Hi there, my name is Keisunga and I welcome you this Friday to Radio Headspace.
Happy Friday! From the experience I've acquired over the years, I've come to the realization that everyone has their own personal thresholds for dealing with past issues and it's essential to respect them.
As I've stated before, I have my master's in social work and I actually was a licensed psychotherapist in private practice for about a year.
My therapeutic approach was obviously based in mindfulness and no matter what the issue the client was seeing me for, I truly felt that mindfulness could help.
Often times though, I had to reference other therapeutic approaches.
All in all though, mindfulness helped in some way.
So a mindfulness technique that I used to do with my clients is called mindful reflection where we would gently reflect on the client's past.
We often started with their childhood and then we gradually worked our way forward.
This is a very useful technique because our past contains a lot of useful knowledge and lessons to learn from and much of our current behavior and choices are actually based on past experiences.
So also keeping in mind that many people have suffered from traumatic experiences and mindfully reflecting on these experiences can be a bit tricky.
Such was the case with this particular client.
We'll call him Em. Em originally came to see me because of his anger issues.
He would frequently lose his temper at the slightest agitation.
He started to notice how it was starting to affect his marriage, his second one and also his work environment.
He was snappy at work and actually received a few citations already.
He was really afraid that he might lose his job if he didn't change.
As it turned out, Em had a very traumatic past.
He had been the victim of a lot of abuse as a child and it was extremely difficult to talk about.
Every time he thought about it, he would have symptoms of a panic attack.
So for Em, mindful reflection was not an appropriate tool to use.
In the spirit of doing no harm to my client, for Em I decided to dip into the solutions focus therapy bag, which focuses on creating solutions for the problems at hand in the present moment.
And so this approach has aspects of mindfulness as it focuses on paying attention to the present moment.
This approach turned out to be the most helpful for Em.
What I learned from my encounter with Em was that as much as I feel the traditional mindfulness approach is the answer to everything, for some people it may not be the most appropriate in that particular moment.
I had to learn how to adapt and as I stated that's being mindful in and of itself because I'm noticing what's happening in the present moment.
So I gently encourage everyone to notice what's working for you in your life on the day to day and have the awareness and courage to change those things that may be doing you some kind of harm.
Thanks for listening today.
If you have any topics you would like me to talk about in a future episode you can follow me on instagram at kegiscombe and just send me a DM.
Have a happy and healthy day!
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