This has been a stressful fall for me. What has made it stressful however, is less about the events and more about my thoughts in reaction to the events. Because I was feeling a tremendous amount of responsibility, any possible mistake or negative outcome activated a strong sense of failure. That is not a fun way to walk through your days.
I often listen to clients tell me “I feel like a failure,” “I feel like nobody likes me,” “I feel worthless,” and so many other “I feel” statements. Cognitive Behavioral therapists recognize this as a thought distortion wherein we mistake our emotions as facts. One of my favorite sayings is that “all emotions are valid, but they may not be based in fact.”
We often feel like something is true about us and develop a strong belief system around these thoughts. A common form of this distortion is when we decide that a fear that something is true means that it is.
It takes a lot of hard work to challenge these thoughts. Sometimes we are not even aware of them as they have developed slowly over time until their strength is formidable. The work lies in actively challenging them. Rather than allowing our emotions to dictate our thoughts, we need to check for facts. We need to actively look for evidence against these emotional thoughts.
In case you think this is easy, I should explain that this is not a one and done type of exercise. It takes a long time to develop the “feeling” thoughts and they do not want to disappear without a fight. I consider these thoughts like muscle memory. There are so many actions I perform by muscle memory without thinking. Changing those actions would feel unnatural.
Imagine how hard it would be to start doing everything with your non-dominant hand. It would feel awkward, wrong and you would constantly have to remind yourself. I would argue that changing your thoughts can be even harder.
Now here is the kicker, even when you have done the hard work of challenging your emotional reasoning with evidence and have learned to believe the new, more evidence-based thinking, those pesky emotional thoughts can still creep up.
This is what happened for me. I am actually quite confident that I am not a failure. I have certainly failed at many tasks during my lifetime and will continue to do so. However, I don’t believe one can be a failure when they mindfully work towards their values.
I don’t believe it, but sometimes I “feel it.” I can feel it with my whole being. I have seen a sign that reads “One of the hardest battles you’ll fight is between what you know and what you feel.” I could not agree more.
I will always work with myself and others to identify distorted thinking. Yet, I realize that even when we become skilled at recognizing and challenging problematic thoughts, sometimes our emotion mind overrides our wise mind.
I do not have a perfect solution for this, but I know that recognizing it helps us to stay mindful of the healthy thoughts and fight harder to bring them to the surface.
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