Open Skills
It’s a very natural thing to want to turn away from painful feelings. We have many ways of running away from them, some that are not so harmful such as distracting ourselves or changing the subject. Sometimes the things that we do to get away from difficult feelings can cause us more problems. Drinking more alcohol than usual, bottling up our feelings, picking fights with other people are all ways that we might be trying to block out painful feelings. The tricky thing is that sometimes these things will let you escape from unwanted feelings, for a short while. They usually come with a cost, however. In combination with the section on AWARE skills, (which help you to track the consequences of the choices you are making) this section will teach you how to be more open. Open skills mean exactly that: being open to all of your feelings, even the painful ones. There are two main ways that we can help you to be open – the first is willingness and the second is watching your thinking. Watch the videos below to find out more.
The Guest House
Jalaluddin Rumi.
Source: Rumi: Selected Poems, trans Coleman Barks with John Moynce, A. J. Arberry, Reynold Nicholson (Penguin Books, 2004)
Opening up
This exercise will help you to practice the OPEN skill:
Making room
Listen to help you practice the OPEN skill
The open skills are also about watching your thinking and stepping back from it.
Here are two exercises that help you to shape this skill of watching your thinking:
Leaves on a stream
In this exercise, you learn to visualise your thoughts as if they are resting on leaves floating on a river. It helps you to practice the skill of watching your thoughts and stepping back from them.
Leaves on a stream
Learn to visualise your thoughts
Passengers on the bus
In this exercise, you learn to recognise your own thoughts and emotions as if they are passengers who have got on your bus. You are the bus driver, and the exercise talks you through how you are dealing with the thoughts and feelings passengers. Importantly it helps you to see the costs of how you handle the passengers.
Passengers on the bus
Learn to recognise your own thoughts and emotions
There are other ways of stepping back from your thoughts. For example, sometimes, simply saying “I notice that I am having the thought that...” can be a way to create a little bit of distance between you and the things that your advisor mind is saying. Sometimes picturing what your thought or emotion would look like if you could see it outside of your body, a bit like during the leaves on the stream or the passengers on the bus exercise can be a helpful way to step back. The worksheet here about catching thoughts can help you to use these ideas and practices in everyday life.
The worksheets below continue developing the skill of openness. These can either be saved on your computer and completed digitally, or printed out and completed by hand. It is a good idea to keep all the sheets in one folder so you can look back on where you have come from. If you are using a mobile phone or tablet to work through My Grief My Way, these may not look as good on your screen. If you can print them out then do that, but if not, you can just write your answers to the questions in a notebook or on a piece of paper.
Catching self-talk and doing something differentpdf | 276.48 KB Catching self-talk and doing something different
docx | 894.49 KB
Letter writing exercise
Sometimes, one way to help you to be open to your thoughts and feelings, particularly when you have a sense of things left unsaid, can be to slow things down, and take the time to write a letter. This is usually a letter that you will never send. Writing is slow, and so it forces you to let yourself be with your feelings and thoughts and helps you to express things that perhaps you can’t otherwise say.
This could be a letter to the person who has died. Alternatively, it could be a letter to someone else. You can even write a letter to yourself. For example, if you are blaming yourself for something, or regretting something, imagine writing to your past self, as if writing to a friend. See if in writing about it, you could be forgiving, in the way you might be to a friend.
For this exercise you just need a piece of paper and a pen or pencil, and to give yourself some time and space to try it out. To begin, think about who you wish you could write to. Try to get a sense of what it is you wish you could say. Take your time, and write from the heart. You don’t have to do it all in one go. You can leave it for a bit and come back to it. You can change it, you can begin again if you need to.
Once you have a sense of your letter being finished enough, you can decide what to do with it. You could put it away for a little bit and look at it another time. You could decide to put it in a memory box. You could throw it away. You could put it in a post box with no address on it, if you have a fireplace or stove in the house, you could put it in the fire. Do whatever you wish to do with it, whatever makes most sense to you. You don’t need to do this just once, you can return to this again as your feelings unfold and change. You can do this exercise focussing on different people and different things.