RAIN – Emotional First Aid

Respond to Memories

RAIN is an acronym for Recognize, Accept, Investigate, and Non-Identify. RAIN is a practice you can learn for handling intense moments in your life that have just occurred or that recur to you as memories. Most such moments involve pain, but some can involve extreme joy.

A common scenario is an invasive memory of an event that occurred in the past but still seems alive in the present. It comes to you, triggered by some random event, and you feel its intensity to the point that it makes it difficult to concentrate in the present. You might experience shame, anger, sadness, or fear—among other feelings.

RAIN is an exercise that involves mindfulness, which is a practice of breathing in conjunction to giving your attention to activities in the present. Mindfulness is most commonly associated with the work of Buddhist monks and became widely known through the teaching of Thich Nhat Hahn (1926 -2022), a Vietnamese monk who was widely known for his work in peace activism and peace studies.

One approach to learning how to breathe mindfully is to begin by sitting in a comfortable upright position. Beathe more deeply and slightly more slowly than normally. Take a breath through your nose, pulling it down so you push out your stomach (you diaphragm). (This ensures that you are breathing in a manner that involves your parasympathetic and social engagement nervous systems. These are the calming systems of your body.)

As you breathe, pay attention to the feelings that arise from the air as it enters you. For example, feel your nostrils, your throat, the rise of your stomach, and the sensation of your body. Allow your attention to go to the wave of your breathing. At the same time, allow your thoughts to come and go. Observe them like you would the floats in a parade.

Then allow your thoughts to go to the memory you have. Here is the RAIN approach.

Recognize

Allow the memory to return. Feel it. Name what you are feeling. Here are a few common forms of memory that can be experienced as recurrent moments of pain:

• An experience of embarrassment, where you withdrew in a situation where you felt you did something wrong. Some of these memories an be of outbursts of joy or delight. Other times it is accidentally offending someone—saying the wrong thing, for instance.

• An experience of shame where you experienced almost unbearable anger when you felt invaded or disrespected.

• An experience of physical hurt, where something happened that left you in pain or injured to the point of needing to stop your activity or get help.

• An experience of losing your temper for a moment and reflecting afterward that you went too far.

• An experience related to work-- losing a job or being forced out of business. Getting turned down.

• An experience of not being accepted into a school, club or as a member of an organization.

• An experience of failing a test. Not winning at something you regarded as especially important. Not getting the service you expected.

• The experience of grief. Any loss can be the occasion for recurrent experiences of sadness of the loss.

Accept

Acceptance involves witnessing with compassion. It involves starting with a statement such as, “Okay, it happened.” “Okay, it hurt.” Do not try to explain or analyze. Do not blame yourself or anyone else. This event exists as an emotional event in your mind. It exists nowhere else. It exists only for you, and it will live or fade away in according with you memory of it.

One thing that can be helpful is to realize that memories stay with us due to the action of the amygdala, the part of our brain that is tied to our adrenal glands (on the top of the kidneys). When your system experiences a surge of excitation, it is likely to be one that is characterized by a significant flow of noradrenaline and adrenaline, and these two neurotransmitters or hormones deepen the extent to which a memory is embedded in the circuitry of the brain. Painful memories are painful due largely to this type of neurological activity.

Extreme moments of pleasure can be embarrassing if you do things that bring you embarrassment. Or imagine yelling in glee in a setting where others are offended by your outburst. You can cheer when someone loses if a victory is important to you but then regret such lack of sensitivity to what the loss meant to those who lost.  

At the same time, it can be difficult to acknowledge a painful emotional event precisely because it is so vividly stored in our neurological system. To approach the memory, then, approach it with self-compassion. Take a breath and allow the memory to come to your attention. Again, saying something simple, like “Yes, that hurt,” is a safe approach.

Investigate the feeling

To investigate is to feel or experience the feeling. When you feel the feeling, you notice your body more than what you remember about specifics of the memory. Allow the memory to emerge and enter your attention, but also attend to your feelings. For example, is your chest tightening, your breathing becoming shorter, or head feeling warmer. Does your attention thicken, so that it is harder to change your focus? Do you find it difficult to attend to what you are reading or listening to? Experience your feelings in light of the memory.

You do not need to do anything more for now. Think of this as allowing the memory event to play itself out in the present. As you do so, continue with your mindful breathing. Let your attention go to the sensation of breathing. Continue breathing as the feelings come and go, as the memory surfaces and resides. Breathe deeply and steadily.

Stop identifying (non-identify)

Break from the memory by letting your attention become aware that you are not the same as the memory. This might come by saying, “That was then. It hurt. But this is now, and now I know that it hurt. But the event is over. What I am feeling is my reaction to it. It is now time to let it go, to let it become the past.”

To stop identifying, continue with mindful breathing. Let your attention go to your breathing as you continue to witness the feeling. But allow a distance to develop as you become aware of your breathing as an experience of yourself that is more immediate than the memory. In this way, you can become aware of then and now. Think of a stream carrying away the memory as though it were a leaf or a floating twig.

The worst event ends when the event is over. Our memories can outlive events by years if we identify ourselves with them and hold them in. But the feelings they bring to us are memories, and we can release them. The process sometimes takes an effort through therapy, but we always outlive the events of our life, right up until the end. And we always have the ability, to some extent, of engaging in the RAIN steps to address them when they invade the present.

Caution: A precautionary note is needed. Some traumas are so severe that a short exercise like RAIN will not fully address them. But it is also worth considering that even with memories of serious traumatic moments, being able to do something rather than nothing in the face of powerful memories can be helpful. But it is also important to give thought to getting help if the memories are persistent, painful, and are seriously affecting your feelings about life.

Source

Lidia Zylowska, The Mindfulness Prescription for Adult ADHD.