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. 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.