Cognitive Behavioural Therapy For Dummies

by Branch, Rhena

  Mind-Reading: Taking Your Guesses with a Pinch of Salt

  So, you think you know what other people are thinking, do you? With mind-reading (see Figure 2-4), the tendency is often to assume that others are thinking negative things about you or have negative motives and intentions.

  Figure 2-4: Mind-reading.

  Here are some examples of mind-reading tendencies:

  You're chatting with someone and they look over your shoulder as you're speaking, break eye contact and (perish the thought) yawn. You conclude immediately that the other person thinks your conversation is mind-numbing and that he'd rather be talking to someone else.

  Your boss advises that you book some time off to use up your annual leave. You decide that he's saying this because he thinks your work is rubbish and wants the opportunity to interview for your replacement while you're on leave.

  You pass a neighbour on the street. He says a quick hello but doesn't look very friendly or pleased to see you. You think that he must be annoyed with you about your dog howling at the last full moon and is making plans to report you to environmental health.

  You can never know for certain what another person is thinking, so you're wise to pour salt on your negative assumptions. Stand back and take a look at all the evidence to hand. Take control of your tendency to mind-read by trying the following:

  Generate some alternative reasons for what you see. The person you're chatting with may be tired, be preoccupied with his own thoughts or just have spotted someone he knows.

  Consider that your guesses may be wrong. Are your fears really about your boss's motives, or do they concern your own insecurity about your abilities at work? Do you have enough information or hard evidence to conclude that your boss thinks your work is substandard? Does it follow logically that ‘consider booking time off' means ‘you're getting the sack'?

  Get more information (if appropriate). Ask your neighbour whether your dog kept him up all night, and think of some ways to muffle your pet next time the moon waxes.

  You tend to mind-read what you fear most. Mind-reading is a bit like putting a slide in a slide projector. What you project or imagine is going on in other people's minds is very much based on what's already in yours.

  Emotional Reasoning: Reminding Yourself That Feelings Aren't Facts

  Surely we're wrong about this one. Surely your feelings are real hard evidence of the way things are? Actually, no! Often, relying too heavily on your feelings as a guide leads you off the reality path. Here are some examples of emotional reasoning:

  Your partner has been spending long nights at the office with a co-worker for the past month. You feel jealous and suspicious of your partner. Based on these feelings, you conclude that your partner's having an affair with his co-worker.

  You feel guilty out of the blue. You conclude that you must have done something wrong otherwise you wouldn't be feeling guilty.

  You wake up feeling anxious, with a vague sense of dread. You assume that there must be something seriously wrong in your life and search your mind frantically for the source of your ill- feeling.

  Often your feelings are simply due to a thought or memory that you may not even be totally aware of having had. Other times they can be symptoms of another disorder such as depression or anxiety problems (see Chapter 9 for information about anxiety disorders and Chapter 12 for more on depression). Some of the feelings you experience on waking are left over from dreams that you may or may not remember. As a rule of thumb, it pays to be somewhat sceptical about the validity of your feelings in the first instance. Your feelings can be misleading.

  When you spot emotional reasoning taking over your thoughts, take a step back and try the following:

  1. Take notice of your thoughts. Take notice of thoughts such as ‘I'm feeling nervous, something must be wrong' and ‘I'm so angry, and that really shows how badly you've behaved', and recognise that feelings are not always the best measure of reality, especially if you're not in the best emotional shape at the moment.

  2. Ask yourself how you'd view the situation if you were feeling calmer. Look to see if there is any concrete evidence to support your interpretation of your feelings. For example, is there really any evidence that something bad is going to happen?

  3. Give yourself time to allow your feelings to subside. When you're feeling calmer, review your conclusions and remember that it is quite possible that your feelings are the consequence of your present emotional state (or even just fatigue) rather than indicators of the state of reality.

  4. If you can't find any obvious and immediate source of your unpleasant feelings - overlook them. Get into the shower despite your sense of dread, for example. If a concrete reason to be anxious does exist, it won't get dissolved in the shower. If your anxiety is all smoke and mirrors, you may well find it washes down the drain.

  The problem with viewing your feelings as factual is that you stop looking for contradictory information - or for any additional information at all. Balance your emotional reasoning with a little more looking at the facts that support and contradict your views, as we show in Figure 2-5.

  Figure 2-5: Emotional reasoning.

