Coping with Emotional Distress

Suzanne Hyde LCSW

Virginia G. Piper Cancer Center at Scottsdale Healthcare

Distress is defined as:

A multifactorial, unpleasant emotional experience of a psychological, social, and/or spritual nature that may interfere with the ability to cope effectively with cancer, its physical symptoms, and its treatment.

Tools: helping yourself combat the tendencies for emotional distress

• Contemplative Practice

– Ability to reduce amount of distress related to feeling

– Become more mindful of triggers which may cause anxious and depressive tendencies

– Help your mind develop new ways to think about things therefore improving distress

Contemplative practice cont. -Buddha’s Brain by Rick Hanson, PH.D. • Contemplative practice provides an opportunity

to influence your own mind and reduce distress, increase emotional well-being, support spiritual practice

• The human brain is fertile ground for a harvest of suffering: worrying about the future, regretting the past, blaming ourselves for the present. Frustrated when we can’t get what we want.

• “We suffer that we suffer. We get upset about being in pain, angry about dying, sad about waking up…” p.12

Contemplative practice involves:

• Regulating your actions, words, and thoughts to create benefits rather then harms

• Increasing our skill level to bringing our attention to both our inner and outer worlds

• Understanding about what hurts and what helps and learning how to let go of what hurts and strengthen what helps

Stages of Growth in Contemplative Practice

• Stage 1: Being with whatever feeling arises

• Stage 2: working with your mind to transform them

• Stage 3: Taking refuge in the ground of being

Stage 1: Being with whatever feeling arises

• I am anxious, depressed

• Start to explore the whole weed including the root. Ask yourself, what are my thoughts, what are my assumptions, what implicit memory are my feelings centered around. What negative thoughts I am struggling with?

– Deep sources can include feelings of helplessness, failure, feeling unwanted or unloved

Stage 2: Working with your mind to transform them

• Internalize an alternative thought process – Actively search for good stuff: the smell of an orange,

a memory from a happy vacation, a success in symptom management, the hug you were able to provide someone you love, the hug you recently received

– Stay with this cascade of positives for as much as 20 seconds

– The point is not to resist actively or grasp for pleasure but to find a balance in which you remain mindful and non-judging

Stage 3: Taking Refuge in the Ground of Being

• The Power of Breathing • Safe place visualization and meditation practice • Walking meditation • Yoga • Additional techniques:

– Involve your senses and remember a smell, taste, vision which produces feelings of calmness and peace

– Understand concept of limited thinking patterns and practice awareness to become more mindful of them. Limited thinking patterns are not the truth and can cause much emotional pain. Label this thought pattern something so when it is happening, you can begin to quiet and distance that negative voice

Eight Most Common Limiting Thinking Patterns

• filtering: terrible, awful, disgusting, scary, horrendous, and the key statement “I

• can’t stand it!” • - polarized thinking - either/or • - overgeneralization - every, none, never, always, everybody, nobody - and

global • labels. • - mind reading - projection • - catastrophizing - ‘The sky is falling’. • - magnifying - huge, impossible, overwhelming • - personalization - direct comparison with others; tendency to relate

everything • to yourself. • - shoulds: should, ought, must • - predictions: creating external causes for success/failure

What are you going to call your negative voice?

Additional techniques to counteract negative feelings

• Engage in cognitive avoidance strategies

• Connect with someone with whom you trust and can talk with

• Play

• Grief

• pray

Resources

• Buddha’s Brain: The practical neuroscience of happiness, love and wisdom by Rick Hanson, PH.D.

• Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness by Jon Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D.

• Overcoming Anxiety, Anger and Depression Through the Path of Mindfulness by Terry Fralich. PESI education program