Welcome to her time to Talk. I'm Megan Clark, a licensed professional counselor and the founder of Her Time Therapy, a group practice dedicated to supporting women's mental health. This podcast is for women by women, and is all about creating a safe place for our experiences, amplifying our voices, and empowering each other with the knowledge to improve our mental health.

Today we are talking about a very common topic that. Myself and other therapists at her time often work with our clients on overcoming, and that is how to stop getting stuck in distress through a two tier method. Have you ever caught yourself replaying a conversation or a situation over and over again in your mind? You're doing this to just try to make sense of it, but really only end up making yourself feel worse. In these moments, you may ask yourself things like, why did this happen? What should I have done differently, or am I thinking about this right? Why am I so upset? if this sounds familiar, and you find yourself in this kind of pattern, you are truly not alone. This type of rumination and distressing situation is very common, especially if you are a person who has experienced trauma or had to be hyper aware to keep yourself safe in the past. So in today's episode, we're gonna be talking about how to stop getting stuck in that distressing rumination cycle and start to move yourself from this place of overthinking into a place of being more grounded so that you can take intentional action. What I'm gonna do here is discuss why this happens and walk you through a two step process that you can try to use yourself anytime you feel stuck in your thoughts, whether it's about work stress, a relationship issue, or a painful memory that has resurfaced or been triggered by something. one of the big reasons why we find ourselves in this pattern is that anytime something upsetting happens, our brains naturally want to solve it for us. It wants to protect us and make sure that we're not just safe in the moment, but moving forward. it tricks us into feeling like if we think through a situation enough and if we analyze a situation enough, we'll eventually find peace and safety. But often what we end up with is complete exhaustion and a lot of distress from that endless cycle of thinking and analyzing the situation over and over again from a million different perspectives. for women, especially women who have survived trauma, which is many of us or those who carry the weight of constant responsibility for multiple roles and people overthinking can start to feel like it gives you some element of control. it becomes a protective measure that can be helpful until it's not. it can easily tip into distressing, harmful rumination. when you get stuck in that cycle where you start to grasp onto control and overthinking as your primary method of functioning is actually more of a trauma response coming up in that moment because this kind of gives you an illusion of control to feel like you can think your way out of a situation. it's important to recognize here that our nervous system doesn't know the difference between a threat from the past and one that's happening right now. If you're thinking about a potential situation that could happen that you're worried about or trying to avoid, it's almost like it's already happening according to your nervous system. That's why you can feel really anxious or tense about things when you're just sitting safely on your couch. Even though you're safe in the moment, your mind is telling your nervous system that you're actually not. So going into that spiral of overthinking is kind of like your body is trying to protect you. So your body is still trying to protect you from something that has already happened or could potentially happen, and that's why we tend to get trapped in this cycle. to characterize this a little bit more, I wanna share a fictional example based on many real clients that I've worked with over the years. we're gonna call this fictional example and this fictional client, Chelsea. Chelsea is a woman of color from a traditionally marginalized community, and she worked in her particular field for many years. Chelsea changed jobs every year or every couple of years, but still in the same field because she had this desire and this hope that each new position would be different. But inevitably Chelsea found herself in the same situation at work over and over again, being treated unfairly. Being ignored in meetings or being assigned demeaning tasks that didn't match her role or her professional level. For example, at one job, her boss often asked her to grab coffee or lunch or even to clean her office While other colleagues in our office, especially other male colleagues, tended to stay behind to work on more high visibility projects and were never asked to grab coffee or things like that. So when she asked clarifying questions in these situations to the boss, she would get snapped at or dismissed. it chipped away her confidence every time she had to self maintain and control an emotional response, that was a really valid emotional response from a microaggression type of situation. So she started to ask herself these questions every time this happens and I feel like I'm being treated unfairly. Is this actually racism in the workplace? Is this a microaggression or am I simply overreacting? she would go through these examples and situations multiple times in her head to try to figure out, is it me, is it them? Ultimately, how do I keep myself safe? it can get more complex than that. With Chelsea's situation, she also had a long history of childhood abuse. She learned from a young age that to be safe and accepted, she had to prove her worth. she had to present herself as perfect, smart, likable, and not inconvenient to anyone around her. when we flash forward to her situations at work. when she's treated this way it didn't just trigger frustration about the situation in the moment. It brought up all of these issues from childhood and continued to chip away at a self-concept that was already struggling because of how hard she had to fight and mask throughout her childhood to be accepted. she believed deep down that if she could just say the right thing or behave in the perfect way, then finally she would be respected. this was an internal belief system developed over multiple years throughout