Cognitive Distortion # 3, Mental Filter

Mental filtering is akin to "discounting the positive" (distortion #4).  Have you ever played a  game and missed a goal you were positioned well for and then kicked yourself mentally for days over that missed shot?  Or sung in a choir and come in loudly a measure too soon in one of the pieces and cringed for weeks afterwards as your mind reviewed it again and again?  Or served as a missionary for a couple of years and, like most young missionaries, made a couple of really bad cultural faux pas in the course of your mission that still come leaping back to the forefront of your mind every time you reflect on your time there?  Or made a presentation where most people responded positively but one person made a mild critique of it and you just can't stop feeling constantly awful about the thing he pointed out?  Or had a medical procedure that was painful and then healed and all you focus on is how horrible the pain was?  I know I have done some of those things.

When you have an experience that has a single negative detail and you dwell on and suffer over that one detail more than any other aspect of that experience you are doing mental filtering.  I do it sometimes. It's hard to get my mind off that one negative.  I think that's partly due to the fact that I, like many people, have grown up in a culture that teaches us to try to eliminate failures and mistakes in our lives, so we tend to notice and focus on them.  However, there is a difference between noticing a mistake enough to change and avoid making it again and focusing on that mistake and beating yourself up about it for days, weeks, months or years afterwards.  The former is being clear-eyed and on the road to improvement.  The latter is called identifying yourself by your errors.  

I think it's clear that identifying someone we know by her errors is one of the heights of disregard and cold-heartedness, that doing so makes it even harder for that person to have hope she can change or live an error down.  We know that for the vast majority of people, including you,  loving-kindness, not error-rehashing, is what enables them to change for the better.  But those of us who wouldn't dream of doing that error-rehashing to others often easily do it to ourselves.

Cognitive Distortion #4, Discounting the Positive

Mental filtering (above) is when you focus on one negative.  Discounting the positive takes that one step farther, not only focusing on the negative but also actively rejecting the positive.  It is when you reject positive experiences by telling yourself they either don't count or that they are not genuine.  Here are some examples:

You are baking cookies for fun .  You make five batches of chocolate chip cookies.  The last batch burns because you were distracted by something else.  You tell yourself  "What a mess.  I stink at making cookies."   You have totally discounted the fact that you made four good batches of cookies and identify your success rate only by the one batch that burned.  The positive has been completely discounted in the face of one negative.

Or you have accepted a new job with a new company and you are understandably a little nervous about this  new chapter in your life .  Your cousin tells you he's been reading up on that company and that he is really excited for you to be able to work there.  He thinks their work is good and their company policies enlightened.  And he says that he thinks you will really like working there.  You tell yourself, "He's just saying that to make me feel good."  You discount the positive observations and you also discount the value of the opinion of your cousin who is honestly expressing what he really thinks.  

Discounting the positive not only brings you down but it also can sadly stifle your relationships with the people whose words you discount in your cognitively distorted thinking as well as prevent you from learning truths when they are spoken.  Fortunately, when you recognize what you are doing you are on the first step to eliminating this nasty source of depression.

Cognitive Distortion #5, Maginification and Minimization

Magnification is when you blow negative things way out of proportion and minimization is when you shrink good things down to almost nothing.   For example, you are trying hard to reduce the amount of time you spend reading news and social media on the internet and you end up, one Saturday morning, spending 45 minutes online instead of the 30 you planned and you think, "Agh!  I blew it!  This is terrible!  How awful!  This is so, so, so disgusting I can hardly stand myself!   That afternoon you spend three hours helping a young family move their furniture into their rented moving van, including wrestling their upright piano with five other guys down a flight of stairs.  And when the mom in the family stops and expresses appreciation for all your help you say, "Nah.  We didn't do much," and on the way home you berate yourself for being such an ineffective help when you are sure there are so many other people in the world who do so much more than you do to help their neighbors.

If you magnify all your errors and minimize all your good work, of course you are going to go through your days feeling like a loser or a failure, or at the least, quite hopeless about your ability to become who you wish to be.   But the problem isn't you.  Most of us, including you, fall within the normal range in our mixture of good choices and not-so-good ones.  The problem is the lens through which you are viewing your particular mixture.

And that can be fixed.

The Sermon on the Mount for 8 Year Olds

A brief respite between cognitive distortions.

While preparing my Sunday lesson it occurred to me that it might be helpful for me as I went about that to synopsize the Sermon on the Mount in a more accessible vocabulary.  So I did.  Here's the first draft for the first chapter, Matthew 5, starting with verse 16:

When you know a good and right way to live, live that way. That helps other people to see goodness and recognize the goodness of God.

