Therapy is honestly one of the most amazing things I’ve been doing this year. I’ve been learning so much about myself and so much about life in general. If you’re even on the fence about trying it, just know that therapy has helped me in every aspect of my life and continues to do so on a weekly basis. I’ve been going since January and since then so many of my relationships and my outlook on my life has improved vastly. I want to share one of the tools I’ve received in therapy with all of you as a glimpse into one aspect of how eye-opening therapy has been for me and can be for you, if you give it a try.
My therapist gave me a sheet of “Unhelpful Thinking Styles” which I’m certain all of us can say we have done or are currently doing.
1. All or nothing thinking: Sometimes called ‘black and white thinking.’
For example–“If I’m not perfect I have failed,” or “Either I do it right or not at all”
I have a tendency of thinking this way in a few aspects of my life. If a guaranteed “win” or success story was not attached to something in the past, I avoided it. Nothing in life is ever absolute, so working on accepting this was definitely challenging for me, but I’m getting to a point now, where I’m not focusing on failure but instead focusing on the possible success, even if it isn’t guaranteed.
2. Mental Filter: Only paying attention to certain types of evidence. F
or example–Noticing our failures but not seeing our successes.
It’s so easy to key in on something negative in our lives because it has such a great impact. Something positive can linger but something negative can ruin our whole god damn day and make a day that was pretty good suddenly sum up to a shit day. This is an issue that I feel I need to hone in on and resolve situationally. Did it suck not to get into grad school when I applied? Yes. However, that was not my path right now. I was meant to do what I am now working on and it’s as simple as that.
3. Jumping to Conclusions: There are two key types of jumping to conclusions—
-Mind reading: imagining we know what others are thinking -Fortune telling: predicting the future
None of us really know what is going to happen nor do we always know what other people are thinking. It’s safe to say, we shouldn’t assume we know things that we simply do not. I am working on this as I tend to assume a lot because it makes me feel in control of things even when I am not.
4. Emotional reasoning: Assuming that because we feel a certain way what we think must be true.
For example– “I feel embarrassed so I must be an idiot.”
I have a lot of feelings and at times I have had issues interpreting them. Am I crying because I can’t handle stress or is this feeling happening as an emotional reaction to a situation that is triggering these tears? I used to identify crying as a weakness. Showing emotion and not being able to control myself was weakness. This, of course, isn’t true at all, but before I believed it true. In therapy, I can honestly say I cry at least once every other week. Afterward I don’t feel embarrassed or weak, my therapist helped me understand that emotions are valid.
5. Labelling: Assigning label to ourselves or other people. F
or example– “I’m a loser,” “I’m completely useless,” or “They’re such an idiot.”
Now, a while back I wrote this entire blog post about labels and how they belong on jars, but since then I have been more vocal about my judgments. Not always in a joking way as I always had before. I find myself more and more, labeling people, calling them careless or irresponsible if I feel it suits them. I’ve argued that I am merely analyzing situations and people, not labeling them, however, there have been times when they were not constructive labels, just mere judgments. It’s a struggle daily, since I am hard on myself and label myself many things daily. As I work on being easier on myself I am also learning to refrain from passing judgments among those who it is not my business to judge. (Exception: Donald Trump is a horrible president and is running this country into the ground. Fuck that guy.)
6. Overgeneralizing: Seeing a pattern based upon a single event, or being overly broad in the conclusions we draw.
For example–“Everything is always rubbish (their word, not mine, I would’ve just said shit), or “Nothing good ever happens.”
I, identify as a dramatic person. You’re labeling! Yes, but I have a point, so, it’s okay in this situation…I’ll talk to my therapist and work on it next week, get off my back! Anyway, so considering being dramatic, I use hyperbole in almost every sentence I speak/write to add the emphasis. I need not only to make a point but to make others laugh. Should I work on this? When I overgeneralize a neighborhood due to the things in my immediate view? Yes! The other times when I say my job (whose name I will not say because god knows corporate will find this blog somehow and sue me for talking shit about them, even if it’s just a dramatic/funny version of the truth) is a place WHERE LITERALLY ALL DREAMS GO AND DIE, I will continue, because it makes people laugh and I like laughter, so there.
7. Disqualifying the Positive: Discounting the good things that have happened or that you have done for some reason or another.
For example–“That doesn’t count.”
