Cognitive Behavioural Therapy For Dummies

Introduction

Cognitive behavioural therapy, or CBT, continues to grow in popularity as an efficient and long lasting treatment for many different types of psychological problems. Increasingly, CBT is the treatment your doctor is most likely to offer you if you consult him with concerns about your mood. If the word psychological sends you running from the room screaming, try to consider the term referring to problems that affect your emotional rather than your physical sense of well-being. At some point in your life, something’s going to go a bit wrong with your body. So why on earth do humans assume that their minds and emotions should be above the odd hiccup, upset, or even more serious difficulty? Happily, fewer stigmas about mental health difficulties like anxiety and depression exist now than when this book first published in 2005).

This book gives you a comprehensive introduction to the theory and application of CBT techniques. Although we don’t have the space to go into nitty-gritty specifics about how to use CBT to overcome every type of emotional or psychological problem, we do try to lead you in a helpful direction by giving an overview of some of the most common problems people encounter. You may not have realized just how common mental health problems can be. We aim to help you see that you aren’t alone, that there is help and that you certainly have no need to be embarrassed about seeking support! We believe all the CBT principles and strategies outlined in this book can improve your life and help you to stay healthy, regardless of whether you’ve worked with or are currently working with a psychiatrist or other psychological professional.

In addition, whether you think your problems are minimal, you’re crushing this living thing, you feel mildly depressed, or you’ve had years of uncomfortable psychological symptoms, CBT can help you. We ask you to be open-minded and to use the stuff in this book to make your life better and fuller.

About This Book

If you’re embarking on a journey of self-help or self-improvement, we hope that this book provides a useful introduction to CBT techniques and will be of benefit to you. This book covers the following:

The basics of using CBT as a scientifically tested and verified psychotherapeutic method of overcoming common emotional problems.

Ways in which you can identify your problems and set specific goals for how you’d rather be living your life.

Techniques to identify errors in the way you may be thinking and to adopt more helpful thoughts, attitudes, philosophies, and beliefs.

Behavioural experiments and strategies you can incorporate into your life to improve your day-to-day functioning.

Information that can help you to understand, normalise, and address some common human problems. You may think that you’re the only person in the world who feels and thinks the way you do. This book shows you that many problems such as depression, anxiety, anger, and obsessions are in fact very common human experiences, so welcome to the human race! You’re not alone.

We hope that the whole experience will be at least a little entertaining in the process. So read on, welcome new concepts, and consider trying some of the ideas we offer in the book.

Note: Depending on the degree of disruption and distress that your personal difficulties are causing you, this book may or may not be enough treatment to help you recover. The book may spur you on to get further help to really knock your emotional demons on the head. See Chapter 23 for tips on finding and working with a professional.

To make your reading experience easier and to alert you to key words or points, we use certain conventions.

Italics introduce new terms, underscore key differences in meaning between words, and highlight the most important aspects of a sentence or example.

We use the terms him in even-numbered chapters and her in odd-numbered chapters when writing, with a view to incorporate gender equality.

The case studies in the book are illustrative of actual clients we have treated and aren’t direct representations of any particular clients.

Bold text is used to show the action part of numbered lists.

And to make your reading experience even easier, we identify skippable material:

Sidebars and the Technical Stuff icon: Within most chapters, we include sidebars of shaded text. These sidebars contain interesting nuggets of information or occasionally expand on a topic within the chapter. Read them if they sound interesting to you and skip them if they don’t. The same goes for text marked with the Technical Stuff icon.

Our acknowledgements: Probably pretty boring to the average reader.

Foolish Assumptions

In writing this little tome, we make the following assumptions about you, dear reader:

You’re human.

As a human, you’re likely at some stage in your life to experience some sort of emotional problem that you’d like to surmount.

You’ve heard about CBT, or are intrigued by CBT, or have had CBT suggested to you by a doctor, friend, or mental health professional as a possible treatment for your specific difficulties.

Even if you don’t think you’re particularly in need of CBT right now, you want to discover more about some of the principles outlined in this book.

You think that your life is absolutely fine right now, but you want to find interesting and useful information in the book that will enhance your life further.

You’re keen to find out whether CBT may be helpful to someone close to you.

You’re studying CBT and want to use this book as a hands-on adjunct to your training.

