Inner Work with Bradley Lewis | Consider Dropping the Fight...

In this spotlight interview, therapist Bradley Lewis shares insights on how to challenge unhelpful thinking patterns and hit pause on our immediate urges.

Welcome to another edition of The Inner Work Series: What Therapists Want You to Know, a collection of short interviews that feature grounded wisdom from real therapists.

Today I'm honoured to feature Bradley Lewis (R.Psych, MSc), a Registered Psychologist with expertise in Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT), Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing (EMDR), mindfulness-based modalities, and Solution-Focused Therapy.

Interview with Bradley Lewis, Calgary Therapist

Q1. What’s one mindset shift you often help your clients make?

In my work, I often see folks that struggle with anxiety and emotion regulation who feel overwhelmed by their emotions and try to push them away or try to get rid of them altogether.

This can put them in a destructive loop of pushing away their emotions and their emotions pushing them back.

What I’ve noticed that has been a helpful shift for clients is getting them to consider dropping the fight. That is, shifting the goal from trying to get rid of their emotions to actually moving closer to their emotions.

Now when I say this, I don’t mean that people should stay in their emotions all the time or that there aren’t times when distance from their emotions is helpful, however the shift we want the client to understand is that emotions have important messages to tell us about ourselves.

We want to hear these messages and consider what we can do to hear them better.

If I were to use a metaphor to describe this, I would say that it’s like when we turn on the radio with the volume too loud, we don’t hear the music beyond the pain it causes in our eardrums. Or like when it comes on with just static.

If we want to hear the music, we wouldn’t just turn off the radio, what we want to do is build the capacity to turn down the volume or to tune the static to a station that we can hear music from.

Once we hear the message of the music, then we are able to hear more clearly what our emotions are trying to tell us. Through tuning in to our emotions, most of us can feel empowered by our emotions instead of feeling defeated or debilitated from them.

Q2. What’s one small habit or daily action that helps with emotional resilience?

This could be considered a psychology “buzzword” these days, but I have been astounded by the impact that mindfulness has for my clients and my own personal wellbeing.

Research has found that regular mindfulness practice for even 5 minutes a day can accumulate into big gains in our ability to regulate our emotions and challenge unhelpful thinking patterns.

I think most of the benefits come from developing the skill to hit pause on our immediate urges, taking an observer position towards our own internal experiences.

An observer position is one in which we take a step back and intentionally focus on bringing our attention to our thoughts, emotions, or bodily feelings without acting on them.

Meaning maintaining a focus on them and allowing them to come and go from our attention without holding onto them or pushing them away.

Mindfulness incorporates a wide variety of helpful skills that can positively impact a person’s relationship with emotions.

In addition to building our capacity to observe, most mindfulness practices involve what I would call one of the most overrated and yet also underrated skills, the skill of paced breathing, or regulating our breath.

I'm certain there have been readers who have had the experience of being told to breathe when they're feeling anxious or overwhelmed, and that actually made them feel pretty invalidated and probably made them feel more upset.

No, breathing does not solve all our life’s problems, but how breathing can help is that, as research has found, when our breath cycle is extended to 10-11 seconds, it can have the reliable effect of down regulating our nervous system which allows us to engage with observing ourselves more effectively.

This, in turn, can help us engage with the problem solving parts of our brain more effectively. And it has the added benefit of helping to disrupt our initial urges or automatic responses and take a moment to try to take an observer position towards our emotion.

Q3. What’s one question you wish more people asked themselves (or their therapist)?

What would the hypothetical future me, who is on the other side of the hard work of the therapy that I am endeavouring to do, likely tell me about the current moment I am facing now?

I think this question is an important one for anyone considering seeing a psychologist, or when they are in the midst of a difficult spot in their work on their mental health.

I think it’s a powerful one because it reminds clients of why they would want to face what feels like insurmountable struggles and that there is hope that they may not always feel this way.

It’s also a reminder that most clients have already made it through past situations that have felt overpowering to them and that can likely be true for their current situation as well.

As they say, hindsight is 20/20, and to elicit this perspective for the current moment can be incredibly powerful.

Q4. Recommend a favorite resource:

I often like to send clients YouTube videos so that they can have a chance to review skills and try to make sense of them as they hear them in another voice. I like to send clients to two different YouTube channels. One for ACT strategies and another for DBT skills.

Both of these channels are great resources for bite sized info of skills and helpful ideas.

The ACT videos are created and presented by the creator of ACT, Dr. Russ Harris.

The DBT videos were created by clinical psychologists specializing in DBT, which I believe at least one of whom was advised by Dr. Marsha Linehan (the creator of DBT) during their graduate schooling.

Q5. What’s one myth about therapy you’d love to bust?

Therapy is just talk.

Since the 1900s psychotherapy has been referred to as the ‘talking cure’.

Though we have come a long way since Freud, I find a lot of people think that change is found through just talking about things. Talk is a large part of therapy but there is much more involved as well.

For most therapists, it's about talk therapy that is narrowed into defined goals and then using research backed strategies to approach tackling these goals.

Some therapies like DBT, have a teaching component towards actionable skills for regulating emotions and changing behaviours.

Or CBT, which takes a look at our limiting thoughts and beliefs and works to expand our perspectives so that we can be more flexible in managing life and our emotions.

EMDR involves less talk and more of a focus on internally processing our past traumatic experiences within a trusted and supportive therapeutic relationship.

Knowing that therapy is not just talk is important because it can help clients be more prepared for the hard but rewarding work ahead of them.

Find Bradley Lewis

Enjoyed reading Bradley's insights and answers to the above questions? Please visit Bradley's website, rethinkwellpsychology.net and additional links below to connect with him and learn more about his work.

Bradley's Links: