negative thinking – COURAGE COACHING

Question & Answer- YouTube videos

Today I am starting off my series of Q & A videos, where my viewers and subscribers are able to get their questions answered by me, in a video each week. Please feel free to ask me questions on the following topics:

Complex PTSD
Narcissistic abuse
Dysfunctional relatioships
Negative thinking
Dealing with emotional flashbacks
Anxiety
Depression
Trauma Bonding
Toxic shame
Codependency

I also am happy to answer questions on how to :

Better manage your time
Practice self-compassion
Develop resilience
Stop self-defeating thinking patterns
Better manage your workload
Build confidence
Set boundaries
Deal with toxic people

Here is the first video on a question asked by one of my viewers:

Please note: **I will always keep the identity of my viewers confidential**

Thanks for reading and watching

Love Athina ♥

How to deal with loneliness

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Loneliness is an unpleasant feeling that a lot of people experience at some point in their lives. Loneliness is a feeling of emptiness or hollowness inside you.You might experience loneliness as a feeling that something is not right, a kind of minor emptiness. Or you might feel loneliness as a very intense deprivation and deep pain.For the most part, it is something that can be remedied quickly by reaching out to family or friends.

What happens however if you have a chronic feeling of loneliness? What happens when you don’t have any supportive family to turn to? or even friends? Do you end up feeling even more isolated? Do you retreat further into your shell and just tell yourself that this is how you are meant to be? Lonely and helpless?

A lot of the time unfortunately this happens. Loneliness is paired with depression and this can lead to further complications.If you don’t have the appropriate support, the downward spiral gets worse and worse. Loneliness is a passive state.

The most important thing about loneliness is that we have to remind ourselves that it is a state of mind, a feeling, not a fact.So what are we doing to enable our loneliness? This is a really important question to ask ourselves.

If we lost a loved one to death or have grief related to trauma, then it is important to acknowledge our feelings. Acknowledging our feelings of loneliness is the starting point to dealing with them. Expressing these feelings in numerous ways is the bext step. If we don’t have a friend or family member to express these feelings to, then we have to try and find someone else who might listen, like a counselor or mental health volunteer. We can also express our loneliness through art or writing a blog.

As I said before, loneliness is a passive state. So how do you change something passive? Your turn into something active.This might be a simple thing to state and some people might find it hard to make changes, but it is crucial to understand that if you do nothing about it, it won’t change.

Being active means that we reach out to others and that we maybe take up a class doing something we enjoy.This is a good way to connect with other people. It means that we can choose to maybe do some volunteering, as helping others can bring a feeling of fulfillment and reduce the feeling of loneliness. It means practicing different acts of kindness towards people that really need it. It also means the possibility of getting a new pet, or helping in an animal shelter.

It is very helpful to write a list of the things we enjoy and which things in particular helped us feel less lonely in the past.

It also very important to fight those self-defeating thoughts we may have, that tell us we can’t feel better and that we will always be lonely. Even if we are very depressed, we must fight this feeling and push ourselves past the negative feelings of not wanting to leave the house or connect to others. We have to challenge the passiveness and do things that might makes us a little uncomfortable.

What are your experiences of dealing with loneliness?

Love Athina ♥

Poor sleep-One of many side effects of CPTSD, anxiety & depression

Are you somebody who struggles to sleep well and ends up waking up exhausted in the morning rather than refreshed? Do you find that you often have vivid stress dreams which can at times disrupt your sleep in the middle of the night?

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If you are someone who also struggles with depression, anxiety or (C)PTSD, then this will no doubt have an impact on your quality of sleep.

Both anxiety & depression, involve a thinking style known as ruminating. Ruminating means that we go over the same thoughts over and over again,without any resolution. These thoughts are usually negative and if they aren’t resolved with some sort of action, they will then possibly play out in our dreams at night.

Apparently is has been stated that a memory is composed of a situation or thought, the emotions experienced from that situation or thought and then the actions taken. If something happened during the day for example, that was upsetting but you weren’t able to resolve the situation in some way, then this will most likely linger until you go to bed. Since ruminating means that our thoughts and emotions are stuck in a repetitive loop, we will then most likely have an anxiety dream, in which we will try and find a resolution to our initial problem. Our mind just isn’t able to switch off properly until our problem has been solved.