You may get angry sometimes and that anger may make you want to do stupid or bad things. Anger can cause you to make very bad choices  Be very wise.  Be sure your reasons for anger are good ones.  And no matter how much anger you feel, do good things because of it, not bad things. And certainly do not ever let your anger cause you to put down other people, no matter who they are.

Just don't make fun of other people, period.

So...instead....when you have a disagreement with someone or you are mad at them, work hard to find a solution that works for both of you.  Working on that will make it much easier for you to hear and understand God's words when you worship at church.

Keep your thoughts focused on what is good, not on what feels exciting and pleasurable, because your thoughts are important as well as your actions.

Repent.

Speak the truth plainly.

Don't swear.

Don't try to make things right by getting even.

When someone makes you give away something or to do extra work, be nice about it and generous too.

Love your neighbor.

Love your enemy.

Be good to people even if they are nasty to you.

Pray for people who are mean.

Do your good deeds quietly. Don't feel like you need to get other people to praise you for doing good things.

Pray privately.

When you pray, say what you think and be respectful.

Be thankful.

Ask Heavenly Father for help and for forgiveness and for the things you need.

Forgive others.

When you fast, don't complain and groan about it.

Be focused on being and doing good, not on getting stuff.

See life clearly and recognize goodness.

Put God ahead of money in your heart.

Be merciful.

Don't judge unkindly.

Worry about your own sins, not other people's sins.

Treat sacred things with respect and share them wisely and with wise restraint.

When you need God's help, ask for it, seek it. You will find it.

Treat others the way you like to be treated.

Seek to live the way God wants you to live and to do what he wants you to do. Doing that leads to eternal life.

Watch what happens when other people make choices and do stuff. That will help you to tell whether or not they are honest and true and good and whether or not their ideas can be trusted.

Be sure that when you are doing something in Jesus' name that it really is what he wants you to be doing.

When you learn Jesus' teachings don't just listen to them, actually do what he teaches.

Cognitive Distortion #6a, The Fortune Teller Error

There are two cognitive distortions that fall into the category of "jumping to conclusions", ie: jumping to a negative assumption that is not justified by the facts of a situation..  One of these is the fortune teller error.   This is when you imagine something negative that might happen and you jump from imagining that it might happen to being pretty convinced that it will.  

For example, you leave a couple of messages for a parent of one of the children in your Sunday school class, asking her to call you back and let you know whether or not she can come help with the class the following Sunday.  Days go by and you don't hear from her.  You assume that she didn't call you back because she's avoiding you and hates helping in Sunday school (see mind reading, distortion #6b below) and when you start feeling bitter and disillusioned by what you perceive as her evasiveness and unwillingness to help you decide not to try to call her again because you are sure that she will only avoid and dislike you more and you will feel like a fool.  You believe this prognostication, which leaves you disappointed, disgusted and resentful and you don't call her.

A few days later you find out that she never got your messages.  You had done all that stewing over the yucky things that you predicted would happen if you tried to contact her again, for nothing.

Fortune telling.

Cognitive Distortion # 6b, Mind Reading

The second cognitive distortion that falls into the category of "jumping to conclusions", ie: jumping to a negative assumption that is not justified by the facts of a situation, is mind reading.  This is where you assume that others are disappointed in you or looking down on you and you are so convinced of that that you don't bother to notice or ask or investigate whether or not that is true.

For example, you are giving a talk in church and a fellow in the middle of the center section is falling asleep.  You immediately assume that it's because you aren't a good speaker or because he thinks your talk is boring.  In this case, it's actually because he was up late the night before driving kids home from a dance, but you don't know that.  You just automatically assume that it must be because he finds you lacking.

Or your co-worker passes you in the parking lot without saying hello because he's absorbed in trying to memorize a bunch of facts he needs for his next presentation .  You erroneously conclude that his silence is because he doesn't value you as a worker or that he is mad at you because he doesn't like your last report.

Or your spouse is watching television and doesn't answer you when you ask her a question.  Your heart sinks as you assume that your questions are not as important to her as they used to be.  And you feel your levels of frustration rising.

Or you commit a sin and your mind tells you that God must be totally exasperated with you, or, at the least, completely disappointed in you, ignoring the facts that though he does not condone sin he also completely understands why you did it and totally and lovingly wants to help you do better.

The biggest immediate problem with this mind reading thing is that most of the time it propels you unnecessarily into actions of either a) withdrawal or b) resentment or of c) counter attack.  Not only do these responses worsen relationships but it's a stark tragedy when you are propelled to make them based on assumptions that aren't true.  So when you are mind reading, you are not only misunderstanding in ways that discourage you, but you also are more likely to respond in ways that make things worse.