Icons Used in This Book

We use the following icons in this book to alert you to certain types of information that you can choose to read, commit to memory (and possibly pass on to unsuspecting friends and family), or maybe just utterly ignore:

Tip This icon highlights practical advice for putting CBT into practice.

Remember This icon is a cheerful, if sometimes urgent, reminder of important points to take notice of.

Warning This icon marks out specific things to avoid or possible traps to keep your eye open for in your quest for better emotional health.

Technical stuff This icon highlights information that may be interesting but isn’t essential for understanding the topic at hand. You can skip these bits if you like.

Think abou tit This icon alerts you to stuff that has a bit of a philosophical basis and may need some mulling over in your spare time.

Experiment This icon indicates a CBT technique that you can try out in real life to see what results you get.

Beyond the Book

We made a ‘cheat sheet’ that sums up the key points in this book; you can use it a handy reminder or give it to anyone who might benefit from its tips.

Go to www.dummies.com and search for ‘Cognitive Behavioural Therapy For Dummies Cheat Sheet’ and commence cheating!

Where to Go From Here

This book is written in a rough order to help you progress from the basics of CBT on to more complex techniques and ideas. However, you can read the chapters in any order you like or just hit on the ones that cover subjects you think you want to know more about.

We’d really like you to read everything in this book and then post positive reviews all over the Internet, get t-shirts printed with the title (and maybe design yourself a CBT For Dummies tattoo), make the cover your profile pic on social media, and scream about its virtues to random people you meet on the street. Too much? Well, failing that, just use this book as your reference guide to CBT, dipping in and out of it as and when you need to.

Have a browse through the table of contents and turn to the chapters that look as if they may offer something helpful to you and your current difficulties.

When you’ve used the book in one way or another, you may decide that you want to get stuck into CBT treatment with a therapist. If so, consult Chapter 23 for more advice on getting treatment.

Part 1

Introducing CBT Basics

IN THIS PART …

Get to grips with what CBT stands for and why it’s the ‘weapon of choice’ among mental health professionals.

Understand how your thinking about events leads to how you feel (and how negative feelings also lead to more negative thinking).

Discover how to recognise and tackle your negative thought patterns.

Gain some tips about exerting control over your attention.

Chapter 1

You Feel the Way You Think

IN THIS CHAPTER

check Defining CBT

check Exploring the power of meanings

check Understanding how your thoughts lead to emotions and behaviours

check Getting acquainted with the ABC formula

Cognitive behavioural therapy – more commonly referred to as CBT – focuses on the way people think and act to help them with their emotional and behavioural problems.

Many of the effective CBT practices we discuss in this book should seem like everyday good sense. In our opinion, CBT does have some very straightforward and clear principles and is a largely sensible and practical approach to helping people overcome problems. However, human beings don’t always act according to sensible principles, and most people find that simple solutions can be very difficult to put into practice sometimes. CBT can maximise on your common sense and help you to do the healthy things that you may sometimes do naturally and unthinkingly in a deliberate and self-enhancing way on a regular basis.

In this chapter we take you through the basic principles of CBT and show you how to use these principles to better understand yourself and your problems.

Using Scientifically Tested Methods

The effectiveness of CBT for various psychological problems has been researched more extensively than any other psychotherapeutic approach. CBT’s reputation as a highly effective treatment is based on continued research. Several studies reveal that CBT is more effective than medication alone for the treatment of anxiety and depression. As a result of research like this, briefer and more intense treatment methods have been developed for particular anxiety disorders such as panic, anxiety in social settings or feeling worried all the time.

As scientific research of CBT continues, more is being discovered about which aspects of the treatment are most useful for different types of people and which therapeutic interventions work best with different types of problems.

Research shows that people who have CBT for various types of problems – in particular, for anxiety and depression – stay well for longer. This means that people who have CBT relapse less often than those who have other forms of psychotherapy or take medication only. This positive result is likely due in part to the educational aspects of CBT – people who have CBT receive a lot of information that they can use to become their own therapists.

