 We're on chapter five, self-care damage control. The bottom line, you don't have to suffer so much. It's not good for anybody. What they go over now is a couple of topics on self-care. They go over resilience, distress, talents, perspective, and developing your awareness of your own emotional triggers. Resilience, basically you want to think about this in terms of chapter five being called damage control. You want to think about this as laying down firm routes into the ground. So this is like focusing on yourself before crisis happens, during crisis, and after crisis. This is eating well, sleeping well, exercising enough, avoiding mood altering drugs. Of course, medications that are prescribed by a physician are okay, but you want to avoid overusing things like benzodiazepines, medications that can be harmful long term. Number five is treating illness, taking care of yourself, resting when you are sick. The list might seem obvious, but these things do suffer. Also, what's interesting that they mentioned is recognizing the stressors that are going on in your life right now may actually give you a motivational boost to following through on taking care of basic care of yourself. It's a strange way to look at it, but this crisis in your life might actually have a silver lining in the sense that it might be just the motivational boost we need to focus on ourselves as part of the longer term project of helping our loved one. And then they say, these are all things you can control. So taking care of yourself are things that you can control at least to some extent when other parts of your life are out of control. Then it goes into distress tolerance. So once we develop resilience, then what they say is change takes time and it's rarely ever straightforward, especially when drugs and alcohol are involved. So your job as a helper and self-helper requires tolerating the way things are now to some extent, however distressing that may be. So one thing is the resilience, building the resilience. And then one thing is learning techniques to just deal with the distress as it comes. So when the crisis occurs and the communication conflicts occur and when disappointments occur, learning how to deal with that. The techniques they talk about take practice to get comfortable with their tools. The more you master them, the more they work. And they might be difficult to sort of wrap our heads around but they're better than the alternatives. Like insomnia, sometimes uncontrollable weeping, exploding in rage are some of the examples that they give. One thing they say in the second paragraph of this distress tolerance section is sometimes distress tolerance is mistaken for a personality trait, as in she's a tolerant person or he's not tolerant. But like acceptance, awareness, it's a learned skill. It's something that you can get better at. So essentially it's a set of tools that they're offering and that they start to describe. Many of these tools are based on a evidence-based behavioral treatment protocol called dialectical behavioral therapy, DBT. And others come from different places. So the first thing they go over is distract yourself. So switch the focus of your thoughts. Do something else when you're in the midst of a very distressing episode or crisis, do something else that requires your attention. So one thing you can do is make a list of distracting activities and keep them handy. But you wanna make sure that they're small things that you can do on the spot. Number two, they say switch the focus of your emotions. So try to lighten up your mood, watching funny things. The third one's interesting. They say switch the focus of your senses. They say take a cool shower on a hot day, step out on a freezing day. One tactic is to keep a rubber band around your wrist and snap it anytime you wanna snap out of any painful thoughts. This reminds me of a statement attributed to the professor when he said, Faheedah Ghazibah Ahadilukum Falyatawallah. This is really interesting. He said, when one of you is angry, make wudu. I remember learning about DBT and hearing about for the first time, one of the tactics was to go and take a break and take water and wash your face. And I was just like so amazed by that that I almost couldn't like believe what I was hearing because it's so in line with the advice that Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam gave so long ago that when you have this overwhelming emotion of anger, make wudu and that that being a tool to use an anger in a lot of ways is the archetype of an overwhelming emotion that just takes you over and moves you in a direction that you wouldn't naturally want to do if you logically thought about it. So using these tools in order to break that distress wudu being one of them. The fourth is do something generous. So directing your energy towards positive goals. It says you can brainstorm in advance but be sure to include specific immediate doable activities. So for example, volunteering, but some volunteering you have to go through several steps like finding a place, signing up, whereas other types of volunteering are more accessible in the moment. Other distractions are more accessible in the moment like calling, emailing, texting. So that's a pretty interesting trick is to try to find some manner of service but then not just any manner of service but a manner of service where we can utilize in order to sort of get out of ourselves. Sometimes you think that I have to wait till my loved one gets better in order to involve myself in service. I would avoid going down that line of