Whether dealing with God, your grandmother, your neighbor or anyone else, mind-reading can take you quickly into the frying pan and from there into the fire.  So much better, when you catch yourself mind-reading, to ask a question or two and find out what's really going on and then respond to that reality, instead of your mind-reading assumptions.

Cognitive Distortion #7, Emotional Reasoning

Emotional reasoning happens when you take your emotions as evidence of truth.  For example: " I feel like this job will never get done, so it won't."  Or, "I feel overwhelmed and hopeless, therefore my problems will be impossible to solve."  Or, "I feel angry at you and misunderstood by you therefore you must be an insensitive jerk."  Or "I feel like a failure, therefore I am one."

Because you feel things are negative, you assume that they must be negative.  And the fact is, emotions are simply emotions.  They are not "things as they really are" to quote a very wise man*.

Perhaps you will recognize this phenomenon in your life.  Most of us have it to some degree.  One of the most common manifestations in my life is when I walk out into the garden and see all the weeds in it.  My first reaction is discouragement at the work that will be involved to weed the garden.  It feels like a disheartening, never-ending task which makes me feel lousy and want to put it off.  But actually, when I finally get past my emotional reasoning and go do it, it's not disheartening work, it actually goes pretty well and I end with a sense of satisfaction.

The challenge is to be able to discern your feelings about things and separate those from your comprehension of things as they actually are.

*Thank you, Neal A. Maxwell

Cognitive Distortion #8, Should Statements

This is where you try to motivate yourself by saying "I should do this" or "I really ought to do that.  Such statements to yourself generally cause you to feel pressured and guilty or pressured and resentful.

Similarly, when you direct should statements towards others it increases your sense of dissatisfaction and frustration.  Thinking to yourself "he really should stop typing and pay attention to what is being said" will invariably increase your dissatisfaction and give room in your mind  for further statements of resentment of the other person and discouragement about creating what you want to happen.   (One of the most common ones to follow this are the "always" and "never" thoughts that are part of cognitive distortion #1.)

Should statements can generate a lot of unnecessary turmoil in your daily life and actually decrease your progress towards becoming the sort of charitable, loving, patient person that you should want to become.  They have great power to create loathing, guilt and discouragement about yourself or bitterness, disillusionment or self-righteousness in your reactions to the human failings of others.

Ultimately, you have to realize what God realizes; that people, including yourself, are imperfect and make mistakes and that He expects that.  It's part of the plan.  And the thing to do instead is to expect the imperfections of reality gracefully, respond wisely to them when you encounter them, and love and appreciate in spite of them, not reduce your reaction to a bunch of frustrating "shoulds".

Cognitive Distortion #9, Labeling and Mislabeling

Labeling is when you create a self-image based just on your errors.   For instance, you put your foot in your mouth during a conversation and you say to yourself, "I'm a fool."   Or you eat three pieces of fudge and you think, "How disgusting.  I'm a pig."

You can also fall into the habit of labeling others.  Your roommate never makes her bed and you think, "she's such a slob."  Or your boss is often abrasive and short tempered and you label him as an "insensitive chauvinist" and complain about him every day.

Labeling yourself is depressing and labeling others makes you feel helpless and alienated.  And it's also irrational. Your self and your value cannot be equated with any one thing you do or don't do.  And neither can anyone else's.   You, and every other person you know, is a complex, multi-faceted conglomerate of a multitude of learning, responding, thinking, ebbing and flowing, progressing and regressing, flow of emotions, responses, thoughts and actions.   I believe that knowing that is one of the things that God sees and that makes it so easy for Him to see the worth of each soul. He, as well as we, can see that some of us are sometimes more in control of ourselves than others but none of us, even the worst of us, are just one thing and it is irrational to define any of us, in any moment of time, just by our inadequacies.

Labeling involves describing yourself,  another person, or an event with words that paint a broad swath of emotionally laden negativity, instead of seeing and acknowledging the nuanced and intricate complexity and multi-faceted nature of human life.

Cognitive Distortion #10, Personalization

Personalization is when you assume responsibility for a negative in your life even when there is no basis for doing so.  For example, your coworker, whom you've been mentoring, fails to receive any recognition awards at the department banquet and you feel guilty because of the thought "It's my fault that he didn't earn any recognition.  It was my responsibility to see that he earned it.  This just shows how I failed."

Another example might be one where you invite your boss and his family to dinner at your house on a Sunday evening and and at the last minute they call and cancel because of illness and your brain instantly tells you, "They cancelled.  What did I do to foul things up?"

