5
DISTORTION LIES
The less clearly we see the reality of the world—the more our minds are befuddled by falsehood, misperceptions, and illusions—the less able we will be to determine correct courses of action and make wise decisions.
—M. Scott Peck1
Do you ever blow up over small things?
Do you take things too personally?
Do you tend to use words such as always and never?
Do you sometimes miss the “big picture” because you focus too much on specifics?
Do you tend to predict the future from the past?
Do you allow your feelings to be more important than the facts?
Be honest. How did you answer each question? Each one reflects a distorted way of thinking that will wreck your emotional health, your relationships, even your faith. When we distort reality, we are, in effect, lying to ourselves. We have turned reality into something it isn’t. Like looking at something in one of those warped mirrors at a carnival, distorted thinking turns reality into something it isn’t.
The truth of the matter is that all of us distort reality in various ways. Borrowing from the work of psychiatrist David Burns, I want to explore six of the most self-destructive ways we distort reality.2Let me forewarn you—you do all six, you do them a lot more than you realize, and you are paying a huge price for doing so. On that encouraging note, let’s take a look into these six misshapen “mirrors” and see how they cause us to distort the truth.
“Magnification: Making a Mountain Out of a Molehill”
Jill was dragging by the time she reached the door of her home. It had been a very, very long day. Almost nothing had gone right at work. As she opened the door from the garage, she glanced into the den. The place was still a wreck from her son’s video-watching party the night before.
“This place is a mess!” she said at the top of her voice.
At that inopportune moment, her son walked in the door.
Jill exploded. “You promised! You promised me this morning you’d clean everything up before you went to school! This is all I need to see after a day like today! You’re grounded for a month!” And then leaving her son standing speechless, she stomped off to the bedroom, slamming the door behind her.
Jill is suffering from distorted thinking called magnification. In this way of thinking, an event is made much bigger than it really is. By reacting the way she did to the mess left by her son, she made a mountain out of a molehill. And when she did, she was lying to herself. By lying to herself, Jill turned up the volume on her emotions.
Odds are, you’ve been through a scene like this. The tendency to magnify is one of the more common ways we distort reality. We often take small, 5¢ events and react to them as if they were huge, $500 events. (The flip side of magnification, taking an event and minimizing it, is equally unhealthy.) But the emotions don’t fit the situation. The more we magnify, the more emotional we get. The more emotional we get, the more likely we are to act badly.
I, for example, have a tough time keeping my cool in traffic. Someone’s failure to give a turn signal, as small as that is, can yank my chain. Given that it is impossible to go out on the highway without seeing someone doing something wrong, my tendency to magnify can make driving a frustrating and anger-provoking experience. Then on top of overreacting, I mentally point my finger at the offending motorist as if he is the real culprit for the feelings I am having (“A causes C” thinking). I do all this rather than admit my tendency to magnify was the real reason I’m so downright irritated. Ugh!
As our lives unfold, we will experience thousands of 5¢ irritations (for example, a person with twelve items in the ten-item checkout line), hundreds of $250 events (for example, not getting a well-deserved raise), and more than a few $500 tragedies (for example, the death of a loved one). Total up these events, and you get a very difficult life. A person who makes each event even bigger mentally causes his life to be almost unbearable. No one is built to cope with a life that feels that big all the time.
How should Jill have handled that “one too many straws on the camel’s back” mess her son left in the den? She needed to (1) see that she was making a big deal out of something relatively minor; (2) count to ten (count to one hundred if you are really angry); and (3) assert herself with her son to get him to clean up. When you feel like wringing someone’s neck, recognizing you are making a mountain out of a molehill is easier said than done. Yet if you hope to achieve mental health and have reasonably healthy relationships with others, you have to learn to see molehills as molehills and mountains as mountains.
“Personalization: Taking Everything Personally”
“He comes home late every night from work,” Cindy was saying in one of our sessions. She and her husband, Paul, were seeing me for marriage counseling.
“Why do you think he does this?” I asked her.
“It’s obvious,” she said, folding her arms. “He comes home late because he doesn’t have the least bit of respect for me. He doesn’t want to be with me. He doesn’t love me anymore.”
Cindy’s reaction to Paul’s lateness is a style of distorted thinking called personalization. In this style of thinking, a person overestimates the extent to which an event is related to him.
We all do it, don’t we? Whether the event is someone looking at us “funny” or cutting us off in midsentence or forgetting an appointment with us, we often interpret the action as a reflection of us or about us in some way.
Couples tend to personalize quite a bit. If the husband leaves his dirty socks in the middle of the bedroom floor, criticizes too much, or never wants to talk, the wife takes it personally. If the wife is always with her girlfriends, spends too much money, or doesn’t wear the perfume he bought her, the husband takes it personally. Like little kids, we think egocentrically (self-centeredly) as if everything that happens around us is about us.
