Though we all know the routine -- how springtime flirts and feigns for weeks on end -- most of us reach a personally-determined limit toward the elements of winter. Likely, yours has arrived. As my friend texted on Monday, “Look outside! It’s snowing napkins right now!” It was beautiful and the snowflakes were huge. We can appreciate the inevitable and also feel disapproving. Once we experience the warmth of one spring day, it becomes harder and harder to tolerate a return to cold and rain or snow. But that’s just the weather. How about other frustrations, like… other people, or when things are going along just fine, until they aren’t? Or even just coping with ourselves from day to day? Context and expectations dramatically alter the range of our patience in a given situation and challenge our perception of what feels acceptable and what may feel like an affront, as if we are being singled out for difficulty. The trajectory for a day can shift swiftly depending on our level of patience.
There is a term in western psychology called, “affect tolerance,” which refers to our experience of intense feelings without dissociating from them or becoming overwhelmed by them. Though we may not like the discomfort of our impatience toward unmet wants, the presence of patience allows us to move forward with more reasonable calm and with some tolerance for disappointment, as temporary or prolonged as it may be. And the absence of patience? We all know how that feels. Not so great. Impatiently, we want impatience to be over! The harmful part is not so much in feeling the discomfort that arises with impatience as it is the potential for sneaky-feelings of comparing how we actually feel with how we think we should be feeling. And even harder on ourselves, comparing how we reacted with how we wished we had responded instead. Without a practice to regulate our reactivity (and we’re all reactive at times), it will inevitably fester and foster more of what we don’t want.
Thankfully, patience and impatience are not feelings, they are behaviors and they present important information about our personal anxieties and fears. It’s not an elusive angelic state of compliance or forced yes-ness, it’s the presence we cultivate when we are triggered. While we cannot control feelings, we can control how we respond. It’s a universal experience to lose patience (frequently in these times!) and even more so in the life of a careparter. No one would debate this, though the nagging idea of a “'good' person/caregiver would xyz" … creates additional stress. This common caregiving pattern comes at a price and with a tax. The first is the cost of feeling impatient and the unpleasantness of it, though that is short-lived and nothing out of the ordinary. The tax is what really hurts, and unlike the financial kind, it’s not required to pay. This is the reactivity, and later on, the judgment, the self-judgment as well as any tension and relational harm which goes unrepaired in the wake of an impatient exchange. This is particularly challenging in dementia care when a care partner may be holding the details and nuance as well as the long-term memory of countless difficult interactions. The biting impatience may be fleeting, though if a stinger remains, resentment can set in. Our memory does not work well when we lose our calm, though our nervous system will keep score. Over time, the reactivity of impatience compounds making smaller irritants unbearable. Which is why on one day, or with another person, we may laugh something off and another day, feel unnerved and taunted by a similar instance. Our stress response can either move us toward regulation or toward dysregulation. When we are dysregulated, we perceive threats where there may be few to none and the conditions for patient behaviors to arise will become very limited. And here is where something really helpful can be inserted without needing to suppress, disavow or deny our true feelings: radical acceptance.
In therapeutic approaches for managing stress -- such as Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) which includes practical training, reframing and emotional regulation strategies -- there is an emphasis on radical acceptance and on our choices in situations we cannot control. Which frankly, is most everything outside of our own responses. This is a fairly wide net, and the approach, which includes mindfulness and cognitive therapy interventions, helps build our capacity for greater patience - toward ourselves and others. Even when patience feels elusive, we can inquire: Can the part of me which is feeling impatient right now be met with some patience and kindness? Yes. Though it takes practice.
A key element in distress tolerance is the attitude of acceptance or more simply, not fighting reality. In improv, it’s referred to as Yes/And practice. Here is a wonderful example of this in dementia care by Monte Carter and Karen Stobbe.
Rather than being a passive act, radical acceptance is active and engaged responsiveness. It validates everyone involved without force and without negating true (even opposing) feelings, which makes the outcome transformative, primarily because it’s so inclusive and not resistant or forcing a change. We can be authentic and struggle and remain connected without additional harm. The restriction of impatience is opened by radical acceptance in the moment which allows room for vulnerability. Vulnerability invites connection and spaciousness alongside difficulty which generates some relief. In this way, we can be accountable without needing to be saints. The intensity of negative feelings will dissipate and our choices become clearer. We’ll see them again, like giant napkin-sized snowflakes on a spring day. They’ll help us snap back into the moment with a more patient perspective and then maybe we can laugh, and if not laugh, we can breathe. We can always stop and begin again.
If you would like to experience a patience practice, I invite you to listen to the below meditation from a past Have a Seat drop in session.
