The difference between a life-lens, or a perspective, and thoughts about events (refer to Chapter 6 for more information about distorted thoughts) is that you apply the same lens to a variety of situations, whereas your thoughts are generally more specific to a particular event. Thus, if you have the guilty lens, you’re likely to end up having a range of different, guilt-related thoughts when you make any errors, big or small, as opposed to thoughts of being unloved as a consequence of your mistake.
For example, Lionel’s life-lens, of seeing himself as inferior, causes him to have a multitude of thoughts, which in practice actually do him a disservice in a variety of different situations. At parties, he has thoughts about how poorly others regard him, so he tries to blend into the background. At work, he fails to put himself forward for promotion because he doesn’t rate his own abilities, and also thinks that others at his level are loads better than him. At the neighbourhood association meetings, he’s loath to participate, because he assumes that no one is going to take him, or his ideas, seriously. Though his thoughts in each situation are different, they all relate to his one lens, the perspective that he’s inferior to others.
Uncovering Your View
You’re now probably curious about which life-lenses you are looking through. All is about to be revealed. Discovering your life-lens can unearth the root cause of much of your emotional distress – depression as well as other troubling feelings, such as anger, anxiety, and worry.
Awareness is the first step on the path towards change. Changing a problematic lens is difficult unless you first identify the lens (or lenses) you’re dealing with. You need to find out the specific lenses that may be causing trouble in your life. And just like people having short and long-sightedness, the lenses that shape your perspective also exist as contrasting opposites, as you can see in Table 7-2.
The Problematic Life-Lenses Questionnaire in Table 7-2 contains a description of what we’ve found to be some of the most important distorted lenses. Take your time and don’t rush this questionnaire. Before going through this questionnaire, please note the following:
Answer as honestly as possible. Sometimes, people readily spot how they think they should answer, and reply in that way rather than with an honest self-appraisal. Self-deception isn’t useful.
Base your answer on how often you feel and react in situations that relate to each lens. For example, if you frequently feel that you are inadequate, but know that in reality you are adequate, answer on the basis of how you feel when your adequacy comes into question, such as when you’re asked to give a presentation.
Take your time. Reflect on various events and situations that have happened to you and that are relevant to each lens. For example, in answering questions about being scared of abandonment, versus avoiding intimacy, think about the relationships you’ve had, and how you feel and react to those close to you.
Don’t worry about inconsistencies. The lenses come in opposite pairs, and you may find yourself using first one, and then the other of the opposing pairs. Thus, if you’re a perfectionist, you may also feel inadequate if you make a mistake. Or, if you normally feel unworthy and undeserving, you may find yourself feeling angry and entitled when your needs unexpectedly go unmet. People often go from one to the other of a pair of opposing lenses, so don’t worry if you think that you appear to be a bit inconsistent.
Answer on the basis of how often each lens describes you. If some aspects of the description apply and others don’t, just underline the aspects that describe you and rate yourself on them, noting how often they apply to you.
Use a scale of 0 to 4 to rate the frequency. Use 0 if the lens almost never describes you, 1 if it does occasionally, 2 if it does sometimes 3 if it usually describes you, and 4 if it almost always describes you.
Table 7-2 Problematic Life-Lenses Questionnaire
Lens
Opposite Lens
____ Inferior: I feel I am less significant and important than other people. I see others as better than me. I feel like I don’t fit in because there’s something lacking. about me
____ Superior: I feel like I’m far above other people. Truly, few are my equal.
____ Unworthy: I just don’t feel like I deserve to have good things happening to me. I feel uncomfortable whenever someone does something nice for me.
____ Entitled: I deserve the best of everything. I expect to have almost anything I want. If my needs unexpectedly go unmet, I feel angry.
____ Scared of abandonment. I need lots of reassurance to feel loved. I feel lost without someone in my life, and I worry about losing those I care about. I feel jealous and cling to my loved ones because of my fear.
____ Intimacy avoidant. I don’t like to get close to anyone. I’d just as soon stay away from any emotional involvement. I don’t need anybody in my life.
____ Inadequate: I feel like I’m not as talented or skilled as most other people. I just don’t measure up. I don’t like taking on things I’ve never done before if they look difficult.
____ Perfectionistic: I feel like I must do everything perfectly. And if I want something done right, I’d better make sure I’m the one to do it.
____ Guilty: I feel guilty and that I deserve to be blamed. I worry about whether I’ve done the right or wrong thing. I hate hurting anyone else.