More and more physicians and psychiatrists refer their patients for CBT to help them overcome a wide range of problems with good results. These problems include the following:

Addiction

Anger problems

Anxiety

Body dysmorphic disorder

Body image problems

Chronic fatigue syndrome

Chronic pain

Depression

Eating disorders

Gender identity and sexuality issues

Obsessive-compulsive disorder

Panic disorder

Personality disorders

Phobias

Post-traumatic stress disorder

Psychotic disorders

Relationship problems

Social anxiety

We discuss many of the disorders in the preceding list in more depth throughout this book, but it is very difficult to cover them all. Fortunately, the CBT skills and techniques in this book can be applied to most types of psychological difficulties, so give them a try whether or not your particular problem is specifically discussed.

Understanding CBT

Cognitive behavioural therapy is a school of psychotherapy that aims to help people overcome their emotional problems.

Cognitive means mental processes like thinking. The word cognitive refers to everything that goes on in your mind including dreams, memories, images, thoughts and attention.

Behaviour refers to everything that you do. This includes what you say, how you try to solve problems, how you act and avoidance. Behaviour refers to both action and inaction, for example biting your tongue instead of speaking your mind is still a behaviour even though you are trying not to do something.

Therapy is a word used to describe a systematic approach to combating a problem, illness or irregular condition.

A central concept in CBT is that you feel the way you think. Therefore, CBT works on the principle that you can live more happily and productively if you’re thinking in healthy ways. This principle is a very simple way of summing up CBT, and we have many more details to share with you later in the book.

Combining science, philosophy and behaviour

CBT is a powerful treatment because it combines scientific, philosophical and behavioural aspects into one comprehensive approach to understanding and overcoming common psychological problems.

Getting scientific. CBT is scientific not only in the sense that it has been tested and developed through numerous scientific studies but also in the sense that it encourages clients to become more like scientists. For example, during CBT, you may develop the ability to treat your thoughts as theories and hunches about reality to be tested (what scientists call hypotheses) rather than as facts.

Getting philosophical. CBT recognises that people hold values and beliefs about themselves, the world and other people. One of the aims of CBT is to help people develop flexible, non-extreme and self-helping beliefs that help them adapt to reality and pursue their goals.

Think abou tit Your problems are not all just in your mind. Although CBT places great emphasis on thoughts and behaviour as powerful areas to target for change and development, it also places your thoughts and behaviours within a context. CBT recognises that you’re influenced by what’s going on around you and that your environment makes a contribution towards the way you think, feel and act. However, CBT maintains that you can make a difference to the way you feel by changing unhelpful ways of thinking and behaving – even if you can’t change your environment. Incidentally, your environment in the context of CBT includes other people and the way they behave towards you. Your living situation, your culture, workplace dynamics or financial concerns are also features of your larger environment.

Getting active. As the name suggests, CBT also strongly emphasises behaviour. Many CBT techniques involve changing the way you think and feel by modifying the way you behave. Examples include gradually becoming more active if you’re depressed and lethargic, or facing your fears step by step if you’re anxious. CBT also places emphasis on where you focus your attention. Mental behaviours, such as worrying and chewing over negative events, can be helped by learning to focus your attention in a more helpful direction.

Progressing from problems to goals

A defining characteristic of CBT is that it gives you the tools to develop a focused approach. CBT aims to help you move from defined emotional and behavioural problems towards your goals of how you’d like to feel and behave. Thus, CBT is a goal-directed, systematic, problem-solving approach to emotional problems.

Making the Thought–Feeling Link

Like many people, you may assume that if something happens to you, the event makes you feel a certain way. For example, if your partner treats you inconsiderately, you may conclude that she makes you angry. You may further deduce that her inconsiderate behaviour makes you behave in a particular manner, such as sulking or refusing to speak to her for hours (possibly even days; people can sulk for a very long time!). We illustrate this common (but incorrect) causal relationship with the following formula. In this equation, the A stands for a real or actual event – such as being rejected or losing your job. It also stands for an activating event that may or may not have happened. It could be a prediction about the future, such as ‘I’m going to get the sack’, or a memory of a past rejection, such as ‘Hilary will dump me just like Judith did ten years ago’. C stands for consequence, which means the way you feel and behave in response to an actual or activating event.

A (actual or activating event) = C (emotional and behavioural consequence)

CBT encourages you to understand that your thinking or beliefs lie between the event and your ultimate feelings and actions. Your thoughts, your beliefs and the meanings that you give to an event produce your emotional and behavioural responses.

