionate Mind Approach to distressing emotions (slide 8)
The book we’re using today is The Compassionate Mind Approach to Beating Overeating by Ken Goss.1Goss, Kenneth. The Compassionate Mind Approach to Beating Overeating. First Edition. Robinson Publishing, 2011. It’s not about climate change or anxiety but we’re using it because it describes a way of learning to tolerate unpleasant feelings that we might be able to adapt.
It’s a self-help book, so it’s supposed to be used without the support of a therapist, but again we encourage you to listen to your instincts about what’s right for you.
I own this book because I use comfort eating to cope when I‘m feeling upset, and it’s not good for me. In a moment, we’ll have a moment to think about how we each cope with or avoid unpleasant emotions. Then you can mentally substitute them for overeating as I read.
According to the Compassionate Mind Approach, distress tolerance is one of the six attributes of compassion alongside care for well-being, sensitivity (openness to what’s going on in and around you), sympathy, empathy, and non-judgement. We’re just looking at tolerating distress, and we’ve obviously skipped over a lot of the book to get there. Including the parts where you build up your ability to be compassionate to yourself and create a set of soothing and distracting practices you can use.
The steps come in this order because learning to tolerate distress can be challenging. Having a compassionate mindset means we are caring and understanding of our difficulties rather than blaming ourselves. If we have already got used to soothing and distracting ourselves then it is easier to turn to those strategies when we want to reduce our distress. We’re jumping straight to thinking about why and how we could tolerate emotions we find distressing instead of trying to make them go away. On the resources slide I’ve put some links to books and websites where you can learn more about soothing, distracting and building a compassionate mindset if that interests you.
Do you have any ways of coping or avoiding your emotions when they become distressing (slide 9)
Give people a moment to think individually.
Sharing can be optional depending on the feeling in the room and the time.
Why tolerate distress? (slide 10)
Read pages 89-90 from The Compassionate Mind Guide to Beating Overeating by Ken Goss.2Goss, Kenneth. The Compassionate Mind Approach to Beating Overeating. First Edition. Robinson Publishing, 2011.
Go slow, pause often and let people raise a hand if they want to ask or comment on something as we go along.
My summary:
- When our “threat system” is active, it pushes us to avoid situations that feel dangerous to us. It’s supposed to work like this. But, as a result, we can end up always avoiding particular situations or feelings and never learning how to cope with them.
- Learning to accept the unpleasant feelings and tolerate them, instead of immediately doing something to make them go away allows us to learn that we can cope.
Deciding to tolerate distress (slide 11)
Read p141 from The Compassionate Mind Guide to Beating Overeating by Ken Goss.3Goss, Kenneth. The Compassionate Mind Approach to Beating Overeating. First Edition. Robinson Publishing, 2011.
In the book, Ken Goss gives us examples of why someone who overeats to cope and wants to stop would want to learn to tolerate distress.
My summary:
- Gain more control over how you respond when an unpleasant or distressing emotion arises.
- Learn alternatives to unwanted habits like comfort eating.
- Find new ways of coping.
- Learn to acknowledge our desires without responding to them.
Preparing to tolerate distress
(slides 11-14)
There are three exercises in the book for deciding to tolerate distress. There won’t be time to do all of them so allow the group to choose. The exercises are:
- The pros and cons of learning to tolerate distressing feelings. (slide 11)
- Preparing: Thinking about what you could say to help yourself in the future, at the times when you decide to let yourself feel an emotion instead of pushing it away (slide 12)
- Planning to experiment with learning to experience emotions (slide 13)
Resources (slide 14)
There are a lot of books available that explain the Compassionate Mind approach, and that cater for different issues, like anxiety for example. Unfortunately, there’s nothing directly dealing with the climate crisis.
There are also some free self-help workbooks to download on self-compassion and tolerating distress. These are produced by the Centre for Clinical Interventions which is run by the government of Western Australia.
Finally, if you’d like one-on-one support, you can find a climate-aware therapist through the Climate Psychology Alliance, who also offer three free sessions of one-to-one therapeutic support. Additionally, self-help services or your GP can refer you to counselling in Manchester for mental health.
Additional notes
Limitations of Compassion focused therapy4“Compassion–Focused Therapy.” Accessed March 20, 2024. https://www.goodtherapy.org/learn-about-therapy/types/compassion-focused-therapy.
- The research evidence is limited at the moment
- Some people find soothing difficult, and even distressing.
- Ideally, we’d have learnt to soothe ourselves as we grew up, but this doesn’t happen for everyone. This can lead to feelings of sadness, grief or distress.
- It’s supposed to be particularly appropriate for shame and self-criticism.
- We may have beliefs around self-compassion or soothing (e.g. I don’t deserve it, if I’m not critical I’ll make mistakes) that make it difficult or uncomfortable to practice these exercises.
- Compassion focused therapy draws on theories (evolutionary psychology, social psychology, Buddhism) that might not be compatible with your own belief system.
Threat, drive and soothing systems: emotional regulation and Compassion Focused Therapy
Some of the quotes I’ve read talk about our threat, drive or soothing systems.
The compassionate mind approach says that we evolved three systems for regulating our emotions. The threat system responds to danger and instigates our fight, flight or freeze responses. The drive system motivates us to seek resources, rewards, achievement and excitement. The soothing and contentment system kicks in when we are safe and satisfied. It generates feelings of well-being, social safety and contentedness.5Gilbert, Paul. “Introducing Compassion-Focused Therapy.” Advances in Psychiatric Treatment 15, no. 3 (May 2009): 199–208. https://doi.org/10.1192/apt.bp.107.005264. Of course, this simplifies complex processes, but it gives a framework for thinking about what going on with our emotional responses. The aim is to develop a balance between the three systems.