welcome everybody today's presentation of pacer integrative behavioral health we are continuing
with our series on attachment and mental health and today we are going to talk about consistency
consistency communicates a lot of things to people consistency communicates that you
as a person that the world is trustworthy so when we're consistent we are demonstrating to
ourselves to others that there is trustworthiness in the world and there's a certain requirement if
you will for having trustworthiness in order to feel safe another thing that consistency
communicates is predictability when we are consistent in the way we act the way we react
what we do what we expect then that creates a environment that is relatively predictable now
it doesn't necessarily mean you like it but it means it's predictable so consistency
allows you to use your schema or your memories if you will to anticipate what's going to happen
what is consistency in relationships look like though when you are consistent it means keeping
promises if you say you're going to do something you do something that's good consistency i mean
people who regularly break their promises obviously they're consistent in that
too but we want to develop positive consistency here so keeping your promises doing what you say
clearly articulating and maintaining structure and routine it's really important you know little
children don't understand what's expected and if you expect them to read your mind and quote
know how they're supposed to react or what they're supposed to do um they're
probably not going to be really successful then they're going to get upset or you're going to
get upset and they're going to get upset and nobody's going to understand what's going on
so it's really important that we clearly articulate you know what do we expect in
in the classroom what do we expect at the dinner table what do we expect your chores to look like
you know you get the idea here the same thing in adult relationships we need to clearly articulate
what we expect in a relationship in order to establish consistency what is it that we want
and what do we want this relationship to look like now you don't have to get overly consistent
people who are more spontaneous might find that too much consistency can get um oppressive
at times but it is important to be able to predict and understand a little bit about um
what you're what the other person wants and expects in a relationship because that that
reduces a lot of stress between the two of you if my husband comes home and he's had a
bad day i know how he's going to react and after 24 years you know i know you
know kind of what he needs in terms of space and responsiveness and all that kind of stuff
but when we first met and we first got together i did not know that i had to learn that he had to
clearly articulate and communicate to me what it was that he needed me to do to be consistent
authenticity also improves consistency when we are living authentically we are and we're not being a
chameleon then people know what to expect um we've most of us have had a friend or a family member
who was regularly sort of chameleon-like you never knew exactly which version of that person
was going to show up because it depended so much on the situation and where you where you were
and who you were with when we live authentically instead of trying to change our colors to fit in
with whomever wherever we are living authentically helps us be more consistent people know
who we are they know what to expect you know if donnelly shows up they know what to expect from
me because i am pretty pretty much an open book and i am pretty authentic in my presentation uh
no matter where i go and that really helps in relationships because then there's no guessing
about well what does this person really want and you know what types of things can we
expect open communication is the other issue and i talked a little bit earlier about
trying to make sure that we are not expecting mind reading people cannot be consistently there for us
and we don't appear consistent to them if we are expecting them to read our mind and
know what we want and when we want it we need to openly communicate our thoughts wants and
needs now one of the caveats here before you can be consistent with other people
ideally you're consistent with yourself i know that's a radical idea here when you make promises
to yourself you say i am going to you know stop criticizing myself so much or i am going
to allow myself to go to the spa on the weekend or whatever it is you do you keep those promises
you are consistent with yourself you don't deny your needs you keep the promises that you make
you identify a structure and routine that works for you and you're consistent with
yourself you are consistent in your mindfulness you regularly check in with yourself and go hey
what are my thoughts wants and needs at this moment imagine that imagine what would happen
if you regularly checked in with yourself like that in order to kind of keep a pulse on what
was going on with you so you could respond drum roll please consistently to me get your needs met
so once you start recognizing what you need and you start being consistent with yourself
a lot of times you'll start expecting others to be similarly consistent and it's important to think
about who in your life right now is relatively consistent you know we're not always all good at
being consistently consistent i think a lot of us could improve in that area but thinking
about the significant others in your life who is consistent and it doesn't necessarily have to be
you know intimate others you know best friends or um spouses or something like that my old boss
i worked for him for 14 years and he was as consistent as the sunrise you know i
could expect when he would come into work he would be dressed in a three-piece suit
with matching shoes and his presentation was the same whether we were at work or at a conference
or i was doing some sort of community appearance with him he was very consistent and authentic
in his presentation and that's one of the things that i sort of strived to model in in learning
how to be consistent myself and learning how to be more authentic it was something that uh i admired
in him but you know who else in your life is consistent is predictable you know that you know
the person or the reaction that you're probably going to get again it sometimes it's negatively
