Podcasts about Emotional reasoning

Ever wondered why your brilliant mind can solve complex problems at work but completely breaks down during relationship conflicts? That's because those emotional reactions that feel so instinctive aren't flaws—they're actually genius survival strategies that once kept you safe. In this transformative episode, we explore how black-and-white thinking, mind-reading expectations, and external validation seeking were perfect childhood adaptations that have now become relationship roadblocks. Through the groundbreaking insight that behaviors which perfectly served us in childhood often become the very patterns that sabotage our adult relationships, you'll finally understand why you keep falling into familiar emotional patterns despite your best intentions. This isn't just another episode about relationship struggles—it's a compassionate roadmap for emotional growth that honors both your wounded inner child and your emerging adult self. You'll discover how to recognize when you're in an emotional "hole" and why continuing to dig with familiar tools only takes you deeper. Most importantly, you'll learn how to pass the baton from your protective inner child to your capable adult self without shame or judgment. Whether you struggle with people-pleasing, emotional flooding, perfectionism, or control issues, this episode offers a strength-based approach to transform these patterns into mature responses that will revolutionize your relationships and bring a profound sense of internal peace. 00:00 Introduction and Episode Overview 00:23 Listener Email: Mark's Story 01:41 Understanding Emotional Immaturity 04:47 Exploring the Emotional Maturity Spectrum 08:47 Introducing the Emotional Architects Group 09:29 Narcissistic Personality Disorder vs. Emotional Immaturity 11:08 Dinner with Daniel: A Narcissistic Narrative 15:47 Stages of Emotional Maturity 26:18 Childhood Behaviors in Adult Bodies 32:45 Understanding Emotional Blueprints 33:07 Re-parenting with Compassion 33:32 Therapeutic Insights from Fiction 34:23 Frozen Moments and Adult Relationships 35:16 Childhood Adaptations in Adult Life 36:17 Exploring Childlike Behaviors in Adults 36:57 Navigating Emotional Development 41:34 Black or White Thinking 44:43 Magical Thinking in Relationships 47:46 Emotional Reasoning and Codependency 52:32 External Validation and Accountability 55:41 Mind Reading and Projection 01:01:32 Pattern Recognition and Familiarity 01:07:12 Path Toward Emotional Maturity 01:07:52 Conclusion and Next Steps

Ever wondered why your brilliant mind can solve complex problems at work but completely breaks down during relationship conflicts? That's because those emotional reactions that feel so instinctive aren't flaws—they're actually genius survival strategies that once kept you safe. In this transformative episode, we explore how black-and-white thinking, mind-reading expectations, and external validation seeking were perfect childhood adaptations that have now become relationship roadblocks. Through the groundbreaking insight that behaviors which perfectly served us in childhood often become the very patterns that sabotage our adult relationships, you'll finally understand why you keep falling into familiar emotional patterns despite your best intentions. This isn't just another episode about relationship struggles—it's a compassionate roadmap for emotional growth that honors both your wounded inner child and your emerging adult self. You'll discover how to recognize when you're in an emotional "hole" and why continuing to dig with familiar tools only takes you deeper. Most importantly, you'll learn how to pass the baton from your protective inner child to your capable adult self without shame or judgment. Whether you struggle with people-pleasing, emotional flooding, perfectionism, or control issues, this episode offers a strength-based approach to transform these patterns into mature responses that will revolutionize your relationships and bring a profound sense of internal peace. 00:00 Introduction and Episode Overview 00:23 Listener Email: Mark's Story 01:41 Understanding Emotional Immaturity 04:47 Exploring the Emotional Maturity Spectrum 08:47 Introducing the Emotional Architects Group 09:29 Narcissistic Personality Disorder vs. Emotional Immaturity 11:08 Dinner with Daniel: A Narcissistic Narrative 15:47 Stages of Emotional Maturity 26:18 Childhood Behaviors in Adult Bodies 32:45 Understanding Emotional Blueprints 33:07 Re-parenting with Compassion 33:32 Therapeutic Insights from Fiction 34:23 Frozen Moments and Adult Relationships 35:16 Childhood Adaptations in Adult Life 36:17 Exploring Childlike Behaviors in Adults 36:57 Navigating Emotional Development 41:34 Black or White Thinking 44:43 Magical Thinking in Relationships 47:46 Emotional Reasoning and Codependency 52:32 External Validation and Accountability 55:41 Mind Reading and Projection 01:01:32 Pattern Recognition and Familiarity 01:07:12 Path Toward Emotional Maturity 01:07:52 Conclusion and Next Steps

