MAR 2022: COUNSELING EXERCISES FOR WHEN YOU GET STRESSED

Counseling Exercises for When You Get Stressed or Overwhelmed

Exercise 2: A Good Photo Can Bring Calm

Submitted by Ellen Lee, LMHC and RCS Director of Equipping.

This is a parenting exercise for quickly grounding yourself in a tough parenting moment. Staying calm while exercising your authority when your kids are melting down is difficult. To refocus quickly before you react in the heat of the moment, lose your temper, and escalate the situation: take a few seconds, then inhale and exhale deeply as you look at a picture of your kids that makes you light up. If you have a joyful moment with you in the photo readily available, that is even better. That short breather connecting your brain to felt joy and love from the past will help your body snap out of that stress-based response to respond to the behavior more reasonably.

Stress and worry hit hard when we least expect it. Our counselors not only offer clients compassion and a listening ear, they also help equip them to handle moments when they get frazzled and need to reconnect with God or simply calm down. Here are three exercises you can use in your daily rhythms.

Exercise 1: Sigh of Relief

Submitted by Natasha Steenkamp, LMHC and Supervisor

Take a deep breath. Release the breath with the sound of a loud sigh, making sure to add your voice to the sigh. Imagine this is the sigh of relief you let go at the end of the long day as you collapse on the couch or finally take off your tight shoes. Notice how your body relaxes. Does your breathing change? Do your thoughts feel clearer or slower? Did tension release in your shoulders or your chest?

Exercise 3: A Somatic Experience of Christ

Submitted by Hilary Chiu, LMFT and Supervisor

This exercise will help you connect the Scripture and Christ’s love and compassion to what you are experiencing. When Christ’s grace connects to the whole person, dramatic transformation happens. Turning to Him to understand yourself better can be a powerful, life-changing shift. Find a Scripture you either love or one that you struggle to connect with. In this example, we are going to use Romans 8:1-2, a good verse for when you feel ashamed or condemned.

  1. Take a moment to find a comfortable, upright position and invite your body to be at ease.

  2. Identify the part of you that is in need of compassion or care–is it your critical part, your tired part, your nervous part?

  3. Recite the Scripture out loud to yourself, with that part of you in the front of your mind. In the Romans 8:1 example, if you are focusing on your critical part, notice what the words, "Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus," do in your body.

  4. Take a few deep breaths as you invite God’s living Word to prayerfully interact with that part. Take a moment to notice the Holy Spirit, who gives life and sets you free from the law of sin and death (Romans 8:2).

  5. Continue to slowly recite the verse another 3-5 times, allowing for pauses when words or phrases stand out to you. If possible, try a few repetitions with your eyes closed.

  6. How does your body feel now? Notice again how that part of you is reacting. How might that part benefit from continued support today?

  7. If you feel that part of you, like the criticism, taking over again later in the day, repeat the exercise. It will help you stay connected to the truth of God’s Word and His love for every part of you.

Eriana's Client Testimony

In the healing journey, RCS counselors help clients understand their emotions and bodies, as well as experience God’s grace on a deeper level. Eriana’s story is one of many where a client’s view of herself and God changed.

Eriana's RCS Story: I first started at Redeemer Counseling in 2015. I had experienced depression and I was young. I had been living in New York City for about a year-and-a-half and had a lot of patterns that were unhealthy emotionally. I wasn’t able to connect with people or build relationships the way I wanted to, so someone suggested Redeemer Counseling. It was a great option for me because I felt like the program was safe and I knew that the counselors would share my faith. They had the sliding scale for payment, as well, and because I was in college and had no money to afford counseling, that scale really helped.

When I started therapy, I thought I was just an unemotional person. I thought I didn’t really feel and that I was more of a thinker and didn’t get emotional. It’s really crazy because now I have had multiple people tell me I am one of the most open, deeply feeling people that they know. My best friend told me something along those lines recently. She said it was crazy to think that I was so shut down a few years ago because I am so open and compassionate now.

Discovering that I am a deeply feeling person and opening up more was not just having access to another part of myself, it was truly discovering that I am a very different person than I thought I was all along. I just had blocks and trauma that prevented me from being that person.

That’s also true with my relationship with God, which has changed so much and so drastically. When I came to counseling, the concept of grace was so foreign. I grew up a Christian and understood what grace was, but it was not really practiced in my upbringing and the churches I grew up in. The idea of God being gracious, kind, gentle, and compassionate -- these are characteristics that we know of God from the Bible and we talk about, but sometimes we don’t really internalize. We don’t have a relationship with God where we act as if those characteristics are true or real. That has been a huge shift for me to understand actually who God is, who the Bible says He is, and not who I have constructed Him to be, based on my upbringing or the way the church talked about Him. Grace is a huge thing my counselor and I have talked about over the last several years.

I haven’t experienced severe depression in a long time. I do not have the old emotional blocks that used to, like being hard on myself. With my counselor, I started to understand myself better and why I was reacting to certain situations in a specific way. I learned that I can offer grace and compassion to myself. But that work in counseling also translated to me having more empathy and compassion for other people. I am more aware of the struggles they are going through, too, and that they need attention and compassion. I have seen that growth in me truly affect the people around me. Especially in our world right now, there is a lot of room for arguing and debating, but there is not a lot of room for stopping and listening or experiencing a hard thing with someone else. People really notice when someone holds space with them and I am able to offer that to the people around me much more now.

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