____ Without conscience: I don’t let any such nonsense as morality and conscience stand in my way if I want to do something.
____ Vulnerable. Bad things happen all the time. I worry a lot about the future. I’m scared. The world feels very dangerous.
____ Invulnerable. I’m invincible. Nothing can hurt me. I have superb luck. The world treats me well. I never worry about taking risks.
Any life-lens that you rated as 2 or higher, in terms of how frequently it describes you, probably gives you problems now and then. You have to appreciate that these life-lenses can make you susceptible towards negative feelings and to depression. Even if you’ve overcome your depression by working on your troubling thoughts discussed in Chapters 5 and 6, you’re likely to find it useful to do further work on these lenses. That’s because if you change your life-lenses, you can lessen the likelihood of depression reoccurring in the future.
Don’t despair if you rated many of these life-lenses as frequently applying to you. We find that working slowly but surely, most people can tackle multiple lenses in just the same way as they deal with one or two.
Challenging Life Perspectives
Assuming you’re fully aware that you’re looking through distorted lenses, now what? We recommend that you take one distorted lens, or perspective, at a time, re-cut it, and then clean and shine it up. Not always an easy task! Life-lenses are manufactured out of long-lasting, emotionally intense material, hardened through the years. Therefore, you need to go slowly and take your time.
If the task of re-engineering your life-lenses ends up being too difficult, we’ve found that many people can at least put their old, distorted lenses away in a drawer for a while. You may still find yourself using your old lenses occasionally, but as time goes by your old lenses are no longer going to be the only way you look at yourself and the world.
You can expect the task to take time if you’ve been depressed for a long while, or if you’ve been experiencing recurring depressions. However, with patience and diligence, you can succeed. If you start to waver, take a look at Chapter 3, which deals with breaking barriers to change.
Avoid trying to go to the opposite extreme in your approach to change. For example, if you have the inadequate lens, you won’t solve the problem by setting your sights on perfection. Having the perfectionistic lens is the opposite extreme, and can be as troublesome as the inadequate lens. Similarly, if have the scared of abandonment lens, avoid the temptation to believe that you need no one in your life (the intimacy avoidant lens). Later in the section on ‘Seeing Clearly: Replacing the Distorting Lenses,’ we show you how to make up a prescription for a lens that’s halfway between such oppo
sites.
Finding self-forgiveness
Finding self-forgiveness is a crucial step that ultimately leads to removing and replacing your distorted life-lenses. All too often, people beat themselves up for having distorted perspectives. Punishing yourself merely drains you of much needed energy for making difficult changes. It’s like running a race and hitting yourself on the head with a hammer at the same time because you haven’t yet reached the finishing line.
Instead, we suggest that you explore ways of forgiving yourself, thereby freeing up your energy for better purposes. An approach that has been proved to be helpful to many of our clients is called the ‘Childhood Review.’
The Childhood Review asks that you look back over the emotionally important events in your life, particularly from the perspective of how they may have contributed to the origins of your life-lens. For example, if you have the scared of abandonment life-lens, look back on your life for possible causes, such as:
Parents divorcing when you were very young
Emotionally rejecting parent(s)
Being left alone for long periods of time at an early age
After identifying likely causes, ask yourself if those life-disrupting events may have shaped the development of your life-lens. If so, try going easy on yourself. Appreciate that everyone is, in a sense, at the best place that he or she can possibly be, given each person’s unique life history, genetics, biology, culture, and other such factors.
Focus on what you can do about future changes rather than beating yourself up over a past that you can’t change.
Separating then from now
Your life-lenses are largely shaped by emotionally intense events in childhood. As an adult, when you look at current life experiences, the lens makes you see occurrences from the perspective of childhood events, as if they are now happening all over again. You may find it useful to compare and contrast the events triggering your problematic life-lens with how you viewed the world in your childhood. When you do, take into account that your reaction probably has more to do with events from long ago than with what’s happening now.
Eileen repeatedly runs into trouble with her guilty life-lens. When she makes the smallest error or social blunder, she feels overwhelmed with guilt and self-loathing. She takes the Problematic Life-Lenses Questionnaire (see Table 7-2) and becomes aware of the extent to which she struggles with one particular lens.
Eileen’s therapist suggests that she fills out a Then and Now Form to help her appreciate that her reaction relates more to the past than the present. He suggests that Eileen writes down her problematic life-lens in the left column; in the middle column records one or more images from her childhood that may have contributed to the development of the lens; and, finally, writes about the event currently triggering her guilty feelings in the right-hand column. Table 7-3 shows what Eileen does with the Then and Now Form.