So basically, if you have had a stressful day and there is still stuff that needs to be resolved, you will then most likely be doing this in your sleep as well. Since stress and anxiety can be exhausting during the day, then it is pretty similar at night too.If the brain doesn’t get a chance to ‘switch off’ or relax at night, then you can understand why the quality of your sleep is compromised.

This causes a vicious cycle which looks a bit like this :

Worrying/Rumination → Poor sleep quality → Increase in stress during the day & trouble coping → Worrying/Rumination → Poor quality sleep .. etc

Too much ruminating can lead to feeling helpless. If you are too focused on the problem you are ruminating about, you tend to get stuck and this affects your actual problem solving skills.

A few tips to calming your worrying mind at night:

Try and resolve the problem before going to bed (if this is possible).
Talk to a friend or family member about your worries (A different point of view might do wonders)
Write down your troublesome thought/s on a piece of paper or type up a document on the computer..This might help you find a solution, by seeing your thoughts clearly written in front of you..
Another thing you can do is write a priority list (if your worries are work related). By organising your time and managing your tasks into more urgent, less urgent etc..this might help you relax more.
Think about what is in your control and what isn’t..If it isn’t in your control, then try to ‘let it go’..
If you are still not able to sleep, use lavender oil on your pillow and find some self-hypnosis tracks you can listen to while lying in bed..

What are your thoughts on this? Are you someone who suffers with ruminating and poor quality sleep? Do you also suffer with a mental illness? How often would you say you have anxiety dreams on average? Twice a week or more?

Love Athina ♥

5 tips to better deal with rejection

Rejection hurts, no matter what the context.

So how do you deal with it in a more constructive way?

Here are 5 tips that might be helpful:

If you never get rejected, it means that you aren’t pushing past your comfort zone enough. Being rejected means that you are putting yourself out there and that takes guts. Rejection acts as proof that you are pushing your limits.
When being rejected, it is much better to acknowledge and accept the emotions that come with the rejection rather than supress or ignore the emotions. It is better to feel the disappointment, sadness or frustration than try to run from it or make excuses to avoid the emotions.
Self-compassion is very important whenever we are having a hard time. To better deal with the rejection, make sure you are paying attention to the way you are talking to yourself. If you get rejected after a job interview and think ‘I will never get a job, I’m just not good enough’ then that doesn’t make you feel better does it? Instead re-frame your thinking to something more positive, such as ‘ That’s a shame, but I have plenty more chances and I am sure I can do better’.
Learning from rejection and asking yourself ‘What can I learn from this’?, is very useful for growth and for doing better next time.
Self-approval is the most important thing when being rejected. If you are comfortable and happy with yourself as a person, then somebody else’s rejection won’t sting as much, because at the end of the day you have yourself to turn to when things feel disappointing.

Love Athina ♥

Low self-esteem & emotional flashbacks

Healthy self-esteem is essential for good psychological survival. It enables us to feel more fulfilled and secure in our choices, career paths and relationships. When this is lacking however and also goes unchecked, it may lead to mental health issues such as anxiety and depression, sometimes with tragic results.

Perhaps the most well known effect of abuse is low self-esteem.

Low self-esteem means that we have a persistent feeling of worthlessness. It also means that we have a habit of judging & rejecting ourselves constantly which causes us a huge amount of emotional pain. This emotional pain, is something that people with normal levels of self-esteem can’t possibly understand.

For those of us who grew up in abusive homes, this was a daily part of our lives and we considered it to be the norm. We intrinsically felt bad when we weren’t able to do something right, such as get good grades at school or be good at sports.We hated taking part in anything competitive, we always avoided the limelight and hated participating in class conversations, for fear of making a fool of ourselves.We avoided any situation or person who made us feel rejected, hurt and vulnerable.The core of this lack of self-worth was due to our parents telling us on a constant basis that we were not good enough, not smart enough, not lovable enough etc..The more constant and long lasting this was throughout our childhood, the more destructive the damage.This then stays with us for life, unless we have years and years of therapy.Even though most of us are intelligent and full of potential, our nasty inner critic tells us we aren’t good enough.This self-hate, sabotages any chance we may have of making something a success, before we even try it. We actually avoid trying things, to avoid the possibility of failing. To others, this may seem ridiculous. To those of us who have suffered abuse, this isn’t ridiculous at all. We have already suffered a huge amount of emotional pain in childhood which then continued into adulthood. Some things we can heal in therapy but others might be a bit more challenging, as they are so deeply ingrained in us.