In today's episode, Gina covers some powerful tips for changing thought patterns that contribute to our anxiety formation. Through understanding how our mind can so easily gravitate to negative thoughts, thoughts that we are so often absolutely certain are true, we can change them and steer ourselves towards better thinking and feeling. This process is largely one of identification and replacement. Learn how to do this, listen in today. Please visit our Sponsor Page to find all the links and codes for our awesome sponsors! https://www.theanxietycoachespodcast.com/sponsors/ Thank you for supporting The Anxiety Coaches Podcast. FREE MUST-HAVE RESOURCE FOR Calming Your Anxious Mind 10-Minute Body-Scan Meditation for Anxiety Anxiety Coaches Podcast Group Coaching link ACPGroupCoaching.com To learn more, go to: Website https://www.theanxietycoachespodcast.com Join our Group Coaching Full or Mini Membership Program Learn more about our One-on-One Coaching What is anxiety? Find even more peace and calm with our Supercast premium access membership: For $5 a month, all episodes are ad-free! https://anxietycoaches.supercast.com/ Here's what's included for $5/month: ❤ New Ad-Free episodes every Sunday and Wednesday ❤ Access to the entire Ad-free back-catalog with over 600 episodes ❤ Premium meditations recorded with you in mind ❤ And more fun surprises along the way! All this in your favorite podcast app! Quote: Our anxiety does not come from thinking about the future, but from wanting to control it. -Kahlil Gibran Chapters 0:42 Introduction to Anxiety and Mind 1:44 Common Thinking Patterns in Anxiety 4:04 Catastrophizing and Fearing the Worst 6:40 Mind Reading and Fortune Telling 8:38 Negative Self-Talk and Its Effects 11:31 Understanding Black and White Thinking 13:05 Emotional Reasoning and Its Impact 14:22 The Burden of Should Statements 16:02 Personalization and Blame 16:48 Filtering Negative Thoughts 17:07 Shifting Your Thinking Patterns 21:08 Practicing Mindfulness and Gratitude Summary In this episode of the Anxiety Coaches Podcast, I delve into the critical role our minds play in managing anxiety, focusing on recognizing and transforming detrimental thought patterns. I explore the ways in which our habitual thinking can trigger stress and worry, and I emphasize the possibility of shifting these mental frameworks to cultivate greater peace of mind. We begin by identifying some common anxiety-inducing thought patterns that many listeners can relate to. I kick off with the concept of "catastrophizing"—the tendency to expect the worst without any real evidence backing our fears. Drawing on my own experiences, I share how this all-or-nothing mindset can leave us perpetually on edge, waiting for disaster to strike. From there, I discuss overgeneralizing, where past negative experiences unfairly color our expectations of future situations, thus trapping us in a cycle of anxiety. The discussion continues with the pitfalls of mind reading, where we erroneously assume we understand what others are thinking about us. This often leads to unnecessary self-doubt, compounded by fortune telling, which involves predicting negative outcomes without basis. I highlight the physical responses these patterns invoke, particularly focusing on how our nervous systems react and create a feedback loop of anxiety. #anxiety #thoughtpatterns #cognitivedistortions #mentalhealth #selfhelp #mindfulness #stressmanagement #emotionalregulation #CBT #anxietyrelief #worry #fear #negativethinking #selftalk #emotionalreasoning #catastrophizing #overgeneralizing #mindreading #fortunetelling #personalization #filtering #shouldstatements #blackandwhitethinking #selfcompassion #gratitude #visualization #mentalrehearsal Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ask  David With Special Guest Expert, Dr. Matthew May Daily Mood Log: Does it have to be done perfectly? Somatic Complaints: How does TEAM Help?  