I’m not suggesting that we should react with indifference to what people do or that their behavior is unrelated to how they feel about us. I’m only suggesting that our tendency to personalize their actions makes us overreact, which only makes the situation worse. You can’t handle things well when you take them personally. Not only is the original problem still there, but unnecessary resentment and bitterness are added to the mix.
Cindy took Paul’s lateness as a personal affront rather than as a statement about Paul—how overinvolved at work he is, how he runs from intimacy, how he can be insensitive to other people’s feelings, and so on. By taking his actions personally, she ended up paying the price, becoming bitter, distraught, and unloving. I responded to her as I respond to most of my patients who personalize things.
“Cindy, could there be other reasons for his continual lateness?”
She frowned and said, “I guess it’s possible, but I sure can’t think of any offhand.”
“In any given situation, let’s assume there are at least four explanations for someone’s behavior. Try to name four things that might explain Paul’s lateness beyond that it has anything to do with you,” I said.
She sat silent.
“Cindy, come on, give it a try,” I finally said.
She made a face. “Okay. I guess he could just have a problem with being late. You know, he doesn’t manage his time well. He does tend to struggle with that. But he used to be only ten or fifteen minutes late, not an hour or more.”
“Okay,” I said. “That’s one.”
“I suppose he could be caught up in wanting to impress his boss.”
“That’s possible,” I said. “He could be feeling a lot of pressure to keep his boss happy.”
“Mmmm,” she answered. “Maybe.”
“How about a third one?”
“He doesn’t know how to say no,” she said, teeth clenched. “You know, somebody comes by to ask him an important question or talk about a problem right before he is ready to leave, and he doesn’t feel comfortable telling the person he needs to go.”
“That could very well be true,” I said. “And the fourth?”
She looked me in the eye. “He doesn’t want to be home with me,” she said defiantly.
“C’mon, a fourth reason that has nothing to do with you. Does he have trouble with intimacy?” I asked.
“Well, yes, he does. He rarely talks about his feelings. I always have to pull everything out of him.”
“His lateness could be about that. Intimacy could be scary for him. He may feel safer at work where he’s more in control. So he stays there later and later.”
She pursed her lips, then nodded. “Maybe. But I still think he doesn’t want to be home with me.”
“That can be a self-fulfilling prophecy, you know,” I said.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“If you react badly to his lateness because you are taking it personally, he may begin to think of you and home in the very way you don’t want him to.
And he might stay at work even longer.”
Cindy didn’t reply, but it was obvious from her face that she understood the truth of what I said. Of all the explanations for Paul’s lateness, she had chosen the only one that had to do with her personally. The possibility that his lateness had nothing to do with her had never really crossed her mind.
“Wait a minute!” you may be saying. “Paul’s lateness is rude and insensitive to Cindy’s feelings. She should be mad at him for neglecting her!”
Of course, there is some truth to that. But take a minute to think this through. If Cindy takes Paul’s lateness personally, she will react too strongly and probably browbeat him in order to get him to change. With her reacting that way, do you think Paul will want to change? If he does change just to get her off his back, do you think the changes will last?
In my experience, situations such as Cindy and Paul’s don’t get resolved when one or both people take the other’s actions personally. Taking something personally makes you resentful toward it, resentful people do mean things, and mean actions don’t lead to intimacy.
Instead of personalizing the things that happen to us, then, we need to stop and ask a very important question: Is what the other person did a reflection of me or the other person? Etch the answer on your brain: people’s actions are always a reflection of who they are. When someone treats you badly (or nicely), that is a statement about who he is as a human being, not a statement about you. We have to learn to see things this way if we hope to get through life reasonably sane.
If someone intentionally rides my bumper in traffic, I can think, He doesn’t respect me and is trying to ruin my day! or I can think, He has little respect for other drivers, and I happen to be the person he is disrespecting at the moment. This may sound like splitting hairs, but these two views create totally different emotional responses. The first way of thinking makes what he is doing a slap in my face. The second is an objective observation about the other driver, and the emotional response to that bit of truth is more appropriate.
It reminds me of a humorous quote I like. At age twenty, we worry about what others think of us. At forty, we don’t care what they think of us. At sixty, we discover they haven’t been thinking about us at all. People act the way they do because of who they are, not because of who we are. We can’t afford to lose sight of that fact, given that people will sometimes treat us badly.
The next time someone swerves in front of you on the highway or doesn’t return your phone call or leaves the newspaper all over the couch, try to remind yourself that what he did is not a reflection of you but a reflection of him. Let it be.
“Polarization: Making Everything Black or White”
“Everything is so black and white to you! You hardly ever see any shade of gray!”
Have you ever had this criticism thrown your way? If so, you are being accused of a style of distorted thinking called polarization. The polarizer takes reality and cuts it into extremes of black and white (all or nothing, great or awful, never or always). Whatever the shade of gray may be in a given situation, the polarizer has a hard time seeing it.
