I'm sitting here in my home office, looking at all the recovery and energy psychology books I have on my shelf..., and looking at my white board where I wrote some notes about Wellness,... And, I'm thinking, "I ought to do a video on this".
But as techy-handicapped as I am.... I'll have to settle for writing a blog post to try and capture this extremely empowering formula that I have put together since putting Recovery and Tapping together.
I may have to change it to Wellness and Tapping, as Wellness Recovery is what I am into more and more.
What is Wellness Recovery?
Wellness Recovery is about getting and staying well. The new way to look at illness is about getting well and not just focusing on the sickness and the symptoms, not just treating the sickness but doing wellness activities to promote wellness as well.
Wellness Recovery starts with the question: "What are you like when you're well?"
So you answer that question so its in black and white what you are like when you are well.
Then, the next question is: "What do you need to do on a regular basis to stay well?"
And that answer starts to develop your daily and weekly routine that will keep you well in the long run.
Then you work on improving that routine to create a well-rounded wellness in all the main areas of your life.
What do you need to do every day to get or stay well?
What do you need to do every weeek, every so often, every month, every year, to stay well?
There are a couple ways to create this plan. One is called W.R.A.P. and another is called G.R.A.P.E.S.
WRAP is Wellness Recovery Action Plan. Created by Mary Copeland, it is a set of questions that help to plan for one's recovery.
GRAPES is an acronym that serves as an easy to remember way to do a well-rounded daily routine of recovery. If you do something for each letter of 'grapes', then we are doing things daily to keep up well.
Growth
Reward
Accomplishment
Pleasure
Exercise
Social
Wellness plans, like WRAP, also plan for triggers. When you learn how to identify your triggers that make you sick or unwell, you can then start to plan for strategies to handle it when they happen again in the future.
In essence, you are learning your own symptom management. Recovery is all about self-management and self-help and self-directed.
You direct your own life, I just suggest that you direct it toward wellness and try to balance your activities so that each area of your life have regular wellness routines so that in the long run, over time, you will be more well.
Which is better than being sick or getting sick and not doing anything but dealing with the sick symptoms.
You're adding in more wellness things so that you have more wellness as a result.
So wellness is maintaining wellness actions on a regular basis. It doesn't have to be perfect or perfectly followed, but at least you have it to go back to when you find yourself slipping into old illness triggers or symptoms.
So in each main life area, you would rate how well it is and then set a goal for that area to make it better. Ask yourself how you want each are to look or feel or be and go with your wants when setting goals. Otherwise you won't be motivated to work towards them.
When I need to regroup or think I ask myself 3 questions and I let my mind think of the answers and write them down:
1. Where am I at?
2. What's going on?
3. What do I need to do?
That helps me clarify what my goals are in each area.
The key to change is identifying what you want to change and replacing old actions with new ones that can get the same intention that the old goals were attempting to.
Increase positive actions and decrease negative ones.
The old way of change was using cognitive-behavioral therapy. In essence, you would look at your thoughts around an action you wanted to change and work toward changing your thoughts to change your actions.
The new way with Wellness NLP is to cooperate. To get all Parts of you to agree to get your wants met.
This greatly helps reduce the resistance to change.
When you want to check in on how you're doing, ask yourself these three things:
1. What are my wins this week?
2. What were my challenges this week?
3. What is my focus this week?
When you are stuck in an old behavior, ask yourself, "What do you like about this dysfunctional behavior?" It may seem like a weird question, but you must ask yourself why you are doing something you want to change. You need to ask yourself what you're getting out of it.
Then find a new behavior that could get you that same result but in a better, healthier way.
Stages of Change
Wellness Recovery takes in to account what stage of change you are in. The goal is to move through the stages, not force an overnight change. Change is hard. Its a process. Working with your resistance and asking questions is one way to help you through the process.
Pre-contemplation - you are not thinking about change yet and may be resistance to any hint of change at this stage.
Contemplation - you are thinking about change in this stage
Action - You are starting to make changes
Maintenance - you have made changes and now are in the maintenance stage where you are keeping up your new behaviors.
Use EFT for recovery. Use NLP to empower yourself to make changes.