For those of us with low self-esteem, we might notice that as we begin a new project or work on some goal, things begin smoothly and we are filled with optimism. After a little while, however, things start getting harder, we get worried and we start to beat ourselves up.This process repeats itself as we move forward with our goal so that it seems like we’ll never reach it.Too many of us give up at some point because we’re overwhelmed by the feelings of worthlessness.The minute we make a mistake, we fall apart emotionally. In a sense, it gets even harder as we move closer to the goal because during times when things are moving ahead smoothly, we get our hopes up. low selfesteem

This sort of dynamic is what happens after abuse. Although most people are able to deal with obstacles, an abuse history can lead others to feeling overwhelmed by feelings of worthlessness. Most people understand that an obstacle to a goal is part of the process, no matter what creates it, whereas for abuse survivors, an obstacle may be seen as a challenge to our self-esteem, proof that we mess everything up, that we’re not capable as others are. These dark feelings can overwhelm us so much that we give up.

Another effect of abuse, that is linked to low self-worth, is when we have an emotional flashback. In adulthood, a tone of voice, a firm look or a certain opinion about something we have or haven’t done, may trigger us into an emotional flashback of when our abusers told us we couldn’t do something and made us feel worthless. Some ‘red flags’ of an emotional flashback, are when we overreact to a present situation because it brings up feelings from the past. These feelings completely hijack us and it is very hard to control them or realise they are actually from the past.We are usually also overcome by feelings of helplessness & hopelessness and a lot of the time they can be linked to feeling worthless.An emotional flashback can be hugely emotionally painful and once again, others have no idea why we are so upset.

So how do you manage chronic low self-esteem?

Since chronic self-esteem is caused by the vicious inner critic that our abusive parents created in us, we have to learn ways to silence this critic. This critic tells us all the horrible things that our parents made us feel when we were younger.

We have to learn to become aware of it and every time we think a destructive thought, we have to stop it. We have to challenge the negative thoughts that pop up dailyand say ”Stop it” or ”That’s a lie” or ”Your father was wrong, you aren’t worthless”.We also have to give ourselves small challenges that we can work towards. The more we are able to achieve, the better we will slowly feel about our ourselves. The more evidence we start to see of ourselves actually being more adventurous or more successful, the better we will slowly feel about ourselves. This takes a lot of persistence, effort and help from a coach or therapist.

If you are interested about how to cope with emotional flashbacks then please check out my post here: https://couragecoaching.wordpress.com/2016/06/10/child-abuse-complex-ptsd-managing-emotional-flashbacks/

Thanks for reading

Much love Athina ♥

Our life reflects the way we feel inside

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How strongly do you believe this to be true?

I believe it is extremely important to treat ourselves with compassion, patience and love.

It is extremely important to replace negative thinking with more positive, constructive thinking.

I believe we must at all times acknowledge our mistakes, acknowledge our emotions and accept that we will attract what we believe about ourselves.

If we believe we are worthless, we will attract people that will treat us badly.

If we believe that we don’t deserve love, then we will attract people who will abandon us.

We have to notice our thoughts, notice our emotions and slowly make changes.

Change can be uncomfortable at the beginning, but it gets easier in time.

Start creating new positive habits in your life, to replace the old destructive ones.

Accept that you are flawed, as all humans have flaws. If your flaws are something that you can change, then change them. If you hurt someone, then make sure you tell them you are genuinely sorry.

If you do find that there are people in your life that treat you badly, then let them go.

Look after yourself first and the rest will fall into place.

Much Love Athina ♥

Surround yourself with supportive people

When you suffer from a mental illness it is very difficult to feel hopeful when you are really struggling.Every day can be a battle and those negative thoughts can be very hard to silence. Sometimes feelings can overcome you at the most inappropriate times and others may think you are overreacting or being a drama queen. Paying close attention to the people in your life can determine how much your overall mood is affected. If you are an empath or highly sensitive person, you suck in other peoples’ emotions like a sponge. For this reason, you need to have the right kind of people around you or limit your time with those who aren’t enriching to your life.