Or your eight month old wakes up three times each night for weeks on end and you hear, in your head, "She isn't sleeping through the night yet.   I'm such a lousy parent."

Personalization causes you to feel crippling guilt as you confuse influence with responsibility for and control of outcomes.  Certainly there are things that you can influence in the lives of those around you, but in the above cases you have confused that ability to influence (or not) with your control over others.  And, you don't have control.  Nor should you.  Ultimately every person you know holds the secret to the key causes for their own actions, not you.

Have you ever heard yourself speak to yourself in this cognitive distortion of feeling that the failure of someone else or some project you are involved in means that you, personally, are a failure as well?

Most of us have at one time or another.

Fighting back against the C.D.s

Once you are familiar with cognitive distortions and recognize them in your own thought patterns, there are a couple of different ways to work on helping your brain move from cognitive distortion patterns to cognitive accuracy patterns.  One of these is talking back to them.  This involves three things:
1) Training yourself to recognize them, which you're well on the way to have done just by reading about them.
2) Learn why those thoughts are distorted.  You've already done this too, probably.
3) Talk back to them.

So, let's say you suddenly realize you are late for a rendezvous with friends with whom you are making a two hour trip.  Your heart sinks and you are gripped with panic.  First, ask yourself "what thoughts are going through my head right now?  What am I saying to myself?  Why is this upsetting me?"  

You may find that you've been saying to yourself "I never do anything right", or "I'm always late", or "they'll leave without me think I and everything I stand for is irresponsible and stupid", or "I'm such a failure" or "I really should have my act together better.".  Can you tell which C.D.s those are?

(all-or-nothing, overgeneralization, fortune-telling, mind-reading, labeling, should statement)

Just as fast as these thoughts run through your mind your emotions plummet.  They, not the situation, are the reason for your misery.

So, you consciously replace them, one by one with cognitive accuracies.  I actually find it helpful to do this part out loud.

"No, actually, sometimes I do do things right.  Everyone is a mix, including me."
"No, sometimes I'm on time. It's just this time that I'm late."
"Actually, they might be kind and wait.  They might be late too.  They might choose to denigrate me or they might choose to treat this with charity.  I don't know what's in their minds or how they will respond.  But I do now that my responsibility is to apologize and be gracious and I can do that.
"One mistake does not equal total failure.  I am good at some things and not so good at others, but I am working at doing better and can continue to do so."
"'Should' will only make me beat myself up.  'I plan to do better next time' is a better way of approaching this and I do plan to watch the clock more carefully and I can tell them so and do so next time.

As you scurry out the door.

Some people who find their cognitive distortions extremely discouraging find it helpful to actually write down the cognitive distortions and their talk-back cognitive accuracies either in the moment or later in the day.  There's something about writing it down and reading and seeing it clearly that makes it harder for your brain to believe "this talk-back stuff will never work for me".   (jumping to conclusions)

Quick review

Quick review
The 10 cognitive distortions are
1. All or nothing thinking.  Everything's black or white.  One error means black.
2. Overgeneralization.  One negative means you can predict never-ending negatives.
3. Mental filter.  You pick out a single negative and dwell on it exclusively.
4. Disqualifying the positive. You reject positive experiences or comments because "they don't count".
5. Jumping to conclusions
                             a. mind reading. You assume someone is thinking negatively of you.
                             b. fortune telling.  You anticipate and expect things will go badly.
6. Magnification and Minimization.  You exaggerate the importance of goof-ups and mistakes and minimize the importance of the good things you do.
7. Emotional reasoning.  If I feel bad it must be bad.
8. Should statements. You try to motivate yourself with "shoulds", "musts" and "oughts" and the emotional consequence is guilt for yourself and frustration when you mentally use those words in connection with others.
9. Labeling and mislabeling. You attach negative labels to yourself and others.
10. Personalization.  You see yourself as the cause of an external negative event that you were actually not responsible for.

So, with that review, can you identify which cognitive distortions are in the following scenario?

You've been reading sections of "Teaching, No Greater Call" about classroom discipline and applying the principles in it to the Sunday school class you teach.  You've been doing it for several weeks and it seems to be making a difference.  Then, suddenly, things in the classroom take a turn for the worse as a couple of kids in your class start acting out and in three consecutive weeks you are back to where you started.  You feel bitter, disillusioned, hopeless and desperate due to thinking, "I'm not getting anywhere.  These methods won't help after all.  I should have things under control well by now.  That 'improvement' was a fluke.  I was fooling myself when I felt like things were going better, They really didn't.  I'll never be able to get these kids to pay attention."  Which of the following one or more cognitive distortions did you employ?

a) disqualifying the positive
b) should statement
c) all-or-nothing thinking
d) jumping to conclusions
e) emotional reasoning

scroll down




















answer:  all of them.  Did you find some of them?  Good!  You could probably add "personalization" to the list if in fact the two kids are acting out due to chaos at home beyond your control.

