Let's say you're dating somebody you really, really like and they break up with you.
Do you think I'm a loser?
Wow.
Did I screw that up?
I will never find a life partner.
All three of those statements or do you think bummer, I thought we were really good together
and I'm sad they don't feel that way.
If you answered with one of the first four choices, you are probably sabotaging yourself
with unhelpful thinking styles that can be changed.
I'm Barbara Heffernan and I'm a psychotherapist who's been helping people recover from anxiety
and trauma for over 15 years.
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Unhelpful thinking styles can really make our lives miserable.
They dramatically impact our mood and our behavior and they can be very self-destructive
when they run rampant.
Let's figure out whether you're sabotaging your own happiness with unhelpful thinking
styles and what you can do about it.
Unhelpful thinking styles is a concept from CBT, cognitive behavioral therapy, CBT therapy
or CBT counseling is based on the idea that how we think and how we behave, impact how
we feel.
We are all connected.
CBT therapy helps us see how we are viewing the world, what lens we are viewing the world
through.
And then it helps us to adjust how we think.
And that's called cognitive restructuring.
And then it also helps us change certain behaviors.
Now cognitive restructuring is sort of a fancy word for a therapist's active efforts to help
you reframe your thoughts, reframe how you're seeing certain situations.
And the first step before we can reframe anything, before we can restructure thoughts, we need
to identify them.
So the first step is to identify what automatic thoughts you are having and what category
of unhelpful thinking styles those thoughts fall into.
So let's go back to the question I asked at the beginning of this video, how you would
feel and respond if somebody broke up with you, who you really liked.
So if you answered, I'm a loser, that would fall into the category of labeling and it
would also fall into the category of emotional reasoning.
So those are two categories of unhelpful thinking styles in the CBT world.
Now, labeling is obvious.
If you're saying I'm a loser, you're labeling yourself as a loser and that kind of labeling
is actually doing to yourself what school yard bullies do to the people that they pick
on.
It is taking the entire essence of a person and narrowing them down to one negative label
and the label is really meaningless.
So it's really important to think about how you label yourself, what words you use to
refer to yourself.
Common ones would be, I'm a loser, I'm bad, I'm stupid, I'm a failure.
And a reframe for labeling is to think about what you would say to a good friend.
If you had a good friend and someone broke up with them, you'd probably tell your friend
there is nothing wrong with you.
That person missed a great opportunity.
And if you can begin to speak to yourself as a friend, and I know this is not easy if
you have a long history of negative labeling of yourself, but if you can at least bring
that to mind and notice when you're doing it and think that there is an alternative,
even if you can't actually execute on the alternative, it's very helpful to bring it
to mind.
Anyway.
It begins you on that journey of talking to yourself in a nicer manner, beginning to treat
yourself like a friend because after all, who's with you all the time?
Who is the person you will go through your entire life with?
It's you.
You might as well be a friend to yourself.
So the other CBT unhelpful thinking style in that statement, I'm a loser, is called
emotional reasoning.
I feel like a loser, so I am a loser.
Sometimes we take our feelings and how we are feeling in a moment and we turn it into
a pervasive label for ourselves.
We can also apply emotional reasoning to other people and you might have somebody in your
life who most of the time you love, but when you're really, really angry at them, you might
feel like, I can't stand this person.
I never want to see them again.
And then you wake up the next morning, you're in a better mood and you really love them
again, and you like remember, wow, I really felt that way and I really thought it was
true.
So that's emotional reasoning.
Now, I don't believe we should discount our emotions.
Our emotions can be wonderful signals to live our life by.
But when our emotions get extreme and we get extremely upset, it tends to distort our thinking.
The other area where emotions tend to distort our thinking is if we have a go-to emotion,
if we are just always anxious, then our emotions aren't as useful because they're all covered
over with anxiety.
If we're always depressed, then that go-to emotion has kind of taken over and we're no
longer in access with all of the different varied levels of emotions that can really
give us signals.
So that's another situation where emotional reasoning does not work.
So the next statement that I suggested, someone might think if someone broke up with them
is I will never find a life partner.
Now that statement is catastrophizing.
It's a projection.
It's a projection into the future.
It's the worst possible outcome.
Say for a person who wants to find a life partner.
Not everybody does.
I understand that.
But if that is a negative projection as like the worst possible thing that could happen,
that would be called catastrophizing and people with anxiety and depression catastrophize
a lot.