reasoning. Sometimes that you feel like I have to get my own house and check before I go out and help others. I would avoid that line of reasoning. Simply because addiction is a long-term project. There's oftentimes nothing we can do at the moment in order to quote unquote get our house in order. And service is a great way to help other people and also get out of ourselves and get out of our head. Especially service surrounding helping other people who have loved ones at addiction. So when you go to support groups, just being a support for somebody else who's an anguish can be incredibly helpful. Listening to somebody will listen to people that have gone through what we've gone through and other people are the same way. They're more willing to listen to people that have gone through what they've gone through and take advice from them. So service is an excellent way to get out of ourselves. And then it goes into relaxation. It talks about ways to soothe yourself. We're gonna go over a lot of these in the PowerPoint in the second part of the presentation. It goes over take a break. Part of make it better section is to meditate or pray. There's five times out of the day where we can increase our awareness and our acceptance and pray around this specific issue. The message that is always there for us to get away from things in the moment if getting away from home or getting away from the situation is warranted. And that's number three on this section, moving and just leaving, going out for a walk. The fifth one is borrowing some perspective from other loved ones, friends, family members. What they say is oftentimes family members will contact professionals in a burst of urgency. So in a crisis, whether due to the cumulative effects of stress, like it just becoming too much over and over again or they just can't take it anymore or they think their loved ones a danger. So they think they need to speed things up. Tolerating distress when it's not really an emergency and staying calm, even what it is, creates time and space to consider options and act in ways that are more likely to help. Panic reactions on the other hand, usually make things worse. So crisis is a good time to commit to things, like meetings, reading books like this, creating a strong support structure, creating more self-care routines and then working through that until the next crisis occurs. It says to try to be aware of your own emotional triggers so when family members with addiction do certain things and it sort of sets us off. So the fact that our triggers are predictable help us plan ahead but then also can sort of lead to loved ones knowing that there's a button to push. So when we're aware of our triggers then we can plan ahead. So maybe that means introducing more self-care around that time. Exercising more, drinking less coffee, planning a gut for walks, creating house rules, practicing your communication skills before a potential trigger might occur. The next section is therapy. So if you're not getting the support you need from other family members or friends, you may want to seek out help from a doctor, a therapist, a marriage counselor, a mentor, a spiritual advisor, a support group. Fellow family members may be too caught up in their own reactions to hear your concerns. Loving someone with a substance problem can be traumatic, literally. Many people will meet the diagnostic criteria for PTSD based on the traumatic events of dealing with a loved one with addiction. So getting professional help is an important thing and we read in the last chapter how people who are dealing with a loved one with addiction have higher rates of depression and anxiety. It talks about support groups then. So support groups create a stigma-free zone for venting and solidarity, like Al-Anan, Nar-Anan, you can probably find a meeting near you. Each meeting is gonna be different. So the vibe in one meeting might be different than the vibe in another meeting. So keep that in mind. If you're not resonating with people in one meeting, you might resonate with people in another meeting. So take what you need and leave the rest. They talk about smart recovery, which has online meetings. Finally, it says you may not want to attend support groups or 12-step meetings. And that's okay too. Everybody has their own path and their own journey. Again, what you wanna do is look at this like a menu of options. So if something is not resonating with you, just like with a menu at a restaurant, you would get it. You might not like a couple of dishes. You wouldn't send back the menu. You would just focus on things that may work for you that may resonate with you. The last two paragraphs are really important to summarize all of this and then we'll go into the exercises. This chapter asks you to take responsibility for your part in your own health and happiness for yourself and the benefit of your loved one. This does not mean there's something you could have done differently to prevent your loved one's behavior or anything you can do now to make them behave a certain way. The power to influence someone no matter how great the influence is not the same as responsibility for another person's choice. Our loved ones problems become our problems. That's a price we pay for love but our loved ones problems are not our fault. And to be clear, self-care is not about trying to be perfect. Perfectly calm, perfectly happy, perfectly well rested. It's about being intentional to whatever we do at every level. In short, it's about doing your best, allowing your best may look different from one day to the next.