If the worst fear actually happens, in what ways can you cope with it? Include all possible options and alternative plans of action. For example, you may consider retraining, or volunteering to work abroad. Think of friends or family – near or far – who may be prepared and able to help get you back on your feet. Include everything you can come up with.
If you get stuck when reflecting on these fear-coping questions, you may find it helpful to review other thought-repair tools, as well as the ‘Taking your Thoughts to Task’ process we discuss earlier in this chapter. And if anxiety and fear complicate your depression, consider reading Overcoming Anxiety For Dummies.
Putting the technique to work
Jack’s story illustrates how this process of facing the worst goes. Jack celebrates his 45th birthday with a sense of gloom and doom. He’s worked at a high tech chip manufacturing company for the past 15 years. During those years, he’s invested 90 per cent of his retirement fund into his company’s stock. For a while, that decision looked pretty good to Jack as his fund soared to heights he’d never imagined, well over £2 million.
Then, suddenly, the value of Jack’s company’s shares plunged so fast that he couldn’t salvage anything from his retirement fund.
Jack is understandably devastated – he fears it may be years and years before he can retire. His therapist suggests that Jack identifies his thoughts using a Thought Catcher (see Table 6-1). The event is the collapse of Jack’s retirement fund. Jack rates his feelings of despair as 80 and rates self-loathing as 85. Jack records his thoughts in response to the event as:
I might not be able to retire before I’m 80 years old.
I was stupid to invest so much money in my company.
Of course, Jack and his therapist can work on these initial thoughts to see if they contain distortions and to gather evidence for disproving them. They do so by using many of the techniques we show you in this chapter. However, Jack experiences only a minor improvement in his troubling emotions of despair and self-loathing. Therefore, his therapist asks Jack the following:
Therapist: Even though we can show evidence to the contrary, let’s assume for a moment that you really were stupid to invest so heavily in the company and that you won’t be able to retire until you’re at least 80 years old. What’s the worst possible meaning that these thoughts hold for you if they did happen to be true?
Jack: It means I’d be ridiculed.
Therapist: Okay, and let’s say you‘re ridiculed. What is it about ridicule that feels so awful? What is going to happen next if you are ridiculed?
Jack: Everyone is going to see me as an idiot and a fool.
Therapist: So if you really are an idiot and a fool, what is it that makes that feel so horrible to you? What’s the worst imaginable thing that can happen if that were so?
Jack: Everyone I care about is no longer going to love me and may leave me . . . I just know I can’t cope with that.
At this point, the therapist has reached some of Jack’s truly core fears – abandonment and loneliness. So Jack’s thoughts hold even greater meaning for him. He’s stupid and can’t retire for a long time, and everyone he cares about is going to leave him and he can’t bear living on his own without them. Jack’s therapist questions him further, in order to help him gain a better perspective. Jack’s answers follow the questions.
How likely is my worst feared fantasy to actually coming true? Actually, as I consider the evidence, it seems pretty unlikely that my family are going to decide that I’m an idiot and leave me. Even if they thought I did something stupid, I’ve lots of evidence that they’re totally loyal. So I reckon this scenario has about a 5 per cent chance of happening.
If the worst fear actually happens, in what ways can you cope with it? Yeough! It would be very difficult. But I guess I’d find a way of dealing with the loss. People do. Perhaps I’d join a support group. I could stay in therapy longer. And I could get involved in some useful activities, such as reading and exercise.
If the worst occurs, can you think of any other plans of action? I’d try to stay in touch with my kids, even if they thought I’d been stupid. I guess I can always find a group of supportive friends. Even if my current friends think that I’m an idiot, it doesn’t mean other people are going to think the same because they won’t know about what I did with my retirement money. And I could master new job skills or find work in another tech company. Some companies are still taking on staff, and I’m not that old. I do have time to rebuild my finances. Finally, over time, I may find another wife. I’m not that bad looking after all.
Cognitive therapy works best when you don’t deny, rationalise, or avoid your worst thoughts. Rather, cognitive therapy delivers maximum results when you deal with your worst-case scenarios directly.
Chapter 7
Discovering the Distorting Perceptions Behind Depression
In This Chapter
Understanding the nature of life-lenses
Seeing how lenses can distort your view
Working out your perspectives
Removing distorting lenses, and making new, clear ones
Everyone views the world from different perspectives, which we call life-lenses. As you look at your world through your life-lenses, they filter what you see. The correct lenses can make your view clearer, but others distort what you see. Lenses can be clear, grey, cloudy, rose-tinted, cracked, dirty, or distorted.
