ESCAPE THESE THOUGHT TRAPS

By Nick Halmasy, MACP, Registered Psychotherapist

Many of us believe we have more control over events than we actually do. But divorce, job loss, and grief –they’re all traumatic events that can serve to veer our train right off the track. It’s actually freeing to let go of these misconceptions and relieve ourselves of responsibility for things we can’t control or help.

Don’t get me wrong, there is much that’s positive about accepting your mistakes and taking ownership. Living long enough means we’ll all encounter people who love to blame everyone but themselves. This perpetuates a victim state of mind we may all experience from time to time, but it helps us to recognize the situation and course correct.

In our personal lives, blaming ourselves for everything is a quick way of making sense of our mistakes. We blame ourselves when our partner cheats on us or when we don’t get that promotion. We blame ourselves

ONE SELF-BLAMING TWO when we aren’t able to save someone. Sometimes these experiences are horrible and painful but actually not really within our control. It’s a massive mistake to assume so.

We can’t control our partner’s actions, the interviewer’s decisions, or the outcomes of our calls. But what we can control is how we feel about those outcomes. Adopting an attitude of learning, adapting, and improving from them is a far more beneficial strategy. Instead of focusing on ways in which we’re responsible for everything, we can instead practice better responses to hard situations.

I get it: as a former firefighter and now as a therapist, I know that at work, worst case thinking is exactly what you need to do to size up a situation. But this strategy falls short when it’s used in our personal lives. Taking stock is one thing, but creating a plan for every worse-case outcome is something different – it’s anxiety. Instead, we need to learn the crucial lesson that is: we can manage. This is a long-lasting answer for hard situations. Rather than developing a plan for everything, we need to learn to trust in our ability to manage the storm.

THREE THE CRYSTAL BALL

How many times have we all said, “If I’d only known then what I know now”? This is called hindsight bias and it is two thinking traps in one. First, it's a form of critical self judgement. We use our current knowledge to judge our previous self – a self that didn’t have the same information. (“If only I’d known the interviewer would ask me about X, I’d have aced that interview.”) In every hindsight situation, we think that if we’d done A instead of B, our lives would be better. But, we rarely have evidence that this would have been the case. It just feels as if it would have been the case and feelings, though important, are not always mirrors of reality.

FOUR FOCUSING ON SIZE

In this case, the trap is minimizing good events and maximizing negative ones. We tend to see positive events easily overshadowed by negative ones. Following a job interview during which we’ve answered everything as well as we possibly could, we then fixate on the one negative moment that occurred. That shadow may hang over us until we hear the employer’s decision – and we later discover that we’ve landed the job.

THE ONLY CHANGE IS IN US, NOT IN OUR SITUATION.

While these four examples are by no means a complete list of sticking points, what’s important is that they’re invisible, until we start to look for them. Our thinking can overshadow everything we do, if we’re not aware of the patterns. We’ll simply believe the reality we’ve created. Thinking, and then acting as if it was real, makes it real. Suddenly, we have real control because we can see a situation for what it is and clearly understand our options. The only change is in us, not in our situation.

CHOOSE CLEAN AIR. CHOOSE PLYMOVENT.