Nimmi Hutnik - Becoming resilient : cognitive behaviour therapy to transform your life

BECOMING
RESILIENT

Cognitive Behaviour Therapy to
Transform Your Life

NIMMI HUTNIK

To my Father who has been the light upon this work

To my daughters, Anna and Tanya, who have enriched my being beyond any telling of it

To all my clients from whom I have learnt many of lifes precious lessons

Contents

D o you often wake up dreading the day, feeling quite low, tearful and with a lump in your throat that you cant quite explain? Are tiredness and fatigue daily experiences for you? Does it take quite a lot of effort to drag yourself out of bed and into the shower to get ready for work?

Do you find yourself waking up with a start in the middle of the night, heart pounding with the stress of things that havent been done or things that you need to do? Do you find your head buzzing with the million emails you have to attend to and the thousand issues you have to address?

This book is for ordinary people like you and me who suffer slightly elevated amounts of depression and anxiety, and other difficult emotions such as anger, jealousy, panic, shame and guilt. It will enable you to learn to deal with difficult moods, manage stress better and improve your relationships. But it doesnt stop there. Once you are on a more even keel emotionally, it will enable you to develop an ability to become resilient, to flourish and to develop in a positive direction. All of this will lead to a higher level of happiness and will enable you to transform your life.

Ideas in this book are based on Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT). CBT is a very successful form of psychotherapy and is based on the observation that our thoughts are intimately connected with our emotions, behaviour and physiological responses. For example, we see a dog on the street and we think, Best get out of the way! Dogs are dangerous; they bite and carry rabies. We will feel anxious and afraid. We might even find our heart racing and our mouth dry, and we will probably take another route to avoid the dog. On the other hand if we think, Dogs are friendly, furry, cuddly animals! we may feel relaxed and/or excited, and cross the street to pet the dog. Two different thought processes for the same situation lead to very different emotions, physiological sensations and behaviours.

This book will enable you to discover how your typical ways of interpreting the situations you find yourself in create feelings of depression and anxiety. It will help you get up again and start over with renewed feelings of vigour and competence. Soon you will find yourself experiencing more positive emotions like joy, love and optimism. Gradually, this book will teach you how to flourish in life.

But to get there, you will need to be passionately committed to your own well-being and you may need to undertake and persist at tasks that may sometimes appear difficult. This is what a psychologist named Angela Duckworth calls grit: the passion and persistence to achieve long-term goals. You will get from this book as much as you put into it. Skimming the book will not produce the results you would like to see in your life. So make a commitment to yourself not just to read the book but to do the exercises in it that are geared towards enabling you to feel happier and more fulfilled.

HERE IS THE WAY THE BOOK IS STRUCTURED:

Part 1: Describes depression and the various types of anxiety. It also includes questionnaires to enable you to assess whether you are suffering from depression and/or anxiety. If you are suffering from anxiety, ask yourself what type of anxiety you suffer from. Phobias, panic disorder, health anxiety (now called illness anxiety), social anxiety, and generalized anxiety are all different types of anxiety. I have also included Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), though strictly speaking they are categories of mental suffering in their own right and are no longer classified under anxiety.

Part 2: Once you know what type of problem you are suffering from, it is then important to begin treating that problem. Part 2 looks at the tools and techniques that CBT has evolved to enable people to tackle depression and the various anxiety states. The exercises in this section, if done well and practiced regularly, will indeed help you feel less sad and less stressed.

Part 3: Is designed to take you beyond anxiety and depression into the realms of contentment, resilience, flourishing and transformation. In this section we look at an age-old meditation technique drawn from the Buddhist and Christian traditions called mindfulness. We will explore an outgrowth of CBT, a newly developed therapy called Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, more commonly known as ACT, said as act. We will also look at how to teach ourselves to bounce back when life knocks us down, i.e., develop resilience, and to spring forward into a place where we can truly say we are thriving or flourishing in our lives.

HOW TO USE THIS BOOK

The good news is that you do not have to read the whole book. After reading that are pertinent to your particular type of anxiety. I have included questionnaires for you to be able to assess what you suffer from. Even though these questionnaires have not been standardized for the Indian population, they will serve as a guide to signpost you to specific chapters in the book and to get specific help from a therapist if required. These questionnaires, if taken regularly, will also give you an objective measure of whether you are improving or not. If more than one problem is present, ask yourself which is the problem that is most debilitating to you at this time. Then read the chapter or section relevant to that particular problem. It is important that you start somewhere. You may even find that addressing one problem will have a knock-on positive effect on the other problems you are experiencing, thereby alleviating them.

Whatever your particular problem, you will benefit from reading the chapters on Mindfulness ( brings all the threads together to show you how you are on the pathway to parivarthan or transformation.

You will reap the greatest benefit from this book if you discuss some of the issues with a friend or trusted family member. Get them to read the book with you and support you as you try to do things differently. But dont worry if you do not have such a person in your life. You can learn to be your own cognitive behaviour therapist.

If your depression and/or anxiety are very severe and you are unable to function adequately in daily life, I recommend that you find a therapist to help you. This book is for people who suffer from mild to moderate conditions.

If at any point you find yourself considering taking your own life, you should get immediate help from a mental health professional.

By engaging with the ideas and exercises in this book, you will be able to bring yourself to a much happier place in your life. I wish you every success in your journey towards resilience, flourishing and transformation.