her childhood and reinforced at work in various situations that felt unfair to her. that inner drive to continually. Overthink and ruminate on like, was this me? Was this them? What do I need to do differently next time? What should I say next time to be taken seriously and treated with respect? That all comes from a place of survival. Sometimes, especially in adulthood, this can become a really distressing type of trap And it freezes us and keeps us from being able to take the steps and the actions needed to move forward into a better place. Because of this dynamic and being in the cycle of rumination and questioning herself, her nervous system was constantly on high alert, especially at work or in relationship dynamics, some of the symptoms she experienced as part of all this is inability to sleep. She would lie awake at night, continuing to ruminate about what she could have said or done differently at work. She would constantly bring up situations at work with her friends, with her partner, tell her worries about. How she's being perceived and treated at work took over the dynamic of all her other relationships leaving her no area of her life that felt comfortable or safe. by the time Chelsea finally came to therapy, she was really exhausted mentally, emotionally, even physically, because of the toll that this overthinking trap takes on the body. She needed space for her nervous system to calm down before she could figure out what was happening and set it down long enough to actually make a plan and figure out what can I do differently other than ruminate about what happened? this is a common thing among the women that we work with here at her time. It's reflected in and talked about within the book, titled Women Who Think Too Much. by Dr. Susan Nolan. she found through her research that women are more prone to rumination. Not because we're weak or broken in any way. It's simply because we're conditioned to care and to be relational and to analyze how everyone around us is doing. I've seen this dynamic described as pathological consideration, and I really can't agree with that term more. I think that's the perfect thing to call this pattern we're seeing in therapy for women. It's this level of hyper attention that women give to considering everyone else around them to ensure that everything runs smoothly and that everyone around them is safe and doing well. That hyper attention can definitely reach pathological levels because being helpful and attentive to others can serve us in so many ways. it can give us a lot of personal satisfaction and be a way that we show love, but it can also keep us stuck in these cycles of intense distress, which causes us to abandon ourselves and not be able to show up for ourselves or others in the way that we would like to. So if you're thinking, gosh, this pathological consideration really sounds like me, because I see myself overthinking every situation. I question if I could have done something better, or if I could just do this thing to make this person happy or to see me in a better light. I really want you to know that you're not alone here. at her time therapy, we specialize in helping women break out of these type of cycles of overthinking, of people pleasing of self-doubt, so they can truly start living more at peace with themselves than others and have a higher level of clarity around their own dynamics. if this feels like something you need support with in the moment, please reach out to us@hertimetherapy.com. But whether or not therapy is accessible to you right now, I wanted to leave you with a two step strategy to start helping yourself break out of this cycle. the first step is, of course, to notice it's happening and being mindful of it. But once you do, we wanna intentionally allow ourselves some time and space to process the event, whatever it was that's making you ruminate Then work on reframing that to a healthier space so that you can move on to step two, which is more focused on being in the present and taking action going forward. this first step of processing and reframing is all about self validation, self-compassion, and calming your nervous system so that you can access what we like to call your wise mind in dialectical behavioral therapy. Your wise mind is a space internally grounded between emotion and logic. when we are triggered, our minds go into survival mode. with Chelsea's example, when she went into work and had a boss give her a demeaning task She experienced, multiple microaggressions throughout her day. These were all, relatively small moments, but they're significant moments because they are triggering and because they add up and they did push her into a kind of survival mode, which caused some of that rumination cycle to start. whether we shut down in those moments or get into this spin cycle of thinking, the first goal is to help your body and brain realize you are safe right now to do this and get your brain to turn off the fire alarm and to move from that state of, I've gotta figure out how to make myself safe, to, we are safe and can make calm, rational decisions on how to go forward. We can move there, not by asking ourselves the same questions over and over of what do they think and how could I have done this differently? We need to ask better questions that actually help us move from one state to another. it is important to give yourself the space to think about situations that have triggered you in some way, and to allow that. That processing to happen, but we wanna do it in an effective way so that you are not spending your whole day or multiple days in this mode. Try to give yourself space to write and journal and put your thoughts out on paper. if writing is not your thing, you can also do this in the form of music or through artistic expression, or even just speaking into your phone and recording audio notes. Whatever your method looks like, it's helpful to get your processing external from yourself so you can actually get it out of you so that you can set it down. here are a list of questions that I recommend going through when you find yourself in that rumination cycle to help you process and reframe how you're thinking about that situation. the first question is, what story am I telling myself about this situation? Sometimes the initial story that you tell yourself about a situation is not the only