Are you a great parent? I doubt it. Are you an awful parent? I doubt it. Are you a horrible tennis player? I doubt it. Are you an awesome tennis player? I doubt it. Do you always mess things up? I doubt it. Do you never mess things up? I doubt it. Are you a scum? I doubt it. Are you a saint? I doubt it. Are you some shade of gray related to these various areas of life? I don’t doubt it.
Splitting hairs? Word games? Semantics? I don’t think so. Just ask yourself if there is any difference for you emotionally between someone telling you that “you never do anything right” and telling you that “you sometimes mess things up.” It’s not a word game anymore, is it?
“Selective Abstraction: Missing the Forest for the Trees”
An offshoot of the polarization lie is one called selective abstraction—the “can’t see the forest for the trees” way of distorting reality. We focus so much of our attention on a small part of something that we can’t see the bigger picture. For instance, have you said something fairly goofy in a crowd at a party and spent the rest of the night worrying about your remark? Now, let’s assume you handled the better part of the evening with great social grace and skill. But if you are a selective abstracter, all you focus on or think about is your goofy statement.
Rick, a friend of mine, had just gotten a nice promotion. The promotion, though, involved added pressure he wasn’t sure he could handle. One day I ran into him, and I could tell he was upset.
“I blew it! I know I’ll lose this job,” he exclaimed. “You should have seen it. There I was, making a presentation in front of my boss, and I knocked the overhead projector over. It made a noise you wouldn’t believe. Broke the dang thing, so we had to stop the meeting for a few minutes and find another one. What an absolute idiot I am. Everyone got really quiet, and I stood there feeling like a complete imbecile! I have never been so humiliated in my life.”
Rick went on like that for another few minutes. Finally, I said, “Rick, did anything good happen?”
“If you call laughing ‘good.’ That’s what my boss did. He told me after the meeting that I had done a good job on the presentation and not to worry about breaking the overhead, but I’m sure that he thinks I’m a total loser and that he made a mistake in promoting me.”
“Rick, it sounds like everything worked out fine. You might even have humanized the whole meeting.”
“What? How? It was awful!”
In spite of all that had gone right, Rick could focus only on the one thing that had gone wrong. I helped him see that he was “missing the forest for the trees” in paying attention to the one thing that went wrong and what it was doing to him emotionally. Rick somewhat resisted my efforts, but he did come to see that knocking the overhead over was the only “dead tree” during his presentation and that the “forest” looked pretty good.
As a university professor, I used to teach an introductory psychology class with an enrollment of about one hundred students. During my lectures, I would often scan the auditorium and notice the students who were not listening to my lecture. Out of the hundred students in front of me, only five or so were not paying attention, yet I would often catch myself focusing on those five to the exclusion of the ninety-five who were paying attention. I’d end up feeling anxious and depressed about the class and myself as a professor. My own “forest for the trees” problem made me feel bad about something that was, overall, quite positive.
Examples of selective abstraction in everyday life are fairly common. A person works hard all day but remembers only what he did wrong. A homemaker exerts a tremendous amount of effort to clean up her home, yet when the day is over, she sees only the things she didn’t do. A tennis player hits hundreds of good shots during a match but thinks only about the ones he missed. A parent ignores a child when he is behaving and pays attention only to his misbehavior. “Missing the forest for the trees” happens all the time.
No matter how many bad things may be going on in your life, positives are in there somewhere. You may have to work pretty hard to see them, but they are there. If we are to avoid becoming depressed and hopeless about life, we have to make sure that we don’t lose sight of the good things just because there are bad things. If we focus on every negative that happens, it is no wonder we become emotionally troubled. Although the statement may sound trite, even the darkest cloud has a silver lining in it.
“Overgeneralization: History Always Repeats Itself”
Larry was coming to see me for his weight problem. A compulsive eater, he would eat when he felt sad or lonely or hurt, which led to despair, which led to more eating, which led to being overweight. A vicious cycle!
“I’m never going to be able to stop this,” he moaned. “I’ve always been fat, and I’ll always be fat. Let’s face it.”
Larry’s prediction that he will “always be fat” is a style of distorted thinking called overgeneralization. In this distortion, any event, such as failing an exam or fighting with a spouse, leads to the lie that the future will inescapably hold more of the same. History, supposedly, always repeats itself.
Many of my clients tend to overgeneralize about their mental health. They worry that they will never get better, some going that extra fatal step and becoming sure of it. When they reach this decision, they typically leave my office and go the route of the self-fulfilling prophecy by keeping up the same self-defeating styles of thinking and acting that made them troubled in the first place.
Making negative predictions about the future has a hidden agenda underneath it. If I predict a negative future, I don’t have to do all the hard work it would take to make things better. For example, let’s say I’m a college student and I make an F on my first exam in Biology 301. Let’s also say I then predict that I will make Fs on all the future Biology 301 exams. It then becomes more likely that I will drop the class. The hidden agenda of predicting Fs on all my future exams in Biology 301 is that this prediction allows me to get out of all the hard work it would have taken to do better on the next exam.
