Healthy Boundaries for Interpreters – 0.2 GS CEUs – Our Saturday School LIVE workshop is happening on November 21st, 2020 from 10 am to noon pacific. Join us to discuss this tricky topic and develop tools to make holding clear, kind, healthy boundaries much easier. Saturday School LIVE workshops are a great opportunity to get to know other interpreters who are struggling with burnout and working on taking better care of themselves!
Put On Your Raincoat: Energetic Protection for Sign Language Interpreters – 0.5 GS CEUs – Interpreting work is sticky – especially in 2020! In this workshop you’ll create a raincoat to protect yourself from the energetic effects of interpreting work, with practices of self-reflection, self-compassion, and mindfulness.
Thank you to everyone who’s reached out to share your fears and how they’re affecting you. This is deep, scary work, and doing it with others can add a bit of comfort and grounding to the process. Keep reaching out!
Ok, are you ready for part 2? This piece is short, but sets the stage for the work we’re going to do over the next few weeks. Let’s dive in!
Cognitive Behavioral Self-Care Strategies for Fear
Photo by Miguel Cortes
Your Garden
Imagine your insides as a garden. I know it’s weird, but humor me. We want to create a visual representation of your inner world, so that you can more easily attend to it.
Photo by www.krstojevtic.com
Your garden lies within the fenced confines of a yard that is your very own. This outdoor space can look however you choose: it may have a beautifully manicured grape arbor, trellised veggies, rows of flowers, pea gravel and statues, or a wide expanse of lawn. This space is yours, and only you decide how it is maintained.
Soil + Seeds: Thoughts
Photo by Gabriel Jimenez
Within your garden, your mind is the soil – the rich, fertile, nourishing medium that cultivates life.
Your thoughts are the seeds carried through on the wind – some tumbling away and out of your garden, some finding a hold in the ground of your mind. Some of these seeds you grab, sow in the ground on purpose, water, and tend to – these are your beliefs.
Buds, Blooms, and Thorns: Emotions
Photo by Stella de Smit
Your emotions spring forth based on how situations and circumstances interact with your thoughts and beliefs. Emotions are a byproduct of our circumstances filtered through our beliefs.
These emotions are like the buds, blooms, and thorns of those seeds you planted in the ground. The emotions themselves are worthy of holding space for and feeling, but they also serve a purpose. They are like flag posts signaling to us that there’s a thought operating below the surface.
When an emotion feels uncomfortable – like sadness, jealousy, fear, and anger often do – we can ask ourselves:
What thought is driving this feeling?
The Fruit: Behavior
The last feature of our garden that we’ll look at today is behavior.
Behavior – what you say and do or have the urge to do – is like the fruit of the plants in your garden. Our thoughts stimulate our emotions, which in turn drive us to act.
Photo by Erwan Hesry
The more mindfully aware we are of the thoughts we’re planting and tending, and the emotions and sensations we’re experiencing, the better chance we have for our actions to be aligned with our values and intentions. On the other hand, if we’re not conscious of our thoughts and beliefs and haven’t chosen them intentionally, we may end up acting in ways that we regret.
Resources for supporting yourself as you get to know your garden
This week, spend some time with your journal and explore the features of your own garden.
Photo by Markus Spiske
Prompts to get you started:
Do you tend to be more aware of your thoughts, emotions + physical sensations, or actions? What helps you notice them?
Once you’ve identified your dominant feature, you can go forward or backward around the triangle to learn more about the others:
What thoughts do you have when you’re feeling (example emotions – substitute what’s relevant for you) sad, angry, frustrated, or jealous?
What emotions and physical sensations do you feel when you’re having these thoughts?
How do you act, what do you do, say, or want to do, when you’re thinking these thoughts or feeling these emotions?
In the moment that you’re feeling upset, this three-point check can be useful:
What am I thinking? What am I feeling?
What am I doing?
An important note:
We are observing, noticing, and increasing awareness here. Remember, a key component of mindful awareness is paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, without judgement.
As you bring your awareness to your thoughts, emotions, and behaviors, notice any judgement of yourself that comes up. It’s helpful to make a note of this too!
Self-Care Strategies for Fear: Part 3
Next week we’ll talk about what to do in this lovely garden of yours, to enjoy it, get to know it, and work with it. You can read part 3 here.
Be so gentle with yourself this week, dear one, and remember that you have a whole community of precious people here to support you in taking better care of your precious self. Reach out to me privately here, or join in our community in the Burnout Proof Interpreters Collective. I look forward to connecting with you more deeply as we continue to explore self-care strategies for fear.
How’s your self-care holding up? If you’re like most of us, it’s probably been pretty rough this year – but it’s not too late to get some support and turn it around!
