Hi, I'm Dr.Tracy Marks, a psychiatrist,
and I make mental health education videos.
Today I'm talking about emotional programming,
what it looks like and what it does to your thinking.
Your early life experiences with your parents,
siblings, and other people in your life,
leave an imprint on you
that carries over into your adult life.
No one's life is perfect because we're all imperfect people
and make mistakes.
We say the wrong things,
don't do enough of the right things, et cetera.
So the imprint that you're left with
is a mixture of positive and negative experiences.
If you have enough positive experiences
to fill your emotional cup,
you can process the negative experiences
and compartmentalize them in a way
that they don't dictate every aspect of your adult life.
The negative experiences have their place.
It's not like you can't remember them,
but you're able to shake them off and keep moving.
If the sum total of your experiences were negative,
or you had some early traumatic experiences
that disrupted your emotional development,
your imprint becomes predominantly negative
and affects the way that you interact in the present day.
So when instead of having an emotional cup
that's full most of the time, or is easy to refill,
you have a hole in the bottom of your cup
and you can't keep it full and it keeps getting depleted.
So how does this affect your thoughts
and outlook on the world?
You develop what's called maladaptive schema
in dialectical behavior therapy terms,
but I'm gonna call it negative emotional programming
that creates these distorted stories that you tell yourself.
These stories keep building and strengthening
when your emotional cup gets depleted
and you're working hard to fill it back up.
So here are six types of negative stories
that you can come to believe and let guide your behavior.
Number one is the abandonment story.
This tends to develop from early experiences
with people who were cold, distant, or critical.
And likewise,
you tend to end up in relationships with a similar dynamic,
with people who are treating you similarly.
With this story,
you say things like people don't really care about me.
No matter how good things seem, it never lasts.
I'm destined to end up alone.
I worry about people I care about leaving or dying.
Ways to deconstruct and think through this
is to ask yourself,
do you have unrealistic expectations
of how relationships should be?
In what ways could you practice being vulnerable
so that you can open yourself up
to experiencing more joy in relationships?
How can you focus on developing more trust
in a relationship?
Because of your early experience,
your reflexive reaction is to close down
and protect yourself from being hurt.
So to work past that,
you have to allow yourself to be more vulnerable.
And what does that look like?
I talk about being more emotionally vulnerable
in relationships in this video on using conversation
to create intimacy and combat loneliness.
Next is the dependent story.
You can develop this story from early experiences
of being overprotected in a way that didn't allow you
to take appropriate risks and learn from your mistakes.
If you were blocked from making your own decisions
and not being allowed to fall down,
you don't learn how to stand back up and be resilient.
So you can say things like, I can't cope with being alone.
I can't trust my own judgment.
I need someone to take care of me and to make me happy.
Life is too overwhelming to cope with on my own.
To deconstruct this, ask yourself,
what are some small ways that you can challenge yourself
to do something outside of your company zone?
How can you gradually build taking on more responsibilities?
What can you do to enjoy your solitude more?
You need to learn to be more comfortable with yourself
so that you can be able to sooth yourself
and break away from this pattern of being too dependent
on someone else to meet your needs.
Number three is the unworthy story.
You can develop this kind of thinking
if you felt the standards you had to meet were so high
that you could never measure up.
Or if you felt constantly criticized or compared to others.
Some of the things that you may say to yourself are;
I'm flawed. I'm unlovable. I'm damaged. I'm less than.
Ways to deconstruct and to think through this
are to ask yourself,
whose voices do you hear
when you say these things to yourself?
If you didn't hear someone say this,
what scenario do you envision
where you were left feeling this way?
For example, a parent pushing you to always do better,
can leave you feeling like you're not good enough.
Once you recognize whose voice this represents,
think about how that voice was really an expression
of their own issues.
So you have a flawed person leaving an imprint on you
of being flawed.
Once you make that connection,
you can start the process of tearing down the facade.
If you saw the movie, The Truman Show,
it was about a man who was raised on television
in a television studio, and his entire life was staged.
That's how you can see the negative emotional programming
that you live with.
The negative things that you believe about yourself
are based on other negative beliefs
that someone else passed onto you.
And by the way, this is not always about your parents.
Children can do a lot of damage to other children.
They can also perpetuate an insecurity
that you have about yourself.
The next story you can tell yourself
is the disconnection story.
This could develop from having insecurities about yourself,
not having your feelings validated,
but it can also be a part of your personality style
just not to be very open with people.
Behaviorally, this can look like keeping yourself
in an arms distance in relationships
to avoid opening up to people.