And this is a CBT, unhelpful thinking style that it's very good to begin to be aware of
because sometimes these thoughts are so automatic.
You don't even realize you're having them.
You're just immediately projecting like, yeah, that's it.
I've had three breakups in a row.
I am never, I'm going to be alone the rest of my life.
Nobody's ever going to want to be with me and Oh, why should they?
Because I'm a loser.
So these can all go together and they can make things much worse.
And so if we go back to the question of what you would say to a friend.
If you knew a friend was thinking like they had this breakup and they're never going to
get married, or they're never gonna find a life partner, they're never going to be with
somebody they love.
You would be pretty sure that that person was exaggerating and projecting and not thinking
in a particularly helpful way.
But weirdly, when we do it for ourselves, we truly believe it.
And I guess that brings me back to the emotional reason I feel it.
So I believe it.
And so we believe these things that are projections of our mind and our mood, and there's no truth
to it.
There's no evidence of it whatsoever.
And your mind is a very tricky place and your mind will be able to argue against this, but
an outside person would be able to sort of see the picture more clearly and help you
understand that.
Yeah, no, that's totally catastrophizing.
Not going to happen.
And if you can begin to label some of your thoughts as catastrophizing and then realize
that that means that they are a projection, that means they are a creation of your mind
looking into the future and they are not facts.
And if you can somewhat continually work with that, eventually that automatic thought pattern
can be changed.
The third statement that I suggested, somebody might feel if someone broke up with them is,
wow, I sure screwed that up.
And that thought would fall into the category of personalization.
Personalization is thinking it's all about me.
So I've seen plenty of situations where person A breaks up with person B and person B takes
it personally and think they did something wrong.
But person A actually has severe intimacy issues and was actually beginning to feel
very close to person B and that scared them and they ran away.
So they actually broke up with person B because person B, a good person that they were feeling
close to.
So that happens.
It Also happens that person A maybe has too much going on in their life.
Um, family problems that they're embarrassed to share.
I have seen that happen a lot or maybe they just never got over their last relationship
and they're just not ready, but there are probably a whole host of reasons that they
broke up with you that have nothing to do with you and if it did have something to do
with you, you may just not have been a fit, but it doesn't mean you screwed it up.
The fourth option I gave as to what somebody might think if someone broke up with them
was that they would think all three of those things, I'm a loser, I'll never find a life
partner, and I assure screwed that up.
And I do think many people would put all three of those things into that category and if
that happens initially and then you resolve that fairly quickly, I'd say that falls into
the category of pretty normal thinking.
But if those negative statements about yourself are very persistent, then that becomes self
sabotaging behavior because if those are the things you believe, you probably don't try
dating again, you probably get fairly depressed or more anxious or you might throw yourself
into some unhealthy behaviors, but you'll either avoid making progress in the area you'd
like to make progress in or you actually move into more self-destructive directly destructive
behaviors.
So the last option that I suggested as an alternative would be to say, I'm really sad.
I'm bummed out.
I thought that relationship had great promise.
I was really enjoying them and I am really upset and disappointed that they broke up
with me.
And that would be a valid statement of feeling.
It would be naming how you're feeling now, knowing that feelings change and it wouldn't
be assigning blame or taking on blame.
It would simply be, I'm bummed out.
And you know what?
We get disappointed in life.
Sometimes we just do.
And if you're able to sit with and accept those feelings and let them kind of rise and
then fall, you can then move on with your life in an adaptive manner in order to illustrate
two other CBT unhelpful thinking styles.
I'd like to use an example from the workplace, but before I do that, I want to give a shout
out to my mom who painted that painting.
It's really awesome, isn't it?
It's beautiful.
It's one of my favorites and as you can see, once in awhile I dressed.
Imagine, let me know in the comments below.
If you have something in your office or your favorite room at home, which is beautiful,
you love it and it's created by somebody you love.
Let's say in your office and your boss walks in looking incredibly grumpy and just whizzes
past your desk: doesn't say hello, doesn't even acknowledge you.
Do you immediately jump to the conclusion that it's something you did?
Do you immediately say, oh my God, it's because I know exactly what it is.
I screwed that thing up yesterday and I'm sure they're really, really mad at me and
Yada, Yada, Yada, and maybe even go to the place where you're getting fired.
Well, if you do all that, you are actually combining three different unhelpful thinking
styles.
One of them is mind reading, thinking that you can read the other person's mind, you
observe a behavior and without asking a question, without having any real evidence, you jump
to some kind of conclusion and think you know what they're thinking.