story, or sometimes it may not include the bigger picture. The next question is how might my experience as a woman or as a woman of color shape how I see or feel about this situation? And you can of course, format that question to be however it's most appropriate for you and your identity. So how is you as a person with this identity experiencing the situation and how does that factor in? The next question is, am I being kind to myself or am I repeating someone else's voice? this is a really critical one because we tend to develop our own internal self-talk based on the way that our parents and our friends have talked to us throughout our life. parents tend to be a really big force on this. So if you're someone who had childhood trauma or a difficult relationship with one or both parents, sometimes you may find these voices speaking through your internal self-talk that are, are really not you. They're coming from the way that you are expecting to be talked to because that's how other people have treated you in the past. As you're thinking about the story you're telling yourself about the situation, also notice is this a story that you truly believe and see through your own eyes? Or is this someone else's perspective about your situation? you can also ask yourself, are my feelings about this moment heavier because of old pain or past experiences? So, in other words, are you looking at the situation that feels so triggering right now just as this situation? Or are you allowing everything from your past to pile on and get muddied with it? Sometimes we need to separate the moment at hand from all the other moments that we've experienced. Next is to think about what your body's telling you. So what is my body telling me right now about this moment and what does my body need? Sometimes we are so in our head and so trapped in that thought spiral that we completely detach from our own bodies and don't really notice. What do we need physically to help process through this moment? You may need to cry breathe stretch or shake it out. taking a moment to honor what your body is asking for can make all the difference. You could also pay attention to whether or not you're thinking in all or nothing terms. as you notice the way that you're thinking about the moment, are you using words like always, never, or should? oftentimes, we put undue pressure and judgment on ourselves because of how we should act or how we should have responded in that moment. So being really clear about where's the nuance, where's the grace, where's the compassion that I can add in here? Often can turn the dial down on that distress. You can also think about what is the worst case scenario. What strengths or support can help me handle if the worst case scenario were to happen? So like in Chelsea's scenario, if the worst case scenario was that yes, her boss was unjustly targeting her potentially in a very racially aggressive way, what can she do to handle that? What can she do to advocate for herself? What needs to happen next and what supports can help her handle that moment? Does she have to face it alone? Because as we go into the next question here, which is, what do I need right now to care for myself? You may start to realize that this doesn't have to all be on you. This doesn't have to be something that is solely solved within your head. This can be something that you turn to your support system and pull from your resources to help you move forward all of these help the most when we pair it with doing something physical. So when we are looking at this all together as kinda like phase one, we look at phase one as being number one. You gotta validate and process what's happening. that's what all of these questions were intended to help you do. Let's reframe the way that we are looking at the current situation so that we can validate for ourselves, show compassion, and understand what's happening and reframe it in a way that feels supportive. After going through these questions and processing the events that felt triggering it's important to do something physical. This can be very small or very big. it can include things like talking to a friend, letting yourself cry, or ideally doing something physically active with motion, like going to the gym or going for a walk. These steps of naming and processing what's happening, breathing deeply and grounding yourself in the present and pairing that with something active can really help the whole process along and get you unstuck and unfrozen all of these situations that may put you into rumination mode are essentially a stress trigger. when that stress is released in your body, you need to process it through to the end, or else it contributes to you being in that frozen state. according to the authors of the book, burnout, the Secret to unlocking the stress cycle Emily and Amelia explained that it's not enough to just think our way out of stress. We have to physically signal to our body that the threat is over and that we are safe we can't really take action for ourselves and move forward until we've done the processing and something active to show our body that it's safe and we are okay to be in the present and to move forward. So step two is all about shifting your focus forward. To be in the present and taking intentional action to improve your future. like step one, I am going to give you a series of questions and encourage you to journal about them some of these questions include, Are the thoughts that I'm experiencing right now tied to the past, or are they tied to the present? Even just allowing yourself to notice a name gosh, I'm still thinking about that thing that happened at work last week. Versus, no, I'm thinking about what's happening right now in the moment. Just that awareness can be really powerful. You can also ask yourself, how is this moment defined and how is it different from when I was hurt before? one triggering situation can sometimes get muddled with all the trauma from your past, and suddenly you're in a much bigger type of spiral and trauma trigger. to help our brain remember that it's safe, we sometimes need to think about this situation is different from all these other ones in all of these ways. So this is where I'm at today. I can realize how right now is different from the past. in order to move into what I can do next. We wanna think about what do