regarding christian wolff
Thought Records
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christian@christianwolff.com
David Burns’ 10 Cognitive Distortions
1. ALL-OR-NOTHING THINKING: You see things in black-and-white categories. If your performance falls short of perfect, you see yourself as a total failure.
2. OVERGENERALIZATION: You see a single negative event as a never-ending pattern of defeat.
3. MENTAL FILTER: You pick out a single negative detail and dwell on it exclusively so that your vision of all reality becomes darkened, like the drop of ink that discolors the entire beaker of water.
4. DISQUALIFYING THE POSITIVE: You reject positive experiences by insisting they “don’t count” for some reason or other. In this way you can maintain a negative belief that is contradicted by your everyday experiences.
5. JUMPING TO CONCLUSIONS: You make a negative interpretation even though there are no definite facts that convincingly support your conclusion.
a. MIND READING: You arbitrarily conclude that someone is reacting negatively to you, and you don’t bother to check this out.
b. FORTUNE TELLING: You anticipate that things will turn out badly, and you feel convinced that your prediction is an already-established fact.
6. MAGNIFICATION (CATASTROPHIZING) OR MINIMIZATION: You exaggerate the importance of things (such as your goof-up or someone else’s achievement), or you inappropriately shrink things until they appear tiny (your own desirable qualities or other fellow’s imperfections). This is also called the “binocular trick.”
7. EMOTIONAL REASONING: You assume that your negative emotions necessarily reflect the way things really are: “I feel it, therefore it must be true.”
8. SHOULD STATEMENTS: You try to motivate yourself with should and shouldn’t, as if you had to be whipped and punished before you could be expected to do anything. “Musts” and “oughts” are also offenders. The emotional consequences are guilt. When you direct should statements toward others, you feel anger, frustration, and resentment.
9. LABELING AND MISLABELING: This is an extreme form of overgeneralization. Instead of describing your error, you attach a negative label to yourself. “I’m a loser.” When someone else’s behavior rubs you the wrong way, you attach a negative label to him” “He’s a damn louse.” Mislabeling involves describing an event with language that is highly colored and emotionally loaded.
10. PERSONALIZATION: You see your self as the cause of some negative external event, which in fact you were not primarily responsible for.
Albert Ellis’ 12 Typical Irrational Beliefs and Disputing Statements
1. The idea that it is a dire necessity for adults to be loved by significant others for almost everything they do…
… instead of their concentrating on their own self-respect, on winning approval for practical purposes, and on loving rather than on being loved.
2. The idea that certain acts are awful or wicked, and that people who perform such acts should be severely damned…
… instead of the idea that certain acts are self-defeating or antisocial, and that people who perform such acts are behaving stupidly, ignorantly, or neurotically, and would be better helped to change. People’s poor behaviors do not make them rotten individuals.
3. The idea that it is horrible when things are not the way we like them to be…
… instead of the idea that it is too bad, that we had better try to change or control bad conditions so that they become more satisfactory, and, if that is not possible, we had better temporarily accept and gracefully lump their existence.
4. The idea that human misery is invariably externally caused and is forced on us by outside people and events…
… instead of the idea that neurosis is largely caused by the view that we take of unfortunate conditions.
5. The idea that if something is or may be dangerous or fearsome we should be terribly upset and endlessly obsess about it…
… instead of the idea that one had better frankly face it and render it non-dangerous, and, when that is not possible, accept the inevitable.
6. The idea that it is easier to avoid than to face life difficulties and self-responsibilities…
… instead of the idea that the so-called easy way is usually much harder in the long run.
7. The idea that we absolutely need something other or stronger or greater than ourself on which to rely…
… instead of the idea that it is better to take the risks of thinking and acting less dependently.
8. The idea that we should be thoroughly competent, intelligent, and achieving in all possible respects…
… instead of the idea that we would prefer to do well rather than always need to do well, and accept ourself as a quite imperfect creature, who has general human limitations and specific fallibilities.
9. The idea that because something once strongly affected our life, it should indefinitely affect it…
… instead of the idea that we can learn from our past experiences but not be overly-attached to or prejudiced by them.