Table 7-3 Eileen’s Then and Now Form
Problematic Life-Lens
Childhood Image(s)
Current Triggers
Guilty: I worry about whether I’ve done the wrong thing. I can’t stand hurting anyone else.
Mother constantly tried to make us kids feel guilty. She repeatedly called us ungrateful, lazy, and worthless. She told us we were ruining her life.
When I forgot to pay my coffee fund contribution for two months, I felt really guilty and sick to my stomach. My boss told me it wasn’t a big deal, but I couldn’t forgive myself.
The priest in our church bombarded us with messages that we’d all end up in hell if we committed sins. I was terrified and believed him for years.
I found a £20 note in the car park, and kept it instead of handing it in. I felt like I’d committed a mortal sin and broken one of the Ten Commandments.
My father stopped me from going out with boys until I was 18. He said that all boys wanted was sex and sex was disgusting. He made me think that I was perverted for having any sexual feelings.
When I had a brief fantasy about our neighbour, I felt guilty for weeks. And yet I know that I’d never have an affair.
As Eileen reviews her Then and Now Form, she realises that the events in her present-day world pale into insignificance compared with her vivid images from childhood. Yet, the current events call up almost identically unhappy emotions. She starts reminding herself that her reactions that she’s experiencing as so intense because of her earlier history. She starts saying things to herself, such as, ‘I feel exactly like I did when I was 13 years old, and my father yelled at me for looking at a boy. Let’s face it – a brief fantasy, which I’ve no intention of acting on, is pretty insignificant compared with my father’s outrageous behaviour.’
Try using the Then and Now technique with your problematic life-lenses. You may need to repeat the exercise many times, but as you do, you’re probably going to find your life-lens cutting down the impact on your emotions.
Carrying out a cost/benefit analysis
Many people would be willing to change their problematic lenses sooner than they do, but are held back because they believe the lenses protect or benefit them in some way. At first sight, you may think that idea sounds unlikely. For example, why is someone going to think that feeling unworthy is in any way beneficial?
One of the reasons life-lenses feel beneficial is that people believe in the view, and they fear the consequences which may arise if they discard the lens. We give you a couple of illustrations of how such concerns play out for several different lenses:
Entitled: Someone with this lens fears that if they give up feeling entitled to everything they want and need, this means that they’re not going to get what they want.
Inadequate: If a person with this lens decides that he is in no way inadequate, but is the equal of others, he may start taking risks, such as volunteering to lead a project at work. But he doesn’t do so because he’s absolutely convinced that his inadequacy lens is true, and if he does volunteer, that he’s going to fail miserably if he tries to discard the view of inadequacy.
Superior: A person who feels that he stands far above others fears that letting go of this lens is going to cause him to be seen as the opposite – totally inferior to others.
Unworthy: If a woman with this lens decides to discard it and believe that she’s truly worthy of good things, she’s likely to fear that others may see her as outrageously greedy and self-centred because, she believes that others really do know that she doesn’t deserve those things.
We suggest that you carry out a careful cost/benefit analysis of each problematic life-lens that distresses you. Start by filling out the benefits side and list every possible advantage to having the lens. Table 7-4 shows you what Thomas sees as the benefits.
Thomas has a vulnerable life-lens. Having been abused in childhood, he now worries constantly about every imaginable danger – financial losses, terrorism, car accidents, threats to health, and more. He goes to great lengths to protect himself and his family. He saves every possible penny, he controls the family’s diet, exercises religiously, and he imposes strict curfews on his children. Thomas lists the benefits for his vulnerable life-lens in Table 7-4.
Table 7-4 Thomas’s Benefit Analysis of the Vulnerable Life-Lens
Benefits
Costs
I always steer clear of danger and maximise safety
I’m less likely to be hurt.
I can plan for dangers and what to do when (not ‘if’) they arise.
I do a pretty good job of protecting my family.
We all just might live longer because of me.
Table 7-4 contains a pretty impressive list of benefits, doesn’t it? Thomas had little difficulty coming up with his list of benefits for his lens. What value is it to him to discard his vulnerable life-lens? To find out, Thomas works on developing a list of costs for his vulnerable life-lens. With quite a bit of effort, he manages to identify a number of important costs. You can see his revised cost/benefit analysis in Table 7-5.
Table 7-5 Thomas’s Cost/Benefit Analysis of the Vulnerable Life-Lens
Overcoming Depression For Dummies Page 20