Andy, the eternal optimist, lands a good job at a marketing company immediately after graduating from university. He cheerfully assumes that he’s going to find a solution to every problem and that nothing and no one will ever stand in his way. He feels confident and even superior. He boasts to colleagues about his successes. He buys an expensive luxury car on credit, convinced that his salary is going to increase steadily. He views himself and the world through rose-tinted lenses.
Ralph, also taken on by the same marketing company, is the exact opposite of Andy. Ralph always expects the worst. He anticipates pitfalls and problems that his colleagues can’t even imagine. Ralph sees himself as less skilled and experienced than how his colleagues view him. He worries constantly about losing his job. Ralph peers through grey, smoky lenses when viewing life. Not surprisingly, he usually has a bleak and unpromising outlook.
Life-lenses colour your perception of events, yourself, and of people around you. You’re probably going to be surprised by how powerful these lenses can be. And you may be totally amazed to discover that both Ralph and Andy eventually fall prey to depression. Ralph, who feels inadequate, fails to progress in his career because he lacks confidence. He becomes depressed, which probably isn’t surprising given his bleak outlook on life. But Andy sees himself and his world as if nothing can ever go wrong for him. Although some optimism is understandably helpful, Andy actually feels superior to all those around him. Eventually, he’s fired for his overbearing insolence and he too quickly slides into depression. Despite their contrasting life-lenses, the outcome is the same for both men. And neither Andy nor Ralph is particularly unusual.
In this chapter, we show you how life-lenses operate, sometimes making you susceptible to depression and other problems, such as anger and anxiety. We help you see which of these lenses may be influencing you, even though you are unaware of it. You probably have a selection of different life-lenses that you use to view different types of events. After discovering which lenses you’re looking through, we give you the opportunity to update the outdated, problematic lenses, and find new ones that suit you.
Looking Closely at How You See the World
In Chapters 5 and 6 we discuss how thoughts or interpretations of events can lead directly to depressed feelings. For example, if you visit your mother and she tells you that ‘by and large’ she feels proud of you for something you’ve done, you may instantly interpret that in positive or negative terms. Perhaps you see the ‘by and large’ phrase as just a trivial figure of speech, and take her statement as a sincere compliment. Or, you may take t
he words ‘by and large’ as highlighting other areas of your life of which she doesn’t approve. If so, you could well have thoughts that you’ve failed and disappointed her, and your mood falls sharply.
What lies behind those instant thoughts? You guessed it: life-lenses. Life-lenses can be so powerful that they can cause two people to view the same event in totally contrasting ways.
For example, Helen and Olivia go to the same university and each gets an upper-second honours degree. They receive acceptance letters for the same prestigious postgraduate course. In the letters, they’re both awarded part scholarships. Helen is ecstatic and phones everyone she knows to tell them the good news. Olivia feels keen disappointment and shame that she didn’t get the full scholarship she’d hoped for, and feels that the university has failed to appreciate her talents. Helen is shocked by Olivia’s negative reaction. And Olivia can’t believe that Helen can be so happy about getting a measly part-scholarship when she also obviously deserves more. What’s going on with these two students?
The answer lies in the life-lenses that each of them are looking through. Helen happens to have pretty clear, undistorted lenses through which she views her achievements. Olivia, on the other hand, looks through the life-lens we call ‘entitled’. The entitled lens makes her believe that she must and will always be at the top, and that she deserves the best of everything. Anything less is totally unacceptable. Thus, Olivia’s reaction, although perhaps a bit exaggerated, now at least makes sense, doesn’t it?
In the following sections, you find out about the 12 life-lenses that are particularly problematic, where these lenses come from, and how they work .
Introducing the problematic life-lenses
Most people don’t realise that they look at their world through life-lenses, and they’re usually quite unaware of precisely which ones their minds use .
The potential list of possible life-lenses is long. But working with people suffering from depression we have found that there are 12 life-lenses which cause particular problems. Our list covers most of the problematic issues dealt with by mental health professionals.