consistent you know they're going to be critical okay you know at least it's consistent so you
know what to expect and you can plan for it you can figure out how to mitigate it
i had one person in my life who and it came from a place of love but it was just i think the way
she was raised that she always had to have some um constructive feedback that usually didn't come out
so constructively every time she came to visit and one day my husband kind of pulled me aside
before she came to visit one time and he said you know she's going to have something snarky to say
so just let her get it out of here out of her system and then it'll all be good and he was right
you know she just that was just one thing she had to do i i don't know where why or where it
came from wasn't worth addressing um but it was very consistent and it was very predictable so to
respond to that to help keep myself safe to keep myself from feeling attacked or hurt when that
happened you know he had a very good suggestion just recognizing that it comes from a place of
love and it she's gonna do it but generally once she gets it out of her system it's done and then
the pressure's off and you can go along having your good time and that was so meaningful to me
to really be able to reframe it that way so consistency can also help you figure out how to
mitigate stress with people who are you know sometimes challenging to be around
and then it's important to think about how you can improve the consistency in your relationships
you know for example for me i am really good at keeping promises if i tell somebody i'm
going to do something i do my darndest to do it i mean last week for example we had the um
the snowstorm and we were snowed in well i told you guys i was going to be here at three o'clock
starting last week and since i had didn't have internet i couldn't do that but i was in the
chat room and so i was able to interact with some of you via chat and for the members i was able to
interact with you uh via snapchat and the discord server so although it wasn't the way i had ideally
planned um it was important to me to keep that obligation so consistency for me that's what i'm
really pretty good at same thing with articulating and maintaining structure and routine because
i'm a jay i love my structure but sometimes i don't communicate as openly as i probably could
and when we get down to attention we'll talk about some of that a little bit later too but
i don't always reach out to people and i'm not as consistent at um
you know it's not like i my husband calls his mother every week you know kind of like clockwork
and i'm not that consistent with following up with my friends and i could i could do better at that
i could do better at consistently touching base it's not something that uh really takes that much
time and it goes a long way to you know just kind of reaching out and virtually tapping them on the
shoulder and going hey how you doing just letting you know i'm still here and i'm thinking about you
how awesome is that for increasing trustworthiness predictability and nurturing that relationship
so remember in effective attachments we have six characteristics consistency
responsiveness attention validation encouragement and support and we're going to talk about each one
of those throughout the week today we talked about consistency and i would encourage you
to think about ways well think about why consistency could in your relationships could
help reduce stress and improve the communication and improve the quality of your relationships
and then start thinking about how you can be more consistent with yourself with your own self-care
and how you can be more consistent in your relationships with other people
so good afternoon to those of you who have logged in
in terms of
coping with a parent with borderline or narcissistic personality disorder um i
do have a video on the um youtube channel on surviving the borderline parent and that
is the really long version of the answer that i would give and you know one of the main things is
depending on the age of the child making sure that the interventions are age appropriate
younger children who are still egocentric are going to have a really hard time understanding
the the boundaries that are on roller skates so
helping them figure out a way to stay safe helping them figure out a way to feel empowered and
protect themselves you know again with the safety from the chaos that is existing in their household
in terms of uh people with adhd again there's a video on the youtube channel on uh strategies
for dealing with adhd and you know it really depends on the symptoms that are presenting
in that particular child and what's causing those symptoms uh for some re for some children um their
blood sugar levels you know if they're not get if their blood sugar dips during the day it may cause
more acting out behaviors other children that doesn't bother them so in terms of addressing any
mental health issue it's really important to examine what are the triggers
for the unwanted behavior and what are alternate behaviors that are amenable to the child that can
help them you know for example organization if disorganization is one of their problems
younger children you're going to need to be more directive
older children it's really important to empower them to brainstorm ways that they can be more
organized in or and help them set small micro goals so they can have those successes
in term of for you for y'all who are asking all these questions they're great questions
um please remember to you can email me at wellness
underscore one at yahoo.com that's wellnessunderscore1 yahoo.com and i
will go through these questions and have more detailed answers for you on monday's shows but
are there other mental health related questions
welcome jane i'm glad you were here hi morgan kim adele
so remember the email is wellness underscore one at yahoo.com and i check that i generally
just check it once a week on um either saturday or sunday that way i can prepare for
monday's show and for those of you who are
members it's you can join me in my discord chat room by downloading discord and clicking on the
link or um if you go into the community section on the youtube channel you can click on that and
if you are a member you will be able to access the members only messages that have my snapchat handle
alrighty everybody have a wonderful day i have got a 3 30 meeting so i am going to have to run
but i will see you tomorrow same time same station