“I haven’t traveled or done shit with my life.” I probably say this at the very least once a week. Then someone will reassure me and say, “So, that 40,000 debt you have in student loans was for fun or did you get a degree out of it?” Oh, that’s right. I guess I did do that. Then another more annoyed voice would say, “Didn’t you just get back from Tahoe and are going to Mexico later this year for the second time?” Well, yes but I want to travel more! I have done the things I claim and complain that I haven’t, but I’m just indulging in the negative for the sake of doing so. It’s so sad how easy it is to take for granted all the things I have been able to do that many others can or have not.
8. Magnification (catastrophizing) & Minimization: Blowing things out of proportion (catastrophizing), or inappropriately shrinking something to make it seem less important.
This one is tough because doing both these things comes incredibly easy for me and quite possibly most people. There are many things at work and even at home that I tend to blow up. Things that are just the way they are and they aren’t even worth getting upset or worked up about. However, with things that compromise my integrity or put me in tough situations that upset me, I tend to play it down to diffuse the situation. I’ll give my own example, a work friend drunkenly hit on me and I said it wasn’t a big deal, but it was. It was a big deal to me and bothered me for several days after. It’s unacceptable, but I made it a small thing because I didn’t want to create friction. Finding a balance with both is tough, but doable I’m sure if you want to work on it.
9. “Should” and “Must”: Using critical words like ‘should’ or ‘must’ or ‘ought’ can make us feel guilty, or like we have already failed. F
or example–If we apply ‘shoulds’ to other people the result is often frustration.
I have a hard time with this as, ‘should’ and ‘must’ are two words imbedded in my vocabulary. I always talk about all the motherly things my mom ‘should’ be doing and all the productivity I must do to be worthy of something. These words set us up to fail and believe that others have failed us using this type of language.
- Personalization: Blaming yourself or taking responsibility for something that wasn’t completely your fault. Conversely, blaming other people for something that was your fault.
This is huge for me. I take blame for almost everything that I am involved in. Remember that story I told about a drunken friend hitting on me? Yeah, I blamed ME. “I shouldn’t have stayed in the car after dropping him off while he vented to me about his issues,” or “Maybe I had been too nice.” After this reflex of taking blame for the situation at hand, I then snapped out of it. Forget that, I didn’t do anything wrong. I always talk about my boyfriend, me and this kid see each other like once a month and I was encouraging him to call his girlfriend the whole time he was venting to me. So, this taking blame BS is getting old. I’m working on taking responsibility for MY actions, not the actions of others. Don’t even get me started on the blame I take in my relationship with my mom. That one is definitely tough, but again, our lives are a work in progress, we just have to show up.***Therapy has this stigma attached to it and I hope to be a part of ending that in our society. It starts with the individual. Before my friends would whisper therapy when talking to me about it, like it was a bad word. They’d vaguely address asking about therapy all sheepish, “How was your, uh, doctor’s appointment…” I, of course, raising my voice a little, “You mean therapy? It’s been going fantastic! I love it and I love my therapist.”It’s important we share that we are in therapy with those close to us, hell even those not close to us, because it could change the way we see therapy. It could help someone who is worried what people might think of them if they were in therapy or shared that they were currently seeing a therapist. I used to be this person. Constantly worried what people would think if they found out I spoke to a professional. The truth is, more people are understanding about it than you might think. We all have issues, some big and some small. If anything, I feel like people reach out to me more, and have a respect for me because I’m not embarrassed about it. There is no reason to be embarrassed. We all need help occasionally, and in my case, I needed help working through family issues and ended up getting to know myself so much more.
I used to think, I’m moderately competent and good at research, I can fix my problems all by myself. The truth is therapy has helped me in a way that I couldn’t have really helped myself. In therapy, I would be talking about something that occurred recently that had a negative impact on me, something I wouldn’t have gone into depth with but did because my therapist asked me to and I discovered something about myself I had not realized. That happens a lot in therapy for me. I’d be talking about something and come to the realization of something I hadn’t thought of before or connected the dots to.
Remember that puzzle-line game as a kid where there would be a series of dots on the page with numbers next to them to help you form an image? Sometimes it would be a giraffe or some complex statue. Think of your life as the dots and right now you don’t have the numbers, or maybe you have some numbers but not all of them. Therapy, are the numbers on the dots, there to help you connect and make sense of the image in front of you (your life). This is what therapy has been for me, helping me connect those dots.
WRITTEN BY: Estela
GIRL. 20-Something. 