Overgeneralizing is a common style of thinking for many married couples. “We have never gotten along, and we will never get along,” couples conclude, and they fall back into the same old destructive patterns of interacting with each other. Doing that ensures they will never get along with each other. When this prophecy fulfills itself, the couples say, “See, I knew we would never get along!” It’s almost as if they’d rather be right about their prophecy and stay miserable than wrong about it and have a good marriage. The hidden agenda is that they do not have to do any of the hard work that it takes to have a good marriage.
“Larry,” I said to my overweight client, “let me ask you something. In the last few years, have you had to learn a new skill?”
“What do you mean? Like learning that stupid computer at work? I thought it would kill me,” he said, rolling his eyes. “I would never have even started trying to learn how to operate that crazy thing if my job hadn’t been on the line. Took me forever.”
“Okay,” I said. “Did you think before you started that you’d never be able to work the computer?”
“Are you kidding? I didn’t even know how to type!” he exclaimed, throwing up his hands. “I knew I was going to be demoted.”
“When you first tried to learn it, did you think you’d never make it?” I asked.
“I thought I’d never get it,” Larry groaned. “The first month was a killer. I thought of giving up a thousand times and packing it in.”
“You thought you’d never handle it. You thought you’d always be a computer illiterate. You thought it so much that the task seemed to grow into a mountain. Every day you just knew you’d fail, but every day you kept trying, right?”
“Well, yeah, that’s what happened,” Larry agreed.
“And then what happened?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Gradually, I began to get it. I started understanding more, and now I handle computers just fine.”
“You broke through that negative prediction, didn’t yo
u?” I said.
Larry, a bit surprised, smiled and answered, “Yeah, I guess I did.” Then as if a light bulb went on in his head, he looked sideways at me and said, “And now you mean I can break through this one too?”
“You did it once, didn’t you?” I pointed out as I watched Larry getting used to the idea.
Although he continued off and on to tell me his eating problem was different, Larry and I knew that his argument was hollow. He couldn’t ignore the fact that he’d overcome a supposedly impossible problem once, and he knew that meant he could defeat others. After a few weeks, he began doing better with his overeating.
The simple truth Larry experienced was that the cards we are dealt (or deal ourselves) don’t have to be the cards we end up with. That F on the first exam doesn’t have to become the final grade in the course. That bad start with a coworker doesn’t have to turn into a bad relationship. The loneliness we feel now doesn’t have to turn into a lonely life. History doesn’t have to repeat itself. The future can be better if we really want it to be. We can change.
“Emotional Reasoning: Feelings Equal Facts”
“I’m worthless,” Angela said to me during one of our sessions together. In her late thirties, Angela had gotten a divorce ten years ago and was now considering remarriage. “I know I’ll mess up this new marriage, like everything else I do. I tell you I’m worthless.”
“Prove it,” I blurted out, much to her surprise.
“How far back do you want me to go?” she said quickly. “In high school, I lied to my best friend about going out with her boyfriend. I did that a lot. In college, I did drugs. And I not only kept lying about going out with other people’s boyfriends, but I slept with most of them. Then I flunked out of college. Then I got married to this guy I didn’t love just because he had money, and when I got tired of him, I started running around with other men until he divorced me.
Shall I go on?”
“All you’ve given me so far is proof that you have done a lot of wrong things. I want proof that you’re worthless. Does doing wrong things make people worthless?”
“Well, no, not when you put it that way,” she said, but I could see that she was not completely convinced.
“Then why do you think what you’ve done makes you worthless?” I asked.
A little of the defiance went out of her manner. “I guess because I feel worthless. I did some pretty worthless things. You gotta admit that,” she said.
Angela feels worthless; therefore, she is worthless. That’s what she said to me, and in her mind, that settled the matter. Her situation is a perfect example of emotional reasoning. It is a distortion that says, “Because I feel something to be true, it must be true.” Emotional reasoning makes feelings equal to, if not superior to, facts.
Feelings, though, are just feelings. They change quite a bit, they are hard to predict, and they often spring from irrational and unrealistic ways of thinking.
Our feelings can actually be completely at odds with the facts. In our culture, though, we worship feelings. How many pop psychology books teach that “you can trust your feelings” and “your feelings are your best guide”? What nonsense.
What would your life be like if you did nothing but follow your feelings? If you’re like me, you’d buy everything in sight, shoot people for cutting in front of you on the highway, and run off to the Bahamas with someone twenty years younger. A feeling-based life would be, at best, a chaotic mess.
Don’t get me wrong. I am not suggesting that we should ignore our feelings.
We are feeling human beings, and we need to take our feelings into consideration when we are dealing with things. But we can’t afford to let our feelings run the show. The main consideration needs to be the facts.
Sometimes couples considering marriage come to my office and trigger my concern that they are making their decision on the basis of feelings alone. They declare, “We love each other so much! We can’t imagine having any problems!” I often am tempted to say, “Well, imagine it because it will happen. Once the glow dims, you’ll wish you hadn’t let your feelings dictate your decision.”