10. The idea that we must have certain and perfect control over things… … instead of the idea that the world is full of improbability and chance and that we can still enjoy life despite this.
11. The idea that human happiness can be achieved by inertia and inaction… … instead of the idea that we tend to be happiest when we are vitally absorbed in creative pursuits, or when we are devoting ourselves to people or projects outside ourselves.
12. The idea that we have virtually no control over our emotions and that we cannot help feeling disturbed about things…
… instead of the idea that we have real control over our destructive emotions – if we choose to work at changing the “musturbatory” hypotheses which we often employ to create them.
Morning Positive Self-Talk (Generated by CW in Therapy)
- Joy. [This is a positive, instant “trigger” word]
- Oh! I don’t look as bad as I feel
- Oh! Okay – now I feel okay
- It’s just one day. Just do it. Tomorrow, it will be a reset
- It is now. There is no other time but now. If not now, then When?
- Today is the day/Show time!!/Here I go!
- Today is a good day. It has time in it. There is so much I can get done.
- No one will fuck with me. I will kick ass today. I’ve won every fight I’ve ever fought.
- KILL (figuratively but with feeling)
- Life is hilarious! Ha! Have fun
Thought Record
Date & Time:
January 22, 2018: 12:08 pm
Situation:
Just arrived at Starbucks downtown.
Automatic Thought(s):
Thank God I am here. My hair is greasy. It probably looks bad and people think bad things about me. I have a thing to go to tonight. I should clean up. That seems laborious. The Buddhists tonight will think I am a homeless person.
Emotion(s):
Relieved (to be a Starbucks). Discouraged that a simple thing like keeping clean is such a big deal for me.
Distortion(s):
That I have erred excessively – that my hair it too greasy – that people will be overly judgemental of me. That negative judgement will have a long lasting effect. Working in a shower this afternoon will be unbearably depressing.
Alternative Thought(s):
Thank God I am here. It is raining outside which I like. My coffee tastes good. I don’t HAVE to have this negative attitude. Pay attention. Accept things for what they are. It is what it is. So be it. Focus. Be present in the moment. My hair doesn’t look that bad. To some extent, oilier makes it look healthier. I can always pull it back.
Outcome(s):
Mild elevation in mood – energy level, focus, awakeness, efficacy.
Mood Flow
Thursday, January 25, 2018, 12:40 pm
12: 15 pm: Perfect peace, calm, clarity. It came as I was halfway through writing this note to my brother:
I like this one and I like the way it is used in the examples. I am mixed on the description of the etymology though. Some of it just seems like a stretch and alternatives come to mind for me. I like the idea that Latin (?) for “hand” is “manus.” My mind wanders to the ideas that God’s creation of “man” was actually the creation of (God’s) hands. In a recent discussion we had, I mentioned this idea I’ve long held that cosmologically, human “embodiment” is a very special time between two perhaps, long, perhaps. short periods of some non corporeal alternatives and that as physical beings, this period is the ONLY opportunity we have to change things. The moral of THIS story if this happened to be accurate is to not waste your life. “Hands” are very important symbolically. They are a symbol of action, doing, efficacy, and so on. Let’s imagine God as a non-corporeal being. No hands. He decided at some point for some reason, he needed hands. He needed hands like a ranch owner needs (hired) “hands.” God created “manus.”
This note accompanied my forwarding the Merriam-Webster Word of the Day to him. The word was”mansuetude” (MAN swih tood) which means “gentle” or “tamed.”
As I was noticing this sudden peace, a barista called out a man’s name. It was “Osiris.” My first recall of Osiris from Egyptian mythology was that Isis had cut his dead body up into a whole lot of pieces and spread the pieces to the “4 corners of the earth.” I thought, “This is interesting. ‘Fragmented’ is how I’ve been feeling.” I looked up Osiris and found:
Osiris (/oʊˈsaɪrɪs/, from Egyptian wsjr, Coptic ⲟⲩⲥⲓⲣⲉ)[1][2] is an Egyptian god, identified as the god of the afterlife, the underworld, and the dead, but more appropriately as the god of transition, resurrection, and regeneration.