Passive Aggression: What distortions cause it? Roger, from Australia, asks: Do daily mood logs still work if you complete them ‘imperfectly'? Roger also asks: Based on your clinical experience, what causes a reduction or complete elimination of in symptoms for people who present with somatic complaints or chronic pain? TOZ asks: Does passive aggressive behavior result from All-or-Nothing Thinking? The answers below were written prior to the show, based on correspondence with those who asked the questions. The live answers on the show will be different in many cases.  1, Roger, from Australia, asks: Do daily mood logs still work if you complete them ‘imperfectly'? 2. Roger also asks: Based on your clinical experience, what causes a reduction or complete elimination of symptoms for people who present with somatic complaints or chronic pain? Dear David, Sure, I would love to have my questions be on an Ask David! It would be okay for you to use my real name and my location as being in Australia for the podcast and show notes. I've reworded the questions so that they get across what I was actually trying to ask in my previous email. You might now have a slightly different response based on the new questions. I have to apologise as my wording in my previous email was confusing, even for me. Here's a shorter version of the first question: “Dear David, I've got a question about doing daily mood logs as part of my psychotherapy homework. I tend to start a lot of new daily mood logs where I write my negative emotions and thoughts, as well as do positive reframing, but then get stuck when it comes to doing methods for challenging my negative thoughts, as I get caught up on trying to do the exercise perfectly. I get worried that I won't see as much benefit from the exercise if I don't do the steps perfectly or in order. Did you see improvements in patients who filled out their daily mood logs imperfectly? Perhaps they may have skipped steps or maybe they couldn't crush their negative thoughts completely, but continued to move on to working with new thoughts and seeing if they could crush those.” An even shorter version of the question would be: “Do daily mood logs still work if you complete them ‘imperfectly'?” A shorter version of the question about somatic complaints and pain is: “I've also got a question on treating somatic symptoms and chronic pain. Some clinicians have seen people improve by doing journalling or expressive writing about life stressors such as past stressors, current stressors, and self-limiting behaviours or beliefs. Other activities which seem to be useful include writing unsent letters to people who've hurt you, or doing behavioural changes for self-limiting beliefs like learning how to designate free time for yourself if you have a tendency to take on too much or feel guilty about spending time relaxing and not doing work. I was wondering what you've seen in your clinical experience and what you've seen patients do which helps them reduce or eliminate their somatic symptoms and chronic pain?" An even shorter version of that question would be: “Based on your clinical experience, what causes a reduction or complete elimination of in symptoms for people who present with somatic complaints or chronic pain?" Regards, Roger He David's reply Thanks, these short versions are a big improvement. Here are the quick answers: The critical thing is to come up with one or more positive thoughts that are 100% true, and that reduce your belief in the negative thought. If you send a specific example, it would help. There are several rules about getting workable negative thoughts as well. Perfection is never possible in the universe of daily mood logs, but excellence certainly is. A change in belief in neg thoughts is the goal. In my experience, somatic complaints, such as undiagnosed pain, dizziness, fatigue, and more, are often created or magnified by (or the expression of) negative emotions, as well as hidden emotions / problems. The average reduction of pain, for example, will be 50% if there is a dramatic reduction in negative feelings, or if the patient identifies and tackles some unexpressed problem, like anger, or unexpressed grief, or loneliness when the kids go off to college, and so forth. An average of 50% means that some people will experience a complete elimination of the negative symptoms, like pain. Some will experience no improvement. And some will experience some improvement. With regard to how or why this works, I don't really know, and don't think that anyone knows. But it seems like negative feelings, like depression, anxiety, anger and so forth have a magnifying effect on negative feelings. On the podcast, I can give a personal example of when I was in the Stanford emergency room, screaming in pain from a broken jaw. I can also give an example of what happens to my low back pain when I am in an especially good mood and I am out jogging. Best, David 3. TOZ asks: Does passive aggressive behavior result from All-or-Nothing Thinking? Hi David, I thought my therapist will tell me once he gets to know me that I'm passive aggressive and therefore I do things particularly anxiety disease as all or nothing black or white.  