Or you can distance yourself by focusing on people's flaws
and exaggerating the differences between you and them.
Some of the things that you say to yourself are;
No one understands me.
I rarely feel close to people.
I feel like there's an invisible barrier
between me and other people.
As you try to deconstruct this story,
think of ways that this story helps protect you
from being hurt by others.
What small step can you take
to feel more connected to people?
And this is another example
where improving the quality of your conversations
can help you feel more connected.
Another thing to ask yourself is,
do you tend to discount similarities and exaggerate
differences between yourself and others?
In other words,
are you the one pushing people away by magnifying
small differences and making them deal breakers?
The fifth story is the mistrust story.
This story can develop from a deep seated belief
that there's no one looking out for your best interest.
And this can come from a traumatic experience
or even the neglect.
In this case,
the neglect doesn't have to be from your parents
leaving you on the front doorstep without food.
This can be from a selfish parent
who's always disappointed you or ignored you.
Behaviourally, this can look like having relationships
where you question the person loyalty,
or it can look like repeated relationships,
where you tolerate unacceptable behavior from the person.
And then these exploitative relationships
reinforce your mistrust of people.
Some of the things that you say to yourself are;
Most people will use or hurt you.
You need to stay on guard to protect yourself.
People only do or think nice things
when they wanna get something out of it.
To deconstruct this story,
think about how much pessimistic thinking
plays into the story.
Pessimistic thinking is where your mind focuses
on the negative and hardly acknowledges the positive.
Think about things that people have done
that show that they are trustworthy
that you overlooked or didn't acknowledge.
It could be something very small,
like following through on something that they said
that they would do or showing up on time.
Also, are you reacting to a present situation
as if you were in the past?
In other words,
are you holding on the things that someone else did
assuming that everyone is gonna do the same thing
or treat you the same way?
When you do that,
you're not judging the current person
on the merits of their behavior.
The last story is the failure story.
And there's lots of reasons
you can believe this about yourself.
You could have had a series of failures or inadequacies
that weren't balanced by an appropriate level of validation.
If you fail enough,
you can start to believe that you'll always fail.
Behaviourally this can look like passing on opportunities
because you're afraid to fail,
or you can create a self-fulfilling prophecy
by giving it a low effort or sabotaging your efforts
so that you do end up failing.
Some of the things that you can say to yourself are;
There's no point in trying because I'm just gonna fail.
I never seem to get things right.
What if people realize I'm not as good as they think I am?
Ways to deconstruct this kind of thinking
is to think about what you would say to a friend
if they were in your situation.
Would you tell them not to try?
Or would you help your friends see the benefit
of giving it a chance?
Another thing that you can think about is
whose voice are you hearing?
That voice may not have said the same thing
that you're saying to yourself,
but the person may have made you feel as though
there was no point in trusting you to do something
because you don't do things very well
or you never follow through with things.
There's a difference between being mediocre,
when it comes to achievements,
and having a basic belief
that you're a failure at most things.
If you have enough self esteem,
you will be able to fail more than once
without those failures becoming your identity.
Your reaction to failure shapes your long-term outlook.
If you tend to over-focus on negative aspects of things
or tend to have black and white thinking,
you are more prone to internalize the failures.
Do any of these negative stories resonate with you?
You can can break past your emotional programming.
The first step is recognizing these patterns
and a useful way to work on deconstructing the thoughts
is to write down things in a journal.
That also allows you to get out your raw thoughts
and then fine tune them later.
An important thing to remember here though is,
emotional reasoning drives many of these stories.
Emotional reasoning is a thinking pattern
called a cognitive distortion where your mind tells you
that your emotions reflect reality.
Even though your emotions can inform you about the situation
and how you should respond, they're not always reliable.
Examples of emotional reasoning are;
I feel scared so I must be in danger.
Or I feel guilty so I must have done something wrong.
But sometimes these are just free floating emotions
that pop into your mind triggered by an unconscious thought
based on something from the past.
If that's the case,
you can misinterpret your current situation
based on an emotion that's unrelated.
So another way to process some of these negative stories
is to engage in self-soothing activity
so that you can generate some positive emotions.
The positive emotions may help you stop ruminating
on your negative story.
A couple of examples of coping statements are;
My past doesn't define me.
My emotion does not reflect my reality.
Whatever happens, I'll handle it.
There's a lot to this. Thanks for making it this far.
You probably need to re-watch this video
to get more out of it.
And I'll do a follow-up video in the future
on distraction techniques and self-soothing activities
and grounding techniques.
Then you can use those tools
to get even more out of this video.
Stay tuned. See you next time.