One of the most serious forms of polarized thinking is scum/saint thinking. More than a few of my clients view themselves morally as either completely scummy or completely saintly, or they flip back and forth between the two extremes. Along these lines, I once read an interview with actor Daniel J. Travanti, best known for his portrayal of Captain Furillo on the television show Hill Street Blues. When asked about his struggle as a young actor with alcoholism, he described himself as having been an “egomaniac with strong feelings of inferiority.” Basically, he was saying that he flipped back and forth between black/white extremes—feeling like a scum or feeling like a saint. His alcoholism may have been, in part, a way to numb the pain of such radical highs and lows.
Now don’t get me wrong. We do scummy things, and we do saintly things. But no one is a scum or a saint. No one on this planet is as awful as he could be, and no one is as good as he could be. There is not one perfectly saintly person or one perfectly scummy person on earth. To label ourselves as scum or saint or to stick either label on others is to miss seeing the whole person. When aimed inward, the label of scum breeds self-condemnation and depression, while the label of saint breeds arrogance and pride.
The saints are an interesting group. I have had hundreds of people in my office who never in their wildest dreams had thought they would do the things they did. The truth about us as humans is that we are capable of doing almost anything. The saints do not—cannot—believe this truth. When they “fall,” they are in shock about the impossibility of their actions. Usually, it takes a tremendous amount of work to help such people see the arrogance behind their assumption that they were somehow too saintly to do such things.
Though she’d never admit it, Sally saw herself as a saint. All her life she’d played the role of the “good girl.” She grew up in the church and was taught a strong value system, so she became a highly moralistic adult and an avid churchgoer. Two years ago, if you’d asked Sally whether she would ever commit adultery, she would have either laughed or sniffed indignantly. Yet that is exactly what she did. She had been friends with a man at her office for years. One night Sally and this man were still working after everyone else had left. And the unthinkable happened.
“How could I have done this? How could I let this happen?” cried Sally in one of our first sessions. How could she be such a scum? That was what she wanted to ask. How could she, of all people, commit such an act?
“I feel so ashamed. I’ve come this close to suicide!” she said, holding her thumb and forefinger a quarter of an inch apart. “How could it have happened?”
“You didn’t think you would ever do something like this,” I observed.
“Not in a million years,” she cried.
“Why not?” I asked.
“What do you mean?” she asked, sounding hurt.
“Why did you think that you would never do something like this?”
“Well,” she stammered, “it’s just not something that I thought I could ever do. I guess I thought I was a more moral person than that. I’m ashamed to say it, but I thought only immoral people had affairs.”
“You thought you were too good to have an affair,” I suggested.
“I don’t like the sound of that. I don’t like to admit that I think I’m better than others, but I guess I do,” she confessed.
“We all have blind spots—things about ourselves we don’t see that are, nevertheless, true,” I observed. “You thought you were incapable of certain wrongs, didn’t take an honest look at the possibility, and got blindsided.”
“Yes, but me of all people. I just don’t think I can live with what I have done.”
“Me of all people” is the exact thinking that helped trip her up—a good example of “pride goeth before destruction.” Why? Have you ever noticed that if you know you’re weak in a certain area, you’re more careful about it? For instance, if know you are a weak swimmer, you wear a life ve
st or are more careful in the water, right? Often, those who drown are the ones who overestimate their ability to swim, not underestimate it.
Perhaps a better analogy would be your car’s blind spot—a point where the side view and rearview mirrors miss what’s coming behind you. If you know your car has a blind spot, you don’t trust the mirrors as much. You turn your head to see what’s coming. Failure to do so can have serious consequences. We, like Sally, have blind spots. We fool ourselves into thinking that we are somehow better or worse than we are, and we end up having a major crash of some kind.
The pride involved in thinking too highly (or even too lowly) of yourself can set the stage for committing immoral acts you never thought you would because you didn’t watch out for your blind spot. You’re saying you don’t have one. That’s exactly what happened to Sally. Going all the way back to her unloving father, she had needs for male attention and affection that were never met. She married a man much like her father, and her needs continued to go unmet. She filled this void with work, kids, home decorating, and volunteer activities. In a moment she didn’t see coming, she tried to get her needs met in an immoral way—with a man whose company she’d enjoyed for years. Her neediness overwhelmed her strict moral sense. And like a car in her blind spot, it overtook her because she didn’t turn to look.
The challenge here is to be humble enough to see the shade of a situation properly, reading black as black, white as white, and the in between as whatever shade of gray it is. There are definitely times to think about things in all-or-nothing, never-always, great-awful, black-white terms, but it is also true that they are infrequent. We need to think about many people and situations in terms of grayer shades of reality where words such as sometimes, frequently, often, occasionally, and good are more honest and appropriate.
The Lies We Believe Page 9