In the premarital counseling I do, we spend time looking at the cold, hard facts: Do you communicate well? Do you resolve conflict properly? Do you have interests in common? Are you good at meeting each other’s emotional needs? Has becoming a couple made your spiritual lives stronger? The facts that emerge from the answers to these questions need to guide a couple’s decision about whether or not to marry, not just how much they feel “in love” with each other.
Unfortunately, when people turn their feelings into facts, they become much harder to help. Angela, for example, had turned her feelings of worthlessness into fact, so she had locked herself into a position that made helping her almost impossible. After all, who can argue with “facts”? All the immoral things she had done led her to feel worthless, so she decided she was. I tried to approach her problem from that perception.
“Angela, have you ever had a feeling about something that proved to be wrong?” I asked.
“What do you mean?” she answered.
“Well, a friend of mine once lent me a book. Months later he asked me if I had finished it. I was convinced I had already given it back to him. He said I hadn’t, yet I felt very strongly that I had. Turns out, I had the book after all. I found it under the passenger seat of my car. I was certain I had given it back to him, but I was dead wrong.”
“I see what you mean. Well, yes,” she admitted, “I have done that before.”
“Give me an example,” I asked.
“Well, one time in high school I felt certain that a guy I was attracted to wasn’t at all interested in me. Ten years after graduating, our senior class had a reunion. He was there, and we got to talking about the ‘good old days.’ I was a little embarrassed, but I just had to ask him about whether or not he was at all interested in me during high school. Turns out he was very interested but just didn’t have the nerve to let me know. I misread him completely.”
“So, you felt something pretty strongly that didn’t turn out to have any truth to it?”
“Yes, that’s right,” she admitted. She sat there in silence for a short time, and I could tell the wheels were turning in her head. “I think I see where you’re going with this,” she added.
“Tell me what you’re thinking.”
“You are trying to get me to see that just because I feel a certain way about something doesn’t mean I’m right. Sometimes my feelings can be off base about things, right?” she stated as much as asked.
“You got it. Your feelings seem to be not only running your life but also ruining your life. You felt like lying to friends of yours about whether or not you were dating their boyfriends, so you did. You felt like sleeping with these guys, so you did. You felt like doing drugs, so you did. You felt like marrying your ex-husband because he had money, so you did. You felt like that guy in high school wasn’t interested in you, so in your mind, he wasn’t. You feel worthless, so you are. See any pattern?” I asked.
With her eyes beginning to fill with tears, Angela replied, “It looks like I have spent my whole life letting my feelings dictate everything, and it has cost me friendships, a marriage, and my self-respect. Dr. Thurman, I don’t want to live that way anymore. I’m tired of it all.”
Reason without passion is boring; passion without reason is scary. In living out our lives, we must have both. We must reason things out with the facts but also allow ourselves to have strong feelings. But the bottom line is this: if the facts of a situation are at odds with how we feel about it, our feelings need to change.
Feeling something to be true doesn’t make it true. We cannot afford to let our feelings run the show! Pop psychology be darned—our feelings are not our best guide. The truth is our best guide.
Growthwork
So far, you have been asked to do three things with the A-B-C model. First, you were asked to keep track of the “trigger events” at “A” for a
week and assess their relative “value” as well as judge who was responsible for their occurrence. Second, you were asked to monitor your reactions at “C” for a week, paying special attention to any emotions and behavior that occurred fairly often. Finally, you were asked to note any “A causes C” reactions where you blamed your feelings and behavior on external events.
You are now ready to move on to the most important part of the model, “B.” In the “B” part of the A-B-C model, your “self-talk” occurs; that is, what you think comes into play here. Self-talk, very simply, is “private mental dialogue” where you think about (perceive, judge, evaluate, analyze) an event that has taken place at “A.” Your self-talk, as we discussed in Chapter 1, consists of all the “tapes” that play in your mind related to the things that happen to you.
The A-B-C model says that first, some kind of event (“A”) takes place (your child spills grape juice on your new carpet). Then, your self-talk (“B”) kicks into gear, and you mentally analyze the situation (I told him not to bring his drink into the family room. He never listens to me. Now my carpet is ruined!). Finally, you react (“C”) physiologically (increased heart rate, shallow breathing), emotionally (frustration, anger), and behaviorally (yell at your child, spank him).
The A-B-C model says that events (“A”) do not cause your reactions (“C”); your self-talk (“B”) does. In other words, how you think about an event—not the event itself—determines how you react to it. The Greek philosopher Epictetus, writing in the first century, put it this way: “Men are disturbed not by things but by the view they take of them.” That is the A-B-C model in a single sentence. “Men are disturbed” refers to “C,” “not by things” refers to “A,” and “but by the view they take of them” is the “B” part of our model. A modern restatement of Epictetus’s statement is, “People become upset not because of the events that happen to them but because of how they think about those events.”
The Lies We Believe Page 10