  Overgeneralising: Avoiding the Part/Whole Error

  Overgeneralising is the error of drawing global conclusions from one or more events. When you find yourself thinking ‘always', ‘never', ‘people are . . .' or ‘the world's . . .', you may well be overgeneralising. Take a look at Figure 2-6. Here, our stick man sees one sheep in a flock and instantly assumes the whole flock of sheep is black. However, his overgeneralisation is inaccurate because the rest of the flock are white sheep.

  Figure 2-6: Overgen-eralising.

  You might recognise overgeneralising in the following examples:

  You feel down. When you get into your car to go to work, it doesn't start. You think to yourself, ‘Things like this are always happening to me. Nothing ever goes right', which makes you feel even more gloomy.

  You become angry easily. Travelling to see a friend, you're delayed by a fellow passenger who cannot find the money to pay her train fare. You think, ‘This is typical! Other people are just so stupid', and you become tense and angry.

  You tend to feel guilty easily. You yell at your child for not understanding his homework and then decide that you're a thoroughly rotten parent.

  Situations are rarely so stark or extreme that they merit terms like ‘always' and ‘never'. Rather than overgeneralising, consider the following:

  Get a little perspective. How true is the thought that nothing ever goes right for you? How many other people in the world may be having car trouble at this precise moment?

  Suspend judgement. When you judge all people as stupid, including the poor creature waiting in line for the train, you make yourself more outraged and are less able to deal effectively with a relatively minor hiccup.

  Be specific. Would you be a totally rotten parent for losing patience with your child? Can you legitimately conclude that one incident of poor parenting cancels out all the good things you do for your little one? Perhaps your impatience is simply an area you need to target for improvement.

  Shouting at your child in a moment of stress no more makes you a rotten parent than singing him a favourite lullaby makes you a perfect parent. Condemning yourself on the basis of making a mistake does nothing to solve the problem, so be specific and steer clear of global conclusions. Change what you think you can and need to but also forgive yourself (and others) for singular errors or misdeeds.

  Labelling: Giving Up the Rating Game

  Labels, and the process of labelling people and events, are everywhere. For example, people who have low self-esteem may label themselves as ‘worthless', ‘inferior' or ‘inadequate' (see Figure 2-7).

  Figure 2-7: Labelling.

  If you label other people as ‘no good' or ‘useless', you're likely to become angry with them. Or perhaps you label the world as ‘unsafe' or ‘totally unfair'? The error here is that you're globally rating things t
hat are too complex for a definitive label. The following are examples of labelling:

  You read a distressing article in the newspaper about a rise in crime in your city. The article activates your belief that you live in a thoroughly dangerous place, which contributes to you feeling anxious about going out.

  You receive a poor mark for an essay. You start to feel low and label yourself as a failure.

  You become angry when someone cuts in front of you in a traffic queue. You label the other driver as a total loser for his bad driving.

  Strive to avoid labelling yourself, other people and the world around you. Accept that they're complex and ever-changing (see Chapter 14 for more on this). Recognise evidence that doesn't fit your labels, in order to help you weaken your conviction in your global rating. For example:

  Allow for varying degrees. Think about it: The world isn't a dangerous place but rather a place that has many different aspects with varying degrees of safety and risk.

  Celebrate complexities. All human beings - yourself included - are unique, multifaceted and ever-changing. To label yourself as a failure on the strength of one failing is an extreme form of overgeneralising. Likewise, other people are just as complex and unique as you. One bad action doesn't equal a bad person.

  When you label a person or aspect of the world in a global way, you exclude potential for change and improvement. Accepting yourself as you are is a powerful first step towards self-improvement.

  Making Demands: Thinking Flexibly

  Albert Ellis, founder of rational emotive behaviour therapy, one of the first cognitive-behavioural therapies, places demands at the very heart of emotional problems. Thoughts and beliefs that contain words like ‘must', ‘should', ‘need', ‘ought', ‘got to' and ‘have to' are often problematic because they're extreme and rigid (see Figure 2-8).

  Figure 2-8: Demands.

  The inflexibility of the demands you place on yourself, the world around you and other people often means you don't adapt to reality as well as you could. Consider these possible examples:

  You believe that you must have the approval of your friends and colleagues. This leads you to feel anxious in many social situations and drives you to try to win everyone's approval - possibly at great personal cost.

  You think that because you try very hard to be kind and considerate to others, they really ought to be just as kind and considerate in return. Because your demand is not realistic - sadly, other people are governed by their own priorities - you often feel hurt about your friends (or even strangers) not acting the way you do yourself.

