Opposite Action is a DBT (Dialectical Behavioral Therapy) skill that can help you to regulate negative or distressful emotions. This skill helps you change your emotions by doing the opposite of what your emotions are leading you to do.
Yesterday, I was feeling all kinds of negative emotions. I was angry at my parents, mostly my mom, and sad that my life wasn’t the way I wanted it to be. My brother, his wife, and their dog are visiting until Sunday (though last night they stayed in LA, because my brother’s wife had a work meeting there).
Whenever my brother visits, my parents buy and make a lot of food. This time, my brother also brought back a box of macadamia cookies from Hawaii, where he and his wife had recently attended their friend’s wedding. Now, my mom keeps reminding me not to eat too much so I won’t gain weight.
I really do want to lose weight to alleviate the pain in my back and knees. I lost 5 lbs in the first 3 weeks going gluten-free. I have tried sticking to the diet but it is kinda hard, especially now with all the good food in the house. And my mom’s nagging doesn’t help.
Whenever my mom or dad irritates or angers me, I want to do something to get back at them indirectly. I turn that anger inward and do something that will hurt me, because I feel like neither arguing with them nor simply expressing my feelings will produce the result I want/need. Which is basically an understanding or an apology or a promise not to do it again.
Whenever my mom clucks at me to watch my eating or tells me I’m gaining weight again, I get so angry because it feels like she does this every freaking day. And not in a good helpful way either but in the critical tone she’s had since my childhood. (My parents don’t see me as a sensitive person, they see me as an over-reactive person.)
Luckily, because I’m also doing the intermittent fasting thing where I don’t eat after 5pm and before 8 or 9am, I can tell her confidently that I haven’t gained any weight. But it still irritates me that she seemingly watches my behavior like a hawk and repeats her endless advice on how to lose weight.
It’s like she’s trying to train me to behave a certain way, but her training style is pretty ineffective, because I don’t enjoy it. (This is probably why our dogs aren’t fully potty-trained either, because my mom insists on doing it her way which does not involve the treats-reward method. I however am trying.)
Anyway, now that my brother, his wife, and the cookies are here, and my parents are stressing me out so much for many reasons, my reaction, because I feel helpless and angry and rebellious, is to EAT THE DAMN GOOD COOKIES. The dark chocolate and white chocolate and coffee flavored macadamia cookies.
Needless to say, in 2006, I failed DBT therapy, and I still have awful coping skills. I should have taken out one of the DBT emotion regulation worksheets and identified my emotions, figured out what my emotions were leading me to do and what the opposite action would be, and do the opposite action instead of eating a bunch of sugar-loaded cookies that would be detrimental to my pain management goals. LOL.
For the past year, one of my favorite things to do when I’m feeling bad is to jump on the computer and kill monsters in WoW… for hours at a time… aggravating the arthritis pain in my back, which eventually caused my current knee pain. Of course, I can still go on the computer and play a video game, but I got to do a stretching exercise immediately after 45 mins or so.
I want to come up with other actions I can do to make me feel better inside. What’s the opposite action to eating a cookie whenever my mom makes me angry with her constant nagging? I need to do something a little more empowering or proactive than simply not eating the cookie. I need to do something that makes me feel better about being me rather than making me feel worse. It could be doing something as simple as exercise or… writing. Something that makes me feel independent, like my own person, something that comes from inside me, something I can call my own.
BEING KATINKA 