Gary had always tried to avoid conflict. He just didn't like it when a fuss was made, especially if he was at the center of it.
He'd always been shy. As a kid, it always made it worse when someone pointed out how shy he was. The worst of all was when someone tried to help him "get out of his shell." Now he was okay being called shy. Someone had noticed the truth and he didn't view it as a negative anymore. It was his way to be a little more anxious, thoughtful, and solitary than others and he was okay with that. He enjoyed being able to do his thing, contribute in the ways he felt comfortable, and feel like that was enough.
Gary had settled into patterns that worked for him in most areas of life. However, his current job is creating some problems for him. He manages computer systems for an insurance company. Most days and most weeks, he has more to do than he can get done. With so much on his plate, he's often frustrated at the end of the day. The worst part of it for him is when he doesn't get everything done on time. If it's bad enought that his boss or a customer complains, that's torture for Gary. He tries to avoid that at all cost.
Unfortunately, sometimes it costs Gary a lot to try to avoid disappointing other people. When things got busy sometimes he comes in to work early, stays at his desk through the lunch hour, and stays late trying to get caught up.
Unfortunately, he can't stay in that wound up mode for long before he needs a release. The primitive, surival part of Gary's brain knows an "effective" one: pornography. He is at a much greater risk of relapse during such times of stress.
Gary tries to combat the urges to view porn again, and he succeeds most of the time. However, every time he lapses (lately that has only been once every few months) it's almost always during or right after a particularly stressful day and week.
For Gary, avoiding porn is like closing down the Queensburrough Tunnel. It's probably not going to work unless we make sure to direct drivers to the Brooklyn Bridge so that traffic still has a way out of Manhatten.
What could be Gary's alternate release?
I knew it would go better if that new and different release came early on, before his brain and body had a chance to work themselves up into a state of reactivity. He needed something to do as he was getting in to work early or instead of skipping lunch. I encouraged him to try the ABCD technique to help shift his body and brain out of reactive mode and back into a state of mastery.
A is for accept. Try accepting whatever it is you find threatening. I encouraged Gary to accept that he might disappoint his boss. Surrender to the possibility that he wouldn't get everything done rather than wasting so much time and energy and expending so many stress hormones bracing against that possibility throughout the whole day. Accepting the dreaded outcome doesn't mean that it will happen. In fact, once we allow that things may very well go poorly, it frees us up to work more effectively on the tasks at hand. We've let the final outcome go, and thus we can plug along at the nitty gritty details, the very place where we can work most productively anyway. Accepting the worst improves our chances that things will actually turn out just fine.
I encouraged Gary to take acceptance one step further. "When your anxiety hits, instead of thinking 'Oh, no!' say to yourself, 'Oh, good. I'll practice mastery.' Anticipate those bad moments as great opportunities to recondition yourself." Conditioning is a simple process, it just takes repetition. Pair a response with a trigger often enough, and the response will eventually be generated by the trigger. It got to the point that Pavlov could make his dogs salivate just by ringing a bell. The automatic response we want is mastery when we usually rise into reactivity. If we practice the ABCDs of mastery enough when we start to feel anxious, eventually our body and brain will pair the two. It will start making the shift on its own, automatically generating some of the elements of mastery when we feel anxiety coming on.
B is for breathe and notice. Take a nice, full breath and notice something that's real now: a sight, a sound, or something you can touch. Breathing insures that the body and brain are getting oxygen, which helps calm the nervous system out of reactive mode. Noticing some concrete and specific aspect of the physical reality helps bring us back to the here and now. Here and now is where Gary lives and can exercise power; he can't do anything to directly influence that imaginary future where his boss is ready to fire him for what he failed to get done.
C is for commit. Commit to a mental image of how you want to live. For Gary, this wasn't a vision of him checking off all his tasks off the list at the end of the day. Rather, it was the image of living a life not driven by tasks. He didn't want work to dominate his mind and his life. He wanted to get his work done, but keep his primary focus on what really mattered: his life after work, with his wife and two kids. That felt very compelling to him. They were the reason he was going to work. He wanted to be able to remember that in the middle of the day, to really feel it, rather than getting so focused on and caught up in work that it seemed life or death.
D is for do. In reactive mode, energizing chemicals are coursing through our systems. Even when we resist the urge to act on a destructive impulse, that may not dissapate the energy driving that impulse. Spend some of that energy by deciding on an action and then taking it. Even if it's just getting up for a minute to take a quick little walk. Gary spends a lot of time in meetings, so he may have to do something while sitting still. I encouraged him to tense muscle groups in his body briefly, for instance by pressing his toes up toward his shin, pressing his heels into the ground, and then also tensing his thighs, hamstrings, buttocks, and even his abs. Just for maybe 15 seconds before releasing. He can do all this without anyone else at the conference room table noticing. It will burn off some of those energizing chemicals and he'll feel a little less compulsive and driven as a result.
I'm hoping that this tool will help Gary stop getting so wound up that he's at risk of falling for that old, self-defeating release of pornography. I'll let you know how it works for him. Please feel free to try it out and let me know if it works for you.
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