Self-Care for Stressful Times – Our Saturday School LIVE workshop this month, worth 0.2 GS CEUs, is happening live October 24th 10:00 am – 12:00 pm pacific and will be available as a self-paced online course after that. We’ll use the Learning Zone Model to help you understand how your brain responds to stress, how to create rest and comfort during stress, and how to grow through stressful times.
Burnout Proof Bootcamp – Fall session kicks off October 7th with a LIVE support session. Earn 1.5 GS CEUs in this 6-week self-paced online course that takes you deep into the causes of burnout and the resilience of self-care habits .
Burnout Proof 101 – A one-hour intro to the Burnout Proof principles. This workshop was recorded September 30th, 2020, and is now available as a self-paced online course worth 0.1 GS CEUs.
My kids are my achilles heel. If you want to bring me to my knees, distract me, or hold me hostage – mess with my kids. When they are hurting, it stirs up every anxiety and fear in me. A couple of years ago, one of the three was having a particularly rough time and subsequently, I was a wreck.
There are multiple versions of every story. Different details, different perspectives, different angles, different altitudes – that, if we consider them, completely transform the story.
From heartbreak to miracle.
From depths of hell to merciful heaven.
From worst possible scenario, to amazing luck.
This rough time of my child’s, when now viewed through the wise lens of hindsight, was such a major catalyst for the growth of our whole family. It has brought us closer together, it has developed a depth and a maturity in the one who went through it, and it’s carved a wider valley for love and joy in me. This perspective, the one of hope, gratitude, and growth as opposed to catastrophe and loss, fills me with peace and upholds the dignity of my child and their experience. It feels empowering.
But while we were in the thick of it all? It was a terrifying nightmare that threatened to eat us alive. I wasn’t sure my precious kid would make it. I wasn’t sure I would either. I wasn’t sure of anything, and that unsureness allowed space for my wildest fears and most heartbreaking regrets to take up residence in my mind. They grew and grew and smothered me with thorny tentacles from every direction. It was hard to ever feel safe while living in this nightmare.
Photo by Michael Weidner on Unsplash
Fear is often at the core of our disempowering stories. When our thinking brain is hijacked by our reptilian brain, the worst-case scenarios take root in our thoughts, gathering energy and mass, igniting anxiety and stealing our joy.
So much energy is spent trying to escape the feeling of fear, that we often don’t allow ourselves the compassion and understanding we need while experiencing it. It’s like we’re running so frantically to get away, when that scared part of ourselves really needs us to stop and give it a hug.
Mindful awareness can be that hug we need. According to Lyra Health, mindful awareness means paying attention on purpose in the present moment without judgement. It helps us to cultivate a space for ourselves to just BE – without having to fix, change, perform, or DO.
When we shine the compassionate light of mindful awareness on the noxious weeds of our fears, we can see they’re not absolute truths. The light shines through in places. Holes can be easily poked through. There are gaps in logic and structure. What once seemed to be an impenetrable wall of sharp thorns and certain death, is now illuminated at the source to reveal a few vulnerable stalks. We then have the opportunity to pull them out by the root, and to plant and nurture the empowering seeds of truth.
Fear Self-Care Strategies: Resources for Working with Fear
Self-Care for Stressful Times – 0.2 GS CEUs – Burnout Proof Academy Saturday School Series – October 24th, 2020 10 am – 12 pm PT
Choose one of the resources above, set your timer for 5 minutes, and dive in! Working with your fears doesn’t have to be a long drawn-out process. Break it down into tiny doable pieces to prevent overwhelm and practice holding loving boundaries with yourself. This is one of the keys to being Burnout Proof.
Reflection
Over the next several weeks we’ll be exploring this process of identifying our thoughts, feeling our feelings, and cultivating more empowering and truthful beliefs.
Photo by Finn on Unsplash
I’d love to know what your experience of fear is like and any questions you have about being with it or working with it. Leave a comment below or drop me a line and let me know:
What keeps you awake at night? What does fear feel like in your body? What do you typically do when you’re feeling scared, worried, or anxious? What would you like to know about working with your fear?
Ok dear one, thanks so much for being on this journey with me. Until next time, take good care of your precious self.
Interpreting during a pandemic, especially a VRS shift, is like entering a war zone. People are stressed, frustrated, in pain and completely freaked out – with good reason.
Don’t treat your shift or yourself like this is a regular day. It’s not.
This is a triage situation.
As interpreters, we can’t expect ourselves to be 24/7 enjoying our #quarantinelife, productive, #blessed, #handlingit, checking things off our bucket lists and doing our work like it’s business as usual.
This is not business as usual.
We are on the front lines, witnessing the lives of many people in crisis on a daily basis.
Facilitating communication between people who are calm and connected is hard. Facilitating communication between people who are triggered, afraid, sick and overwhelmed is exponentially harder. It can be helpful to name why this is so hard. Let me offer a suggestion:
It is hard because you care.