I was wondering for you not to answer my case but in general does passive aggressive attitudes or approaches result from all or nothing thinking? Thanks, Toz David's reply. Thanks, Toz. Great question! To find out, you would have to do what I have recommended for nearly 50 years. Write down your negative thought on a piece of paper (can you do that?) and identify the distortions in it, using my lit of ten cognitive distortions. Let me know if you've done this. Most people refuse to do it! Warmly, david Toz replies: So I did your exercise. My thoughts were: I'm crashing.  Help I'm scared.  I'm going to die.  Help me laud.  Help me laud. Distortions:  predicting the future.  Magnification How is that? I looked up. Saw that was fine. Felt better. Then I checked my pulse.  Not too fast so okay. Toz. David's reply to Toz, That, Toz, is totally cool! Way to go! Could also add: Emotional Reasoning. You identified two super important distortions that are always present in fear, paranoia and anxiety. Cool, cool, cool! David's comment: This is why I ask for specific examples when people ask general questions. As you can see, Toz asked about passive aggression, but his specific example turned out to be all about something entirely different: anxiety and panic. He did a great job of testing his negative thoughts with the Experimental Technique. Warmly, Rhonda, Matt,  and David

Identifying false beliefs is key to freedom. In this episode, you will learn to identify emotional reasoning. Just because you feel it doesn't mean its true

418 The Fear of Driving Featuring Werner Spitzfaden, LCSW and Rhonda Barovsky, PsyD Today, we feature Werner Spitzfaden, LCSW, a Level 3 certified TEAM-CBT therapist who recently treated Rhonda, who's driving phobia returned during the pandemic because she did very little driving at that time. After you overcome any fear or phobia, it has a way of returning if you don't continue confronting your fear. Werner describes his skillful and compassionate work with Rhonda! Werner is a dear colleague and friend with over 35 plus years of clinical experience treating phobias, such as the fear of flying, claustrophobia (the fear of being trapped in small places), and driving (especially over bridges and overpasses). He also treats depression, panic and other forms of anxiety, and works in corporate environments to improve communication and teamwork. Let's dive right in, Please take a look at Rhonda's completed Daily Mood Log, As you can see, the upsetting event was thinking about driving over an overpass, and she rated her initial anxiety cluster at 100%, indicating extreme anxiety. She was also 90% ashamed, and 80% Inferior, worthless, inadequate, defective, and incompetent. She was also feeling 99% embarrassed, foolish, humiliated, and self-conscious, and 85% hopeless, despairing, frustrated, stuck, angry, annoyed, irritated, upset, and devastated. Her sadness was only modestly elevated at 25%. There are several teaching points. First, most of Rhonda's negative feelings were severely to extremely elevated. Second, although she is asking for help with a phobia, anxiety often goes hand-in-hand with a wide variety of negative feelings, including shame and inadequacy. This is because anxious individuals often feel like there's something terribly and shamefully wrong with them. Rhonda's feelings of shame are not unusual. Shame is a central feature of anxiety, whereas a loss of self-esteem is a central feature of depression. Werner added that the fear of driving often goes along with the fear of heights as well as claustrophobia. Rhonda admitted to engaging in many “safety behaviors” which typically make anxiety temporarily better but worse in the long run. Rhonda's "safety behaviors" included  going out of her way when driving to avoid scary overpasses as well as asking her husband to drive her many place. As you can see, these totally understandable “safety behaviors” relieve your anxiety in the here-and-now because they are forms of avoidance, but that's why they makes anxiety worse in the long run. The urge to avoid of the thing(