So in CBT terms, your partner does not make you angry and sulky. Rather, your partner behaves inconsiderately, and you assign a meaning to her behaviour such as ‘She’s doing this deliberately to upset me, and she absolutely should not do this!’, thus making yourself angry and sulky. In the next formula, B stands for your beliefs about the event and the meanings you give to it.

A (actual or activating event) + B (beliefs and meanings about the event) = C (emotional and behavioural consequence)

This is the formula or equation that CBT uses to make sense of your emotional problems.

Emphasising the meanings you attach to events

The meaning you attach to any sort of event influences the emotional responses you have to that event. Positive events normally lead to positive feelings of happiness or excitement, whereas negative events typically lead to negative feelings like sadness or anxiety.

However, the meanings you attach to certain types of negative events may not be wholly accurate, realistic or helpful. Sometimes, your thinking may lead you to assign extreme meanings to events, leaving you feeling disturbed.

For instance, Tilda meets up with a nice man that she’s contacted via a dating app. She quite likes him on their first date and hopes he’ll contact her for a second meeting. Unfortunately, he doesn’t. After two weeks of eagerly checking her phone, Tilda gives up and becomes depressed. The fact that the chap failed to ask Tilda out again contributes to her feeling bad. But what really leads to her acute depressed feelings is the meaning she’s derived from his apparent rejection, namely, ‘This proves I’m old, unattractive, past it and unwanted. I’ll be a sad singleton for the rest of my life’.

As Tilda’s example shows, drawing extreme conclusions about yourself (and others and the world at large) based on singular experiences can turn a bad distressing situation into a deeply disturbing one.

Technical stuff Psychologists use the word disturbed to describe emotional responses that are unhelpful and cause significant discomfort to you. In CBT terminology, disturbed means that an emotional or behavioural response is hindering rather than helping you to adapt and cope with a negative event.

For example, if a potential girlfriend rejects you after the first date (event), you may think ‘This proves I’m unlikeable and undesirable’ (meaning) and feel depressed (emotion).

CBT involves identifying thoughts, beliefs and meanings that are activated when you’re feeling emotionally disturbed. If you assign less extreme, more helpful, more accurate meanings to negative events, you are likely to experience less extreme, less disturbing emotional and behavioural responses.

Thus, on being rejected after the first date (event), you could think ‘I guess that person didn’t like me that much; oh well – they’re not the one for me’ (meaning) and feel disappointment (emotion).

Tip You can help yourself to figure out whether or not the meanings you’re giving to a specific negative event are causing you disturbance by answering the following questions:

Is the meaning I’m giving to this event unduly extreme? Am I taking a fairly simple event and deriving very harsh conclusions about myself (and/or others and/or the future) from it?

Am I drawing global conclusions from this singular event? Am I deciding that this one event defines me totally? Or that this specific situation indicates the course of my entire future?

Is the meaning I’m assigning to this event loaded against me? Does this meaning lead me to feel better or worse about myself? Is it spurring me on to further goal-directed action or leading me to give in and curl up?

CONSIDER THE REACTIONS OF TEN PEOPLE

Different people can attach different meanings to a specific situation, resulting in the potential for a vast array of emotional reactions to one situation. For example, consider ten basically similar people who experience the same event, which is having their partner treat them inconsiderately. Potentially, they can have ten (or maybe more) different emotional responses to precisely the same event, depending on how they think about the event:

Person 1 attaches the meaning ‘That idiot has no right to treat me badly – who the hell do they think they are’?, and feels angry.

Person 2 thinks, ‘This lack of consideration means that my partner doesn’t love me’, and feels depressed.

Person 3 believes that ‘This inconsideration must mean that my partner is cheating on me with someone else’, and feels jealous.

Person 4 thinks, ‘I don’t deserve to be treated poorly because I always do my best to be considerate to my partner’, and feels hurt.

Person 5 reckons the event means that ‘I must have done something serious to upset my partner for them to treat me like this’, and feels guilty.

Person 6 believes that ‘This inconsideration is a sign that my partner is losing interest in me’, and feels anxious.

Person 7 thinks, ‘Aha! Now I have a good enough reason to break up with my partner, which I’ve been wanting to do for ages’!, and feels happy.