And this happens all the time and this is a key component of collapses in communication.
Because if you are doing that, you're probably not following up with a lot of questions.
You probably wouldn't go to your boss and just simply say, Hey, is everything okay?
Which actually might be a really helpful thing for your boss and for you it would also be
personalization.
Seeing somebody else's bad mood and immediately thinking that you caused it or that you had
something to do with it when maybe it has nothing to do with you whatsoever.
So that would be the personalization, which we talked about already.
And then spinning the story out to where you're losing a job is can you guess catastrophizing,
which is a projection.
So all three of those things are wrapped up in that micro moment.
When you see somebody in a bad mood and you immediately think it's about yourself and
you project out to some horrible outcome.
And the last CBT unhelpful thinking style I'd like to talk about today is the mental
filter of disqualifying, the positive, maximizing negative situations, events or qualities about
yourself and minimizing the positive.
And those are sometimes broken into three different unhelpful thinking styles, but I
see them all as the same thing.
It's a melt mental filter of filtering out good information and only focusing on the
bad, whether that's about the world or about yourself.
And an example, in the workplace that happens all the time, would be receiving a review
from a boss.
And maybe it's really even a very positive review.
Maybe your boss goes through, you know, what a wonderful job you did on certain projects.
You know, how awesome you do working with customers, um, how wonderfully punctual you
are, goes through all of these positive things and then maybe make some type of suggestion
and perhaps your boss intends it to really be a positive, constructive criticism that
will help you to improve and eventually get promoted.
And just to come up with an example, let's say the constructive criticism your boss gives
you is that they'd like you to slow down on certain projects, do a little bit more proofreading,
um, possibly do some research in a more thorough manner and maybe be a little bit more timely
on how you meet deadlines.
So all of those would be meant to say like, you're doing all these great things and here's
some areas you can improve and they're concrete and attainable and just something that you
need to focus on.
And you might walk away from that review completely devastated.
You might filter out all the positive gets pushed away and ignored and the neg- and the
constructive criticism gets taken as a negative goes into that pot of I'm a failure, which
is the labeling we discussed and anything positive gets dismissed and everything negative
gets amplified.
So that is another CBT, unhelpful thinking style that can be very, very self sabotaging.
So what are the steps to stop self sabotaging with these unhelpful thinking styles?
First step is to identify your automatic thoughts in order to identify your automatic thoughts.
It's very helpful to begin to strengthen the observer part of your brain.
And I talked about this last week when I released a video, which you can access here by the
link above called CBT mindfulness.
So identify your automatic thoughts.
Number two is to categorize them.
Put the thought into the category belongs into.
And let me just review those categories right here.
One, labeling two emotional reasoning.
Three, catastrophizing four personalization, five, mind reading, and six, the mental filter
disqualifying anything positive and maximizing anything negative.
And once you've categorized your thought, you can then begin to see it as a cognitive
distortion.
That's the other term we use in CBT therapy is cognitive distortion.
That's a label for something which is just simply not true.
It's a distortion of your thoughts.
And if you're able to identify some of your thinking as falling into these unhelpful thinking
styles or cognitive distortions, you can know they're not true.
You might still feel that they are, but at least you can begin to take a step knowing
they're not true and then you can begin to see, could I see this differently?
What would I say to a friend?
That's one of the best questions.
What would I say to a friend who is in the same situation and can I be a friend to myself
and if I can begin to speak to myself in a kinder, more compassionate, more reasonable
way, actually then my behaviors will also shift so many self sabotaging behaviors come
from talking to yourself in a horrible way.
Catastrophizing thinking things are horrible and you're a horrible person because if that's
true, why bother trying anything?
Why bother communicating with anyone?
Why bother engaging your boss in terms of what the problem might be?
Why bother trying to date again?
Why bother moving forward in your life if you are going to believe these horrible feelings
now, changing how you speak to yourself is not easy.
It takes consistent practice and lots of tools.
And I do have a free pdf called transform your negative core beliefs.
So if you find as you're going through this exercise that there are certain very repetitive
themes and you feel like it's very difficult to dislodge that you might find this pdf very
helpful.
The link is below.
And I'd love to know what you think of this concept of being a friend to yourself.
Please comment below.
Let me know.
If you liked this video, please give me a thumbs up.
It helps me know that I'm on track and motivates me to keep making more content for you until
the next time.