Odd, as I am writing this I am overhearing this Starbucks Osiris. He is explaining words from Genesis to a younger man. Some days seem full of synchronicities.
Prior to arriving at Starbucks: I woke about 10 am in the middle of a dream in which my brother and I were having an increasingly intense argument about all the Jesus crap he uses to manipulate the family and to control things. I was furious! Perhaps I am slightly incorrect about the sequence here. I remember one of my emotional/mood moments being an extremely pleasant one. The observation was simple: “I am in bed. I am comfortable. It is only 10 am and I can sleep another hour or so.” But the dreaming would not escape me. I seem unable to bring my dreams to positive resolutions these days. This is one of the ways I get myself to rise – when an unpleasant dream simply will not resolve. I sleep late for several “reasons,” but for now, let’s just call it an extreme felt dread of the day. I think sometimes, if I can resolve a dream, that dread will go away and I will feel better about rising. I will NOT let myself sleep past 11:30 am and if it is past 11:00 and the dream is not resolving, I say “screw it,” and like someone closing their eyes and jumping off a high dive, I swing my legs over the edge of the bed. I sit there for a moment. When I’ve had a dream like that, I sit there for a longer time feeling exhausted from the dreaming.
Waking up and getting out of bed is regularly an intensely horrible experience. I guess we’ve talked about this before. I will write more on this later.
2:00 pm: At a little past 1:30, I realized I am disappointed that I don’t have more emails to read (which, if they were there, would be mostly HARBR-related). Truth be known, my feelings are mixed about this. Feelings, emotions, moods, I think, are more often than not, NOT what we think they’re about. Those emails would have kept me busy. THAT’S why I am disappointed. If it weren’t for that, I might be GLAD there aren’t so many today. Now I am feeling stuck and bored. I am in the “golden cage” of Starbucks. My safe island. I WAS going to actually read today (Portrait of a Lady by Henry James), and even told Ryan that this is what I was going to do – then I noticed I didn’t bring it with me. Perhaps it is online on the Gutenberg Project site. I will check momentarily. That would make me feel more … level and content. Just moments ago though, I was thinking of actual things I could do. I looked at a Fort Wayne map to see where I might drive to see new things and possibly discover opportunities, enthusisms, and encouragements. I thought I could drop into The Atrium where I haven’t been for 2 months. This did little for my malaise. I realized for the second time this morning that these “activities” held little prospect for me if I did them alone, as an isolated person. Even having someone who is interested to report to would help. Ha! – I guess that’s you right now Raphael. Earlier, it had occurred to me that there is a tradition in which people write such reports “as if” someone were listening or reading. It is the “diary tradition” in which someone begins an entry with “Dear Diary” as if the diary were a “person.”
I think this song probably bears some discussion. Well, maybe not. It’s just that I have some people “watching over me” – the Psych Board and those people. I think I long for someone to benevolently watch over me – to be my witness – to be my “protector.”
Here is a song I have long enjoyed, and though the song as whole made some sort of emotional sense to me, I could never really understand the witness/mutineer pairing. Only now do I think I understand it. The singer Warren Zevon has always been a bold writer. The characters in his songs are often iconoclasts and mercenaries and people on the wrong side of something. This video is his last performance on David Letterman before he dies of lung cancer at the age of 55 or so. I think he was affirming his relationship with God – that God was “with” him even though he’d always been an irreverent smart-ass. I think he was struggling with some amount of guilt about that, and as well, I think he was experiencing some guilt about dying. I think he was saying, “Come on, God – let’s get out of here.” On the other hand, he may have been singing this from the point of view of God in which case God may have been saying, “Yeah, you thought you were captain of your own ship, and I let you. But I am now staging a coup. I’m taking over. You can’t deny it. You are dying. I’m taking command of the vessel. Come on, son – let’s get out of here.
Thought Record
Date & Time:
Wednesday, January 31, 2018: 12:30 pm
Situation:
Typical morning routine. Just reached the bathroom from the bedroom after waking.