we need to set down and leave in the past, and what do we wanna focus on moving forward. a question that can help with that is, what part of this story feels ready for rest right now, knowing that I can return to it later. for anyone who's done EMDR therapy, one EMDR resource is called the container. this container is something that you can use anytime completely internally. It doesn't have to be done in the therapy session. we often use it to say This thing that I'm thinking about, this thing that feels triggering right now doesn't have a space in my world today, in this moment, but I know we can come back to it later. So I'm literally going to put this distress, or this thought, or this memory or this situation into a mental container and of compartmentalize and put it away on the shelf for now, so that I can focus on. What is actually important for me to prioritize my energy towards today. Even if you don't necessarily have that container as a resource. Just writing down X, Y, and Z about the situation are good to put to rest for a moment so I can focus on other things. Helps your brain to intentionally make that shift. if you're struggling to be in the moment and the past keeps pulling you back you can intentionally name or write down. Three or four things that you can see, hear, and feel right now that feel calm and that you are thankful for. This can be something small, like noticing how cute your pet looks, taking a nap the sound of your kids playing Or the wind, Even just noticing how your feet feel on the floor and if your clothes are a soft material. These are all very grounding things to bring your awareness into the present and to feel more calm so that you can take action moving forward. You can also ask yourself as part of this, is there anything that I'm going to choose to practice radical acceptance around. some things don't have a solution. Some things you just can't think your way out of, and you have to accept at least for the moment. there is some power to say and actually write down. I'm going to radically accept that this job is probably not the one that I'm going to stay at long time because I don't feel like I'm being treated well. I'm just going to accept that fact so that I can then set that down and focus on what I can do next. The next question that you could lean into is, what does it mean for me to choose peace and to choose myself today? Where do you need to put your attention and your energy right now? And most importantly. We're using all these questions and they're building upon themselves to come to this one, and that is what small action is within my control that I could make today or even tomorrow to feel better. What small action is within my control that could make today and tomorrow better? And with that, what supports or resources do I need to call upon to actually do that thing, to make that action step possible? this question isn't about ignoring the upsetting situation or just getting on with it. It's about reclaiming your power on how much energy that thing takes and how you're going to choose to respond, and where you direct your time, energy, and attention, which is valuable. That next action step that you choose to take, instead of spending more time ruminating about that upsetting event, is sending an email to your boss, advocating for a meeting with hr. It could be advocating for your partner to take an evening off with you and watch a funny movie. It could be cleaning your environment because you know it's gonna make you feel better. It can be taking a walk outside or calling a friend to get coffee because you know that's gonna bring you some joy today. that action step, doesn't have to be massive It doesn't have to be, I'm gonna go and quit my job tomorrow and find a brand new one. It can be one small action step that will move her forward in making the next day, the next week better for herself. sometimes the most important thing to remember here is that it's a really powerful move to step back and let your body and mind recover. Do what you need for yourself and choose yourself first. by giving yourself the time space and validation for that processing first, it actually allows you to move into that second phase Taking action and figuring out what is the next small thing that I can do to get myself out of that stuck place and out of that spiral. The reminder here and what this episode is all about is that you don't have to stay stuck in your pain any longer. than necessary. You're allowed to pause. You're allowed to say, I've done enough thinking for now, and you're allowed to put your situation down for a moment and then focus on what peace looks like for you today and what the next step of improvement in your life looks like. I wanna leave you with this quote from that book titled, women Who Think Too Much, which is The antidote to rumination is action, but not just any action. It's compassionate, intentional action that reconnects you to your life. So I encourage you today to take that small kind step and to remember, you're not what happened to you, and you are not what triggers you. You are what you do with it now. You are what you do next for yourself to move you forward into a better state of awareness and intentionality that honors who you are and what you need. if you resonated with this conversation and are ready to start practicing this kind of grounded healing and want that professional support, we would really love to work with you. Please reach out to us@hertimetherapy.com to learn more about working with one of our therapists and book a free consultation today. We accept most insurance plans and we have a payment plan that meets pretty much anyone's budget if you prefer or need to pay for therapy out of pocket, including monthly therapy membership plans that ensure therapy is never out of reach. We also offer a free gift for our new therapy membership Clients, which is a free digital download of our 30 page therapy guide Her Time to Heal a Feminist Guide to Make the Most of Therapy. This guide is great because it includes not only educational content and guiding questions like the journal prompts that we went through in this episode, but we also include journal pages designed to help you prepare for and get the most out of everything. Therapy session that you attend.

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