Connect to the humanity of it. Seeing another human in pain (fear, frustration, anguish) causes us discomfort. It hurts because we care.
This hurt is compounded by the fact that we’re each personally going through hard things, so witnessing the pain of others lights up and intensifies our own personal pain.
Stress affects brain integration.
Brain Dis-integration
When we’re calm, our brain is in a state of integration where all its parts work together to balance and support the other parts. We’re able to problem solve, understand different perspectives, organize our thoughts, and carry out our plans.
When our pain is lit up – when we’re stressed, overwhelmed, outraged, anxious – our brain’s connections dis-integrate, and we lose our ability to do all of those things.
Identify ‘check points’ that remind you to scan your body for tension and breathe deeply into it, allowing it to release and relax. Even 5 second check points throughout the day can do wonders. During a VRS shift some check points could be:
During your setup process, just before you log in to take calls
While ringing or waiting for a caller to answer
While on hold
Between calls
When you log out for a break
When you return from a break
At the end of your shift
Make self-care a habit.
During this crisis, as interpreters we must have time and practices built into our lives to care for ourselves – to be able to handle the stress we’re exposed to and experiencing. This includes time to cry and grieve and scream and break down. Time to laugh and connect and time to just let ourselves be.
Daily reflective practice allows our nervous systems a chance to decompress and rest, and builds stronger connections toward integration.
You wouldn’t ask your car to keep running without giving it gas. Don’t ask your heart, mind, or body to show up to work without having what it needs.
A daily self-care practice creates stronger connections for brain integration.
As you flex this muscle of integration, over time you will find it easier to stay calm through the hard stuff. When those around you are in disintegration, or when things are tough for you personally, your brain will naturally maintain integration in more and more difficult situations for longer periods of time.
The goal is not to become immune to disintegration, it’s to notice it.
We are human. The ability of our brain to prioritize safety when necessary is a very good thing. The goal then becomes a growing level of consciousness, where we’re able to shorten the time it takes to return to integration when we’re not actually in danger, and where we’re able to be gentle with ourselves and others throughout this messy process of being human.
In this integrated state, we become a true source of support for those around us, and are able to act with more compassion and empathy – for ourselves and others.
May we make this state of integration, compassion, and empathy the new normal.
Brain integration, dis-integration, why it matters to your interpreting and how self-care can help.
This information comes from Dr. Daniel J. Siegel, and I teach it to interpreters because it can dramatically alter our ability to attune to ourselves and regulate our emotional responses, attune to our consumers – allowing us to act with empathy and compassion, and it can also strongly impact our consumers’ ability to regulate their emotional responses.
Brain integration has a powerful impact on our interpreting interactions
Start with the hand model of the brain. 3 Parts:
PFC + Cortex – upstairs brain – executive function
Limbic Area – emotions and memory
Brain Stem – fight/flight/freeze, autonomic function
Flip-your-lid
When the brain is in integration:
Cortex, Limbic, Brain stem all connected
Cortex is regulating, soothing, and assessing all impulses from limbic and brain stem areas/downstairs brain.
When downstairs brain overwhelms the capacity of the upstairs brain, cortex tries to hang on, to maintain integration – you know what it feels like when cortex loses its grip – FLIP-LID – in a matter of seconds we have lost our ability to regulate our emotions and behavior.
Disintegration is contagious
When one person has lost emotional equilibrium, it’s much easier for the other to lose it. You may feel this when you are interpreting – especially if it is a topic, attitude or behavior that is particularly triggering to you personally. During times of crisis, disintegration is even more common.
Good news: Integration is also contagious
Integration is like a muscle, and involves several skills.
Any work that you do to create stronger connections in your brain promotes brain integration and will support you during times of stress and help you maintain integration with others who are experiencing disintegration.
From: The Whole Brain Child, by Dr. Daniel J. Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson, Ph.D.
Self-care strengthens the muscle of brain integration
In the moment – BREATHE – Deep, slow belly breathing, in and out your nose
Reflective practice – meditation, mindfulness, conscious breathing practice trains the brain toward integration
Healthy Boundaries for Interpreters – 0.2 GS CEUs – Our Saturday School LIVE workshop is happening on November 21st, 2020 from 10 am to noon pacific. Join us to discuss this tricky topic and develop tools to make holding clear, kind, healthy boundaries much easier. Saturday School LIVE workshops are a great opportunity to get to know other interpreters who are struggling with burnout and working on taking better care of themselves!
Self-Care for Stressful Times – 0.2 GS CEUs – Have you heard this episode of Brene Brown’s Unlocking Us podcast on burnout and completing the stress cycle? Do yourself a favor – listen now, and then register for Self-Care for Stressful Times! You’ll come away with more awareness of your own stress responses, specific supports that help you complete your stress cycle, and a plan for turning these actions into habits. 