Entitled: A perspective that you always deserve the best and you feel outraged when your needs go unmet
Guilty: A pervasive sense that you inevitably, usually unwittingly, do the wrong thing, and you deserve punishment for this
Inadequate: A sense that you lack important skills, abilities, or other vital qualities
Inferior: Viewing yourself as insignificant and less important than others
Intimacy avoidant: You don’t like getting close to people
Invulnerable: No recognition of the need to take special care because you believe you can come to no harm
Without conscience: Shameless disregard for ethics and morality
Perfectionistic: A belief that you can and should do everything perfectly – go to Chapter 5 for more information about the destructive influence of ‘shoulds’
Scared of abandonment: Worry that people you care about plan to leave you
Superior: The view that you are far better than others
Unworthy: A sense that you don’t deserve good things, or to have good things happening to you
Vulnerable: A belief that the world is a dangerous place, and you are at imminent risk of coming to harm
Remember Andy’s rose-tinted spectacles that we mention in the introduction to this chapter? You can see from the list that the rose-tinted spectacles actually consist of two lenses from the following list – superior and invulnerable. In other words, Andy feels both superior to others, and that he is invincible.
Understanding the origins of life-lenses
Who writes the prescriptions for life-lenses, when and where do people go to collect them, and why do they wear them? Knowing the answer to these questions helps you understand that no one deserves blame for having a variety of problematic, distorted life-lenses. After all, who is going to go to the Take a Quick Peek Optical Superstore and ask for a pair of cracked, distorted glasses? We believe that no one wants distorted life-lenses. Nevertheless, people end up wearing them for good reasons.
Generally speaking, the life-lenses through which you see yourself and the world were created in childhood. From infancy onwards, children actively work to make sense out of the activities and actions of parents, friends, teachers, relatives, and others. From a child’s perspective, these lenses reflect a reasonable understanding of the events they experience. And during childhood, they seem to make pretty good sense.
Thus, people who look through a guilty lens probably had parents who criticised them frequently and harshly. Naturally, a child comes to the conclusion that they must be to blame. Similarly, people with the entitled lens were probably spoiled as children, receiving excessive praise and even flattery.
The world inevitably changes as people mature and enter adulthood, but the perspective they hold often remains constant. For example, a boy who is always hearing how inadequate, inferior, and unworthy he is, quite possibly isn’t going to go on hearing those messages as an adult. However, he continues to look at the world through the same old lenses. As an adult, because of his long-held distorted views, he may interpret comments from others as criticism, even if that’s not intended.
Although events later in life may shape or reshape a person’s view of themselves, childhood is usually when the most difficult, distorted perspectives are formed.
Seeing the world through cracked life-lenses
Now, to show you precisely how these lenses operate, here’s an example of how viewing the exact same event through different lenses leads to totally contrasting thoughts and feelings (refer to Chapters 5 and 6 for more information about the interconnections between events, thoughts, and feelings).
Imagine you’re giving a presentation to a group of colleagues. You feel slightly nervous at the start, but quickly relax and gain confidence as you get your point across. After the talk, a colleague comments, ‘I noticed you were a little nervous up there.’
Depending on your particular life-lens or perspective, your reaction to the comment may lead to very different thoughts and feelings. Table 7-1 illustrates how these lenses work.
In Table 7-1, you may notice that the final lens, ‘good enough,’ wasn’t on the list of problematic lenses listed earlier. If so, you observed correctly. That’s because some lenses are not distorted, or “cracked” and do give a clear view of yourself and the world. We discuss clear lenses in the section on ‘Seeing Clearly: Replacing the Distorting Lenses’ later in this chapter.
Table 7-1 How Life-Lenses Lead to Contrasting Thoughts and Feelings
Event: You give a talk, and a friend says that you looked a little nervous.
Life-Lens: Definition
Thoughts (or Interpretations)
Resulting Feelings
Inadequate: I’m not very bright or good at anything.
I’m never going to be a good speaker. I shouldn’t even try. Everyone thinks I’m a twit and an idiot. How stupid can I be?
Shame
Despair
Scared of abandonment: I really worry about whether people like and approve of me. Eventually, everyone leaves.
My friend won’t want to associate with me any more. No one else is going to, either.
Worry
Anxiety
Isolation
Superior: I’m better than others and therefore I look down on them.
My so-called friend is trying to undermine me! Who is he to say something like that? As if he could do any better. I never thought much of him anyway.
Anger
Rage
Good enough: I know and accept that I have both strengths and weaknesses. I like to do well, but I can learn from mistakes too.
My friend is right; I did feel nervous, and it probably did show a bit. I don’t particularly like looking nervous, but I’m sure I can improve my performance with practice.
Mild, Short-lived Distress
Optimism
Overcoming Depression For Dummies Page 19