Automatic Thought(s):
I noticed that I wasn’t “cursing silently to myself” as I usually do (as described yesterday on the “pavement” page). I thought that this was a good thing. I thought about how this is progress. Then I thought, “I’m probably just fooling myself, and actually driving this negative self talk deeper into to subligualty.” This last thought is not unlike some other thoughts I’ve had this week about degrees of perceived progress. As I am writing this, I am trying to decide whether “defeated” is a thought or a feeling.
Emotion(s):
The thought threw me into a mid-negative “blah” – a mid-negative neutral. Now, an hour and a half later, the feeling is the same although I do notknow if I can’t attribute this to this singular thought-event.
Distortion(s):
I just read through Ellis’s Irrational beliefs and found that a fair half of them seemed to fit.
Alternative Thought(s):
I am making far too big a deal out of the idea that I may be fooling myself.
Outcome(s):
After reading Ellis’s list, I felt a mood lift. The meaning of the identified thought did not fully change nor my feelings about it. Whether one is fooling oneself is a complex thing. I am putting it on my list to problem solve: How can I tell when I am and am not fooling myself?
Mood Flow
Wednesday, January 31, 2018
2:20 pm: Only now is my mood leveling. This is NOT unusual. I am about 1/3 through my second 16 oz. cup of Starbuck’s dark roast. Don’t know how the coffee factors in. This is how things have played out today so far:
11:00 am: Woke and got out of bed immediately. Noticed that moderately positive dreams were starting to turn problematic and so I thought I’d just nip THAT problem in the bud. Physically, I felt moderately tired (approximating the usual). See the Thought Record for this same day (above). I felt “blah.”
11:20 am: Continued to feel “blah” and, as well, sort of “zoned out” as I listed to an otherwise interesting story on NPR’s A-1 Program. Usually I get more drawn into the story even if it is LESS interesting.
11:45 am: Almost to Starbucks, I ended up behind a funeral profession for the SECOND DAY IN A ROW. I asked myself where my compassion was and examined this as I experience irritation and anger about the procession itself. This is not unusual and I comfort my self only by knowing that most of us only encounter these rarely. I did not engage sublimation or reaction formation (Freudian defense mechanisms) and accepted that a COGNITIVE compassion for those suffering the loss of the departed was enough. I saw an opportunity for a detour but it didn’t work and, THIS time, I resigned myself to summoning patience. To note: I have never condone this traffic blocking custom nor approved of this being accompanied by official, authoritative (police) escort.
12:00 noon: In the Starbucks parking lot. The NPR story had been on vitamin supplements, regulation, free choice/risk, labeling, fraud, danger, safety, the FDA, whether the people should trust the government, big business, their own experience, their own internet research, and so on. THEN it was anounced that the head of the Center for Disease Control (CDC) just stepped down after evidence was presented that as soon as she took her position a year ago, she bought stock in tobacco and pharmaceutical companies! My considerable rage was only tempered by the validation (proof) of my suspicion that things are operating in this way. This is NOT unrelated to my HARBR work and I have a lot of “I told you so’s” to deliver to a lot of people about matters which can be generalized from this.
12:05: I enter Starbucks and a guy I see most days sitting quietly in the corner seemed to “thrust” an eyeball at me meaning he seemed to be giving me “the evil eye” and he seemed to sit up as if to “thrust” this at me and he seemed to hold this gaze. Reflexively, I felt angry/defensive but not REALLY threatened and after a second, as I stood in line to get my coffee, all this simply turned to a moment of curiosity. The line was a little long. I noted I was a little irritated by this. Nevertheless, people were starting to say hello to me and more than usually the baristas were calling me by my name. Many pleasant exchanges, jokes, initiation on my part of chats with strangers, compliments, and so on. But my “blah” feelings were still running in the background. As I took my seat with my coffee, that guy seemed to be eyeballing me again. I thought to approach him and “confront” him but opted to just put it out of my mind instead.
As I have been doing this week on half the days or so, I wrote on THESE pages before getting into my email which I felt (and feel) good about. I give myself credit for this choice. It is habit breaking with good results. It seems like progress which gives me hope, confidence, and ease.
3:10 pm: I am feeling a little “blah-ness” returning. I think it has something to do with reaching my momentary threshold of introspection. I will now leave this page and tend to other tasks.