Hello. Today I'm going to follow up a little bit on what I was talking about in my recent episode about sensory processing sensitivity.

And it kind of follows on from the personality disorders episode from the other week as well, actually,

because it's one thing to recognise yourself in one of those labels. But what then?

Now, as a therapist, part of my treatment of issues is a flow chart that starts with understanding a problem, then accepting the problem, and then overcoming the problem.

And for a majority of clients, that's the way that it goes.

Now, some might not need as much understanding, some might not need as much

acceptance, but on the whole, this process seems to work quite well I've found. In therapy,

people often say they don't like the idea of accepting their emotions, though. They want to

stop them, that's why they're there. But our feelings are there for a reason.

Now, they're not always an accurate reflection on what's genuinely going on in our life right now, though.

Totally get that. But because our mind and body are working together to try and keep us safe,

to override it is going to mean going against your instincts, and there's going

to be pushback from that, especially with anxiety as it feeds itself. If you're anxious about being

anxious, it can only get worse. So I do find that for many people, the secret to being able to

bring the intensity of the emotion down,

which is what they're really after anyway, is to accept it, and then they can control it.

So that's what I mean by acceptance. Accepting isn't being resigned to it. That's not what I'm

saying. Ultimately, we want to get to a position where we can say to

ourselves things like, I notice I'm feeling anxious, or I notice that I'm angry and it not be a problem.

It's a long road to get to that point. I'm not going to lie, but it is worth the effort.

And it raises the question, doesn't it?

How do we do that? Well, we tend to split this into two different areas. We've got processing and distracting.

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