Change Your Mind, Change Your Life: Dialectical Behavior Therapy


Yesterday one of my readers, out of compassion and in hopes of helping me reduce my suffering over recent stressors, suggested I revisit a couple of DBT (Dialectical Behavior Therapy) skills that I have not visited in a while.
They are:

  • Looking at “Error Thinking” and
  • Finding meaning in the pain
I applied both, as follows, and I must admit….where all other skills were slow to help me truly shift my mood, I am truly in a much better place emotionally having applied (and continuing to apply) these particular skills.
In the front of my DBT binder, there is a summary of  “15 Styles of Distorted Thinking” from this book:

Thoughts & Feelings: Taking Control of Your Moods & Your Life by McKay, Davis, and Fanning.

Here they are, with the ones I’ve been experiencing, highlighted.

  1. Filtering: You take the negative details and magnify them, while filtering out all positive aspects of a situation. A single detail may be picked out, and the whole event becomes colored by this detail. When you pull negative things out of context, isolated from all the good experiences around you, you make them larger and more awful than they really are.
  2. Polarized Thinking: The hallmark of this distortion is an insistence on dichotomous choices. Things are black or white, good or bad. You tend to perceive everything at the extremes, with very little room for a middle ground. The greatest danger in polarized thinking is its impact on how you judge yourself. For example-You have to be perfect or you’re a failure.
  3. Overgeneralization: You come to a general conclusion based on a single incident or piece of evidence. If something bad happens once, you expect it to happen over and over again. ‘Always’ and ‘never’ are cues that this style of thinking is being utilized. This distortion can lead to a restricted life, as you avoid future failures based on the single incident or event.
  4. Mind Reading: Without their saying so, you know what people are feeling and why they act the way they do. In particular, you are able to divine how people are feeling toward you. Mind reading depends on a process called projection. You imagine that people feel the same way you do and react to things the same way you do. Therefore, you don’t watch or listen carefully enough to notice that they are actually different. Mind readers jump to conclusions that are true for them, without checking whether they are true for the other person.
  5. Catastrophizing: You expect disaster. You notice or hear about a problem and start “what if’s.” What if that happens to me? What if tragedy strikes? There are no limits to a really fertile catastrophic imagination. An underlying catalyst for this style of thinking is that you do not trust in yourself and your capacity to adapt to change.
  6. Personalization: This is the tendency to relate everything around you to yourself. For example, thinking that everything people do or say is some kind of reaction to you. You also compare yourself to others, trying to determine who’s smarter, better looking, etc. The underlying assumption is that your worth is in question. You are therefore continually forced to test your value as a person by measuring yourself against others. If you come out better, you get a moment’s relief. If you come up short, you feel diminished. The basic thinking error is that you interpret each experience, each conversation, each look as a clue to your worth and value.
  7. Control Fallacies: There are two ways you can distort your sense of power and control. If you feel externally controlled, you see yourself as helpless, a victim of fate. The fallacy of internal control has you responsible for the pain and happiness of everyone around you. Feeling externally controlled keeps you stuck. You don’t believe you can really affect the basic shape of your life, let alone make any difference in the world. The truth of the matter is that we are constantly making decisions, and that every decision affects our lives. On the other hand, the fallacy of internal control leaves you exhausted as you attempt to fill the needs of everyone around you, and feel responsible in doing so (and guilty when you cannot).
  8. Fallacy of Fairness: You feel resentful because you think you know what’s fair, but other people won’t agree with you. Fairness is so conveniently defined, so temptingly self-serving, that each person gets locked into his or her own point of view. It is tempting to make assumptions about how things would change if people were only fair or really valued you. But the other person hardly ever sees it that way, and you end up causing yourself a lot of pain and an ever-growing resentment.
  9. Blaming: You hold other people responsible for your pain, or take the other tack and blame yourself for every problem. Blaming often involves making someone else responsible for choices and decisions that are actually our own responsibility. In blame systems, you deny your right (and responsibility) to assert your needs, say no, or go elsewhere for what you want.
  10. Shoulds: You have a list of ironclad rules about how you and other people should act. People who break the rules anger you, and you feel guilty if you violate the rules. The rules are right and indisputable and, as a result, you are often in the position of judging and finding fault (in yourself and in others). Cue words indicating the presence of this distortion are should, ought, and must.
  11. Emotional Reasoning: You believe that what you feel must be true-automatically. If you feel stupid or boring, then you must be stupid and boring. If you feel guilty, then you must have done something wrong. The problem with emotional reasoning is that our emotions interact and correlate with our thinking process. Therefore, if you have distorted thoughts and beliefs, your emotions will reflect these distortions.
  12. Fallacy of Change: You expect that other people will change to suit you if you just pressure or cajole them enough. You need to change people because your hopes for happiness seem to depend entirely on them. The truth is the only person you can really control or have much hope of changing is yourself. The underlying assumption of this thinking style is that your happiness depends on the actions of others. Your happiness actually depends on the thousands of large and small choices you make in your life.
  13. Global Labeling: You generalize one or two qualities (in yourself or others) into a negative global judgment. Global labeling ignores all contrary evidence, creating a view of the world that can be stereotyped and one-dimensional. Labeling yourself can have a negative and insidious impact upon your self-esteem; while labeling others can lead to snap-judgments, relationship problems, and prejudice.
  14. Being Right: You feel continually on trial to prove that your opinions and actions are correct. Being wrong is unthinkable and you will go to any length to demonstrate your rightness. Having to be ‘right’ often makes you hard of hearing. You aren’t interested in the possible veracity of a differing opinion, only in defending your own. Being right becomes more important than an honest and caring relationship.
  15. Heaven’s Reward Fallacy: You expect all your sacrifice and self-denial to pay off, as if there were someone keeping score. You fell bitter when the reward doesn’t come as expected. The problem is that while you are always doing the ‘right thing,’ if your heart really isn’t in it, you are physically and emotionally depleting yourself.
(The above list was sourced from Thoughts & Feelings: Taking Control of Your Moods & Your Life by McKay, Davis, and Fanning.)