Person 8 decides the event means that ‘My partner has done a bad thing by treating me in this way, and I’m not prepared to put up with it’, and feels annoyed.

Person 9 thinks, ‘I really wish my partner had been more considerate because we’re usually highly considerate of each other’, and feels disappointed.

Person 10 believes that ‘My partner must have found out something despicable about me to treat me in this way’, and feels ashamed.

You can see from this example that very different meanings can be assigned to the same event and in turn produce very different emotional responses. Some emotional responses are healthier than others; we discuss this matter in depth in Chapter 6.

If your answer to these questions is largely ‘yes’, then you probably are disturbing yourself needlessly about a negative event. The situation may well be negative, but your thinking is making it even worse. In Chapters 2 and 3, we guide you toward correcting disturbance-creating thinking and help you to feel appropriate distress instead.

Acting out

The ways you think and feel also largely determine the way you act. If you feel depressed, you’re likely to withdraw and isolate yourself. If you’re anxious, you may avoid situations that you find threatening or dangerous. Your behaviours can be problematic for you in many ways, such as the following:

Self-destructive behaviours, such as excessive drinking or using drugs to quell anxiety, can cause direct physical harm.

Isolating and mood-depressing behaviours, such as staying in bed all day or not seeing your friends, increase your sense of isolation and maintain your low mood.

Avoidance behaviours, such as avoiding situations you perceive as threatening (attending a social outing, using a lift, speaking in public), deprive you of the opportunity to confront and overcome your fears.

Learning Your ABCs

When you start to get an understanding of your emotional difficulties, CBT encourages you to break down a specific problem you have using the ABC format, in which

A is the activating event. An activating event means a real external event that has occurred, a future event that you anticipate occurring or an internal event in your mind, such as an image, memory or dream.

Technical stuff The A is often referred to as your ‘trigger’.

B is your beliefs. Your beliefs include your thoughts, your personal rules, the demands you make (on yourself, the world and other people) and the meanings that you attach to external and internal events.

C is the consequences. Consequences include your emotions, behaviours and physical sensations that accompany different emotions.

Figure 1-1 shows the ABC parts of a problem in picture form.

© John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

FIGURE 1-1: A is the activating event, B is your beliefs and thoughts and C is the consequences, such as the emotions you feel after the event and your subsequent behaviour.

Writing down your problem in ABC form – a central CBT technique – helps you differentiate among your thoughts, feelings and behaviours and the trigger event. We give more information about the ABC form in Chapter 3, and you can find a blank ABC form in Appendix B.

Consider the ABC formulations of two common emotional problems, anxiety and depression. The ABC of anxiety may look like this:

A: You imagine failing a job interview.

B: You believe, ‘I’ve got to make sure that I don’t mess up this interview; otherwise, I’ll prove that I’m a failure’.

C: You experience anxiety (emotion), butterflies in your stomach (physical sensation), and drinking to calm your nerves (behaviour).

The ABC of depression may look like this:

A: You fail a job interview.

B: You believe, ‘I should’ve done better. This means that I’m a failure’!

C: You experience depression (emotion), loss of appetite (physical sensation), and staying in bed and avoiding the outside world and drinking to quell your depressed feelings (behaviour).

You can use these examples to guide you when you are filling in an ABC form on your own problems. Doing so will help ensure that you record the actual facts of the event under ‘A’, your thoughts about the event under ‘B’, and how you feel and act under ‘C’. Developing a really clear ABC of your problem can make it much easier for you to realise how your thoughts at ‘B’ lead to your emotional/behavioural responses at ‘C’. (Chapter 3 describes the ABC form more fully.)

Characterising CBT

We give a much fuller description of the principles and practical applications of CBT in the rest of this book. However, here’s a quick reference list of key characteristics of CBT. CBT

Emphasises the role of the personal meanings that you give to events in determining your emotional responses.

Was developed through extensive scientific evaluation.

Focuses more on how your problems are being maintained rather than on searching for a single root cause of the problem.

Offers practical advice and tools for overcoming common emotional problems (see Chapters 9, 12 and 13 Numbers may change).

Holds the view that you can change and develop by thinking things through and by trying out new ideas and strategies (head to Chapter 4).

Can address material from your past if doing so can help you to understand and change the way you’re thinking and acting now. (Chapter 16 covers this in depth.)

