Earlier in the week, someone close to me commented on a spelling error in one of my blog posts. Ugh. I felt a pit in my stomach. There was an immediate drop in my mood. These reactions were not the result of the comment, but of my interpretation of the comment.
The comment came from someone who loves and supports me. Someone who reads everything I post and compliments me consistently. Yet, I took this one comment out of context and heard “You are doing a bad job.” The pit in my stomach and mood drop fit what I heard, but not what was said. My reaction was the result of a distorted way of thinking.
The funny thing is I didn’t fully recognize it at first. I knew my reaction was a bit extreme, but I wasn’t sure why.
The next morning, I was driving to work thinking about a group I was planning. The group topic for the past few weeks has been about components of emotion regulation. A primary contributing factor is our thoughts, or, more specifically, how we interpret events.
I often give the example of my kids’ reactions to snow days. My daughter cheers based on her thought “woohoo, a day of relaxing.” The same event results in a reaction of disappointment from my son. His thought is along the lines of “oh no, we will have an extra day of school at the end of June and my summer will be shorter.” Each of my kids is using a filter that leads to opposite reactions to the same event.
As I was thinking about some new examples for the group, the light bulb went off! No wonder I was upset by the comment. I had filtered out all the positive and only heard the negative. I then generalized a small comment directed at one mistake to a huge criticism of all my writing. To top it off, I was only looking for evidence to confirm my fear. Triple “ugh!!” I actually laughed at myself in the car as I realized it.
I thought about some of what I would recommend to a group member if (s)he gave an example such as mine. I would say “check your facts.” In other words, do the facts support your interpretation? Is there evidence that contradicts your interpretation? Is there a more neutral explanation? Most of the time, there are some distortions at work.
In my case, the actual comment did not support my thought of “you are doing a bad job.” There was also a lot of evidence that the comment was made by someone who thinks I am doing a good job. The more neutral interpretation is “You are doing a great job and here is a suggestion on how you can do even better.” That comment doesn’t leave a pit in my stomach!
I have gotten a lot better at noticing when my thinking is distorted. You may remember from my recent post, “Mondays Are for Emotion Regulation,” that I noticed the impact on my mood when I misinterpreted my daughter’s anger as directed at me. I caught that one almost immediately, but it happens so often!
People often ask me how to notice these distortions and I have to admit it takes a lot of practice. The distortions can be so automatic. The first step is to be able to look back as I just did on events that seemed to have a strong effect on our moods. Once we get better at noticing the thought patterns retrospectively, we can start to notice them in the moment.
I still have a lot of work to do, so you can look for lots more posts on this topic!
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