Ben King Therapy

This does not mean to avoid processing your emotions and listening to your gut. This is just a first step that can be really helpful - when you’re feeling any emotion, try to just observe it. How to actually do this? Two simple ways: either in your own head, or writing it down on a piece of paper. To observe, you want to genuinely ask yourself in a curious way, how am I feeling right now. It’s almost as if you are trying to take a third-person perspective of yourself, so that... you can observe that emotion but not get caught up in it. What am I feeling right now? How anxious/angry/sad do I feel? What led me to feeling that way? It gets easier the more practice you have (and can be very difficult at first), and can help you feel more in control. Many times we’ll allow the emotion we’re feeling to take us over, which isn’t terrible, but usually not ideal. So try to incorporate observing yourself into your days when you’re feeling different emotions - it’s a great tool to have See more

There’s a reason why this is the most common coping strategy - it’s easy to do and it works in all kinds of situations. Feeling frustrated while talking to your partner? Take a deep breath. Feeling anxious before a date? Take a deep breath. Feeling stressed about work? You got it, take a deep breath. This isn’t going to magically make you feel great, but it can make the feeling more manageable. Doing deep breathing gives you a great foundation to continue to work towards feel...ing better. For example, when feeling anxious, taking deep breaths will (ideally) lessen the intensity of the anxiety, and allow you to think things through. What am I feeling anxious about right now? What is making me feel this anxious? Is the anxiety due to how I’m thinking about the situation (catastrophizing, mind reading, etc)? The response you give or next step after a deep breath is almost always going to be better for you than if you were to be reactive. So take that deep breath, and continue to do it for the rest of your life when you feel overwhelmed See more

Often we will encourage others to share their feelings - tell the other person how you feel. This certainly is good advice, but it’s helpful to be even more specific. Share your feelings with the other person with the intention of connecting with them and for them to have empathy for you. Those additional points are important because if we’re honest with ourselves, some of the times we express our emotions because we’re outraged by what the other person said or did. The diffe...rence is subtle in theory, but you can immediately tell the difference in practice. Imagine if the roles were reversed - you said or did something that hurt or frustrated your partner. If they come to you and in a frustrated way, express that they feel frustrated because YOU *did or said something*, and continue to go on and on about why they’re frustrated, it’s most likely coming from an attacking place. However, if they come to you and say, hey can we talk for a little bit? Earlier today when this happened, I felt pretty frustrated. Do you have a minute to talk about it? It obviously doesn’t have to go exactly like that, but the intention of the person starting the conversation is drastically different. The former is using their emotions as a way to stab at the other person, or to put the other person’s face right in their hurt. Whereas the latter is expressing their emotions with the intention of talking it through in a connected way, even if it’s about an interaction that caused hurt feelings. So go and express yourself to the other person, but make sure your intentions are right where they should be See more

This is one of the nuances that I see couples struggle with the most. It’s coming from a fine intention - we want our partner to understand our whole mental process of a situation, so we tell them how we think, or different conclusions that we’ve come to. But the trouble with this is that it often escalates an argument: we tell the other person how we think they were wrong, and we start arguing over those details. Then we might tell ourselves that we were simply expressing ho...w we feel, how could the other person argue against that? The part that we didn't realize is that we didn't actually express a feeling, we told them a thought, conclusion, or even our assessment - the difference is how the two are received. Usually if we express a thought to our partner about why they did something wrong, they’ll be more inclined to be defensive because we’re focusing on what they’re doing or not doing. But if I share my feeling with them, or how something impacted me, I’m focusing on myself and my own experience. It’s so much easier to hear the latter because there isn’t any blame being thrown around. Instead of trying to make the other person look at themselves and take responsibility, open yourself up to them and share how you’re feeling, how what was done or said impacted you. That’s the much smoother way to arrive at a place where you both take responsibility for an unfortunate interaction, and start to repair things See more

This is the other side of the spectrum, opposite of knowing when we’re working ourselves to the bone. For many of us this is less of an issue - we tend to work ourselves too hard - but is still incredibly important. Knowing when we’re not challenging ourselves enough will give us a better chance of feeling adequately productive, and that we’re living our lives how we want. Having a clear answer for both ends of the spectrum (what is working too hard to me, what is not working hard enough to me) will give us a great roadmap for life. We answer those questions for ourselves, so working to keep that balance will be inherently rewarding. Balance isn’t doing everything, and it’s not doing nothing either. Find that balance for yourself, and do what you need to do to feel good at the end of the day