Can you see how our thoughts and responses to a situation can create our emotions?  And how distorted thoughts can mess up our emotions?

The goal, then, is to learn how to think thoughts based in reality, things as they really are, not in distortions of reality.  And that can be done.  The first step is to start identifying those distortions.  And you just did that.

The next step is to talk back truth to them when they pop up in your brain.

Recalling an Adage

Thinking about things...

"An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure."
Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanack

Wise words

"Some things are more important than money.  And one of the things that is always more important than money is people."
~ E.  August 2012

"Magnifying" a calling

Thomas Monson's message in this month's Ensign is about serving in our church callings which he equates with loving and serving as Jesus did and taking responsibility instead of seeking to be comfortable.

That article and its sidebar, of course, use quotes that refer to "magnifying your calling".  I've sat in on classes where teacher and students have discussed what that word "magnify" means or doesn't mean in that context where they have had a bit of a struggle creating a definitive definition.

Today I found this:

Magnify:  late 14th century, "To speak or act for the glory or honor (of someone or something)," From O. French magnafier,  from Latin magnificare, "esteem greatly, extol", from magnificus, "splendid".  Meaning use of a telescope or microscope is first attested 1660s.

It is relevant to note that the King James Version of the Bible was finished in 1611.

So, perhaps, if one is called by the Lord  to do some work in his Kingdom, then to magnify one's calling mostly just has to do with acting in that calling in a way that honors the divine nature of that calling thereby speaking and acting for the glory or honor of the Lord; speaking and acting in ways that reflect his way of loving and serving and that help turn others hearts to honor him, not making that calling bigger or clearer or more visible or detailed as later definitions of the word came to mean.

That makes sense to me.

Florence Barclay

"To my thinking, offence has no possible place in a genuine friendship.  The one pained always forestalls offence by the realization of non-intention to wound on the part of the other."

~Florence Barclay, "The Broken Halo"

Galatea and Pygmalion

Étienne Maurice Falconet: Pygmalion & Galatee (1763) Hermitage Museum, photography by abakharev, April 2006 

(public domain)

I found this in a very old book yesterday:

"True happiness does not come from marrying an idol throned on a pedestal.  Before Galatea could wed Pygmalion she had to change from marble into glowing flesh and blood and step down from off her pedestal. Love should not make us blind to one another's faults.  It should only make us infinitely tender, and completely understanding...Men and women, who are human enough to marry, are human enough to be full of faults; and the best thing marriage provides is that each gets somebody who will love, forgive and understand."              
 ~Florence Barclay

Secular Liberals and Conservative Evangelicals: the root of their differences

Professor of Anthropology (Stanford) Tanya Luhrmann was interviewed about a book of hers that was recently published. You can find the resultant article here.

What struck me was her comment about her understanding of the root of the difference in political thinking between secular liberals and conservative evangelicals.  She said,

"Secular liberals want to create the social conditions that allow everyday people, behaving the way ordinary people behave, to have fewer bad outcomes. When evangelicals vote, they think more immediately about what kind of person they are trying to become—what humans could and should be, rather than who they are. From this perspective, the problem with government is that it steps in when people fall short."

One party wanting to change the effects of human beings' choices and the other wanting to change the causes that are behind the choices made.  No wonder that they have such a terrifically difficult time understanding each other's modus operandi and feel totally thwarted by each other at every turn.

It reminded me of this quote by Ian Buruma:

"Obama is neither a socialist, nor a mere political accountant. He has some modest ideals, and may yet be an excellent president. But what is needed to revive liberal idealism is a set of new ideas on how to promote justice, equality and freedom in the world."

I am old enough to remember the idealism and belief about what we Americans could become in terms of equality, justice and freedom  that rang through the rank and file of many Democratic Party members in the days of Martin Luther King Jr., George McGovern and others in spite of the political old-boy network that still controlled its upper echelons.  I recall that that idealism and belief were grounded in a vision of moral integrity and the brotherhood of man that carried its believers forward through incredible opposition, fear-mongering and  hate that also prowled the political scene. 

I think we could use more of that vision, both of moral integrity and universal brotherhood in all political parties.

Learning from the view

Since my house burned down
I now own a better view
of the rising moon.

~Mizuta Mashide, 17th century Japanese poet

paint the window white and tile the wall. nice

Other design