Shows you that some of the strategies you’re using to cope with your emotional problems are actually maintaining those problems. (Chapter 7 is all about this.)

Strives to normalise your emotions, physical sensations and thoughts rather than to persuade you that they’re clues to ‘hidden’ problems.

Recognises that you may develop emotional problems about your emotional problems – for example, feeling ashamed about being depressed. (See Chapter 6 for more on this concept.)

Highlights learning techniques and maximises self-help so that ultimately you can become your own therapist (head to Chapter 22).

GETTING COMPLICATED

Sticking to the simple ABC formulation in which A + B = C can serve you well. But if that seems a little simplistic, you can consider the more complicated formulations shown here:

This diagram shows the complex interaction among your thoughts, feelings and behaviours. Although your thoughts affect how you feel, your feelings also affect your thinking. So, if you’re having depressed thoughts, your mood is likely to be low. The lower your mood, the more likely you are to act in a depressed manner and to think pessimistically. The combination of feeling depressed, thinking pessimistically and acting in a depressed manner can, ultimately, influence the way you see your personal world. You may focus on negative events in your life and the world in general and therefore accumulate more negative As. This interaction among A, B and C can become a vicious circle.

CBT pays a lot of attention to changing both unhealthy thinking patterns and unhealthy patterns of behaviour.

Chapter 2

Spotting Errors in Your Thinking

IN THIS CHAPTER

check Identifying classic pitfalls in human thought

check Correcting your thinking

check Getting to know the thinking errors you make most

You probably don’t spend a lot of time mulling over the pros and cons of the way you think. Most people don’t – but to be frank, most people ideally ought to!

One of the central messages of CBT is that your thoughts, your attitudes and the beliefs you hold have a big effect on the way you interpret the world around you and on how you feel. So, if you’re feeling excessively bad, chances are that you’re thinking badly – or, at least, in an unhelpful way. Of course, you probably don’t intend to think in an unhelpful way, and no doubt you’re largely unaware that you do.

Thinking errors are slips in thinking that everyone makes from time to time. Just as a poor signal stops your phone from functioning effectively, so thinking errors prevent you from making accurate assessments of your experiences. Thinking errors lead you to get the wrong end of the stick, jump to conclusions and assume the worst. Thinking errors get in the way of, or cause you to distort, the facts. However, you do have the ability to step back and take another look at the way you’re thinking and set yourself straight. In this chapter we show you how to do just that.

Think abou tit Months or years after the event, you’ve probably recalled a painful or embarrassing experience and been struck by how differently you feel about it at this later stage. Perhaps you can even laugh about the situation now. Why didn’t you laugh back then? Because of the way you were thinking at the time.

To err is most definitely human. Or, as American psychotherapist Albert Ellis is quoted as saying, ‘If the Martians ever find out how human beings think, they’ll kill themselves laughing’. Ellis made that observation back in the ’60s, but not a lot has changed about our tendency to ‘think badly’ since. By understanding the thinking errors we outline in this chapter, you can spot your unhelpful thoughts and put them straight more quickly. Get ready to identify and respond in healthier ways to some of the most common ‘faulty’ and unhelpful ways of thinking identified by researchers and clinicians.

Tip Albert Ellis was one of the founders of cognitive-based psychotherapy. He developed a treatment for emotional disorders called Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy or REBT. A long-winded name, no doubt, but it basically involves much of what is in this book. Alongside Aaron Beck, who developed CBT for the treatment of depression and later further popularized CBT, Ellis developed the underlying philosophical foundations that still comprise CBT today. So if you are very keen on learning more about how CBT developed, look for books by Ellis and early work by Beck. You may also want to look at books by Windy Dryden, who has over 200 publications on the subject.

Catastrophising: Turning Mountains Back Into Molehills

Catastrophising is taking a relatively minor negative event and imagining all sorts of disasters resulting from that one small event, as we sum up in Figure 2-1.

Consider these examples of catastrophising:

You’re at a party and you accidentally stumble headlong into the ice sculpture. After you slide your way across the floor and to the bathroom to clean up, you scurry home and conclude that everyone at the party witnessed your little trip and laughed at you.