Think about how the people in your life make you feel 80% of the time? Are they supportive & uplifting? Are they encouraging and empathetic? Do they understand your struggles and offer to help?

This is very important when you have a low tolerance for stressful situations due to a history of toxic child abuse. When complex trauma is part of your life, you need to feed your brain with the things you were starved of as a child. You should provide yourself with unconditional love, acceptance, validation and comfort. It is also important to have friends and family that can also provide these things for you. It might feel unnatural at first and almost feel silly to tell yourself that you are worthy and lovable every day, however this is what your brain needs. It needs a new healthy habit!

Recent studies have shown that victims of childhood abuse and combat veterans actually experience physical changes to the hippocampus, a part of the brain involved in learning and memory, as well as in the handling of stress. The hippocampus also works closely with the medial prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain that regulates our emotional response to fear and stress. PTSD sufferers often have impairments in one or both of these brain regions. Studies of children have found that these impairments can lead to problems with learning and academic achievement.

We know that psychotherapy can really help survivors of severe trauma and also we know that EMDR is very helpful for reducing nightmares, flashbacks & overwhelming emotions.What you do for yourself however is equally important as you are the person that feels, thinks and reacts to your surroundings 24/7! It has been proven that with a mixture of validating affirmations, manageable goal setting, therapy and loving relationships, people can improve the quality of their life dramatically, especially in regards to their overall outlook.

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Unhelpful thinking styles/Cognitive distortions

This link below gives you a useful list of all the unhelpful thinking styles that we might use in our daily lives.For those of you who suffer from depression or anxiety, keeping an eye on your thinking style is really important. Try and challenge those negative thoughts by replacing them with more positive or helpful alternative thoughts. With practice, this should help you feel better.

http://media.psychology.tools/worksheets/english_us/unhelpful_thinking_styles_en-us.pdf

Love Athina ♥

Our choices have to reflect our values

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I have met many people who have very strong morals and values and are stuck working in a company that doesn’t reflect these in the slightest.

I have also met people who are lucky enough to actually have a job that reflects their values but in their personal life this isn’t the case.

What is it that stops people from ditching the uncomfortable situations they find themselves in and going for what they really want? Is it timing or circumstance?Or maybe they are just unlucky in their choices. Things start off well and then things take a turn for the worse.

The reason that people struggle with changing something in their life is due to the fear of it being the wrong choice again. I mean if it has already happened once, it can happen again right?

This is very common and when it comes to jobs or relationships it is quite understandable that people worry about not finding the right one.

In cognitive behavioural coaching, the coach can help the coachee self-reflect on their thought processes and find the thoughts that may be blocking them from making a decision. It can also assist with the steps that the coachee needs to take to reach their goal.

As always stated in any coaching session, motivation is key. If the coachee isn’t motivated to make a change then change won’t happen.

Procastination, perfectionism, negative thinking? We all have something we do that makes our life more difficult

Humans are fallible beings and we all have moments where we over-complicate the way we live our lives.

It is very difficut to balance our work-family-personal life without getting overwhelmed.

There are always those overly boring tasks that we always put off or that presentation at work that we have to get perfect. Many of us find rejection quite painful and have thoughts such as ‘No one will ever love me again’ or ‘I’m just not attractive enough’. Others find it easier to make excuses and blame their failings on their past. Being a victim is easier than taking responsibility for our own life.

Many of us are control-freaks and want to go as far as controlling what we are physically unable to control, like other people’s opinions or reactions to us.

There are many thinking errors that we all indulge in but how do you even recognise you are making such errors in the first place?

When people suffer from depression & anxiety, thinking errors are very common as they are part of the illness. Cognitive behavioural coaching can be very useful for tackling these unhelpful thinking patterns. There are many models and exercises that can be very helpful in helping someone get ‘unstuck’ and the coach is trained to use these models in a conversational way with the person they are coaching.

In my own experience, I have found coaching very helpful in dealing with anxiety inducing situations. What is your experience? Have you had coaching before? Is it something you would ever consider?

Take a little look at the different links on this page and if you are curious in any way, then let me know.

I am offering free coaching sessions to the first 10 people that read this blog post and make themselves known.