The book then breaks down each of the different distorted thinking styles and offers “Rational Comebacks,” or ways to rationally cope and look at each of the distorted styles. The suggestions help bring balance to otherwise “error thinking.”

I’ll give you one example. With the filtering, I realized I have been caught up so much in the pain of the situation and focused on the resentment I had around the isolation of working from home, that I have not paid attention to the positive aspects of my situation, which leads to the second skill, Finding Meaning in the Pain.

I began to write a list of all of the positive aspects of working from home at this time that I had not considered before:
  • Since I only have to focus on work a certain number of hours a day, the rest of the day is free. 
  • No commute: I save money on gas and get to sleep in.
  • I attend meetings in my pajamas. Literally.
  • I can take a nap on my lunch break.
  • I have my cats by my side as I work.
  • I can make myself a healthy lunch, right here at home.
  • I don’t have to deal with the day-to-day drama at work.
  • No one looking over my shoulder and micromanaging.
I’m smiling now, just as I was when I first started formulating this list in my head.  If you are going through something stressful and feel stuck, I encourage you to consider the skills that my dear reader recommended.  Take a look through the distorted styles of thinking.  Can you identify any that might have you stuck?  How can you challenge those patterns of thinking?
Also, can you find any meaning in your current suffering?  What are some of the positive aspects of the situation you are coping with?  Maybe you’re learning something new, discovering your strength, or getting to work in your pajamas, for example.
Here is a link to an example I did on the distorted thinking style of Polarized (Black or White/All or Nothing) thinking.
Thank you for reading.
More Soon.

2 replies
  1. Caila McNeil
    Caila McNeil says:

    Possibly my favorite post so far. You give the reader a looot to relate to in understandable terms, and then provide an example of real life application. I have experienced everything on that list at one point or another in my life.

    Reply
  2. Caila McNeil
    Caila McNeil says:

    Possibly my favorite post so far. You give the reader a looot to relate to in understandable terms, and then provide an example of real life application. I have experienced everything on that list at one point or another in my life.

    Reply

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