  You believe that you absolutely should never let people down. Therefore, you rarely put your own welfare first. At work, you do more than your fair share because you don't assert yourself, and so you often end up feeling stressed and depressed.

  Holding flexible preferences about yourself, other people and the world in general is the healthy alternative to inflexible rules and demands. Rather than making demands on yourself, the world and others, try the following techniques:

  Pay attention to language. Replace words like ‘must', ‘need' and ‘should' with ‘prefer', ‘wish' and ‘want'.

  Limit approval seeking. Can you manage to have a satisfying life even if you don't get the approval of everyone you seek it from? Specifically, you'll feel more confident in social situations if you recognise your preference for approval rather than viewing approval as a dire need.

  Understand that the world doesn't play to your rules. In fact, other people tend to have their own rulebooks. So, no matter how much you value considerate behaviour, your friends may not give it the same value. If you can give others the right to not live up to your standards, you'll feel less hurt when they fail to do so.

  Retain your standards, ideals and preferences, and ditch your rigid demands about how you, others and the world ‘have to' be. So keep acting consistently with how you would like things to be rather than becoming depressed or irate about things not being the way you believe they must be.

  When you hold rigid demands about the way things ‘have got to be', you have no margin for deviation or error. You leave yourself vulnerable to experiencing exaggerated emotional disturbance when things in life just don't go your way.

  Mental Filtering: Keeping an Open Mind

  Mental filtering is a bias in the way you process information, in which you acknowledge only information that fits with a belief you hold. The process is much like a filter on a camera lens that allows in only certain kinds of light. Information that doesn't fit tends to be ignored. If you think any of the following, you're making the ‘mental filtering' thinking error:

  You believe you're a failure, so you tend to focus on your mistakes at work and overlook successes and achievements. At the end of the week, you often feel disappointed about your lack of achievement - but this is probably largely the result of you not paying attention to your successes.

  You believe you're unlikeable, and really notice each time your friend is late to call back or seems too busy to see you. You tend to disregard the ways in which people act warmly towards you, thus sustaining your view that you're unlikeable.

  To combat mental filtering, look more closely at situations you feel down about. Deliberately collecting evidence that contradicts your negative thoughts can help you to correct your information-processing bias. Try the following:

  Examine your filters closely. For example, are you sifting your achievements through an ‘I'm a failure' filter? If so, then only failure-related information gets through. If you look for a friend's achievements over the same week without a filter, you're likely to find him in far greater possession of success. So drop the filter when assessing yourself in the same way you do when looking at your friends' achievements.

  Gather evidence. Imagine you're collecting evidence for a court case to prove that your negative thought isn't true. What evidence do you cite? Would, for example, an assertion that you're unlikeable stand up in court against the proof of your friends behaving warmly towards you?

  If you only ever take in information that fits with your negative thinking, you can very easily end up reinforcing undesirable thinking habits. The fact that you don't see the positive stuff about yourself, or your experiences, doesn't mean it isn't there (just bear in mind Figure 2-9!).

  Figure 2-9: Mental filtering.

  Disqualifying the Positive: Keeping the Baby When Throwing Out the Bathwater

  Disqualifying the positive (see Figure 2-10) is related to the biased way that people can process information. Disqualifying the positive is a mental response to a positive event that transforms it into a neutral or negative event.

  The following are examples of disqualifying the positive:

  You convince yourself that you're worthless and unlovable. You respond to a work promotion by thinking, ‘This doesn't count, because anyone could get this sort of thing.' The result: Instead of feeling pleased, you feel quite disappointed.

  You think you're pathetic and feel low. A friend tells you you're a very good friend, but you disqualify this in your mind by thinking, ‘She's only saying that because she feels sorry for me. I really am pathetic.'

  Figure 2-10: Disqual-ifying the positive.

  Hone your skills for accepting compliments and acknowledging your good points. You can try the following strategies to improve your skills:

  Become aware of your responses to positive ‘data'. Practise acknowledging and accepting positive feedback and acknowledging good points about yourself, others and the world. For example, you could override your workplace disappointment by recognising that you're the one who got the promotion. You can even consider that the promotion may well have been a result of your hard work.

  Practise accepting a compliment graciously with a simple thank you. Rejecting a sincerely delivered compliment is rather like turning down a gift. Steer your thinking towards taking in positive experiences. When others point out attributes you have, start deliberately making a note of those good po
ints. Even if your current thinking bias leads you to doubt the validity of a compliment or good experience, try considering that you may well be wrong to do so. Trust what others say for a change!