You’re waiting for your teenage daughter to return home after an evening at the cinema with friends. The clock strikes 10:00 p.m., and you hear no reassuring rattle of her key in the door. By 10:05 p.m., you start imagining her accepting a lift home from a friend who drives recklessly. At 10:10 p.m., you’re convinced she’s been involved in a head-on collision and paramedics are at the scene. By 10:15 p.m., you’re weeping over her grave.

© John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

FIGURE 2-1: Catastrophising.

Your new partner declines an invitation to have dinner with your parents. Before giving him a chance to explain his reasons, you put down the phone and decide that this is his way of telling you the relationship’s over. Furthermore, you imagine that right now he’s ringing friends and telling them what a mistake it was dating you. You decide you’re never going to find another partner and will die old and lonely.

Catastrophising leads many an unfortunate soul to misinterpret a social faux pas as a social disaster, a late arrival as a car accident or a minor disagreement as total rejection.

Nip catastrophic thinking in the bud by recognising it for what it is – just thoughts. When you find yourself thinking of the worst possible scenario, try the following strategies:

Put your thoughts in perspective. Even if everyone at the party did see your ice-scapade, are you sure no one was sympathetic? Surely you aren’t the only person in the world to have tripped in public. Chances are, people are far less interested in your embarrassing moment than you think. Falling over at a party isn’t great, but in the grand scheme of things it’s hardly society-page news.

Consider less terrifying explanations. What other reasons are there for your daughter being late? Isn’t being late for curfew a common feature of adolescence? Perhaps the film ran over, or she got caught up chatting and forgot the time. Don’t get so absorbed in extreme emotions that you’re startled to find your daughter in the doorway apologising about missing the bus.

Weigh up the evidence. Do you have enough information to conclude that your partner wants to leave you? Has he given you any reason to think this before? Look for evidence that contradicts your catastrophic assumption. For example, have you had more enjoyable times together than not? Isn’t dinner with the parents something a lot of partners may want to avoid due to nerves or some other reason?

Focus on what you can do to cope with the situation, and the people or resources that can come to your aid. Engaging in a few more social encounters can help you put your party faux pas behind you. You can repair a damaged relationship – or find another. Even an injury following an accident can be fixed with medical care.

Remember No matter how great a calamity you create in your mind, the world’s unlikely to end because of it – even if your catastrophic fear comes to pass. You’re probably far more capable of surviving embarrassing and painful events than you give yourself credit for – human beings can be very resilient. Often people say that they can’t imagine dealing with a tragedy like losing a loved one or perhaps developing a terminal illness, even when they know other people just like them who are dealing with their own tragedies. You don’t always need to be able to imagine coping with a negative event to be able to do so if the time comes. Sometimes you just need to have faith that your coping resources will be there if and when you need them.

All-or-Nothing Thinking: Finding Somewhere In-between

All-or-nothing or black-or-white thinking (see Figure 2-2) is extreme thinking that can lead to extreme emotions and behaviours. People either love you or hate you, right? Something’s either perfect or a disaster. You’re either responsibility-free or totally to blame. Sound sensible? We hope not!

Unfortunately, humans fall into the all-or-nothing trap all too easily:

Imagine you’re trying to eat healthily and you cave in to the temptation of a doughnut. All-or-nothing thinking may lead you to conclude that your plan is in ruins and then to go on to eat the other 11 doughnuts in the pack.

You’re studying a degree course and you fail one module. All-or-nothing thinking makes you decide that the whole endeavour is pointless. Either you get the course totally right or it’s just a write-off.

© John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

FIGURE 2-2: All-or-nothing thinking.

Tip Consider the humble thermometer as your guide to overcoming the tendency of all-or-nothing thinking. A thermometer reads degrees of temperature, not only ‘hot’ and ‘cold’. Think like a thermometer – in degrees, not extremes. You can use the following pointers to help you change your thinking:

Be realistic. You can’t possibly get through life without making mistakes. One doughnut doesn’t a healthy diet ruin. Remind yourself of your goal, forgive yourself for the minor slip and resume your diet.

Develop ‘both–and’ reasoning skills. An alternative to all-or-nothing thinking is both–and reasoning. You need to mentally allow two seeming opposites to exist together. You can both succeed in your overall educational goals and fail a test or two. Life is not a case of being either a success or a failure. You can both assume that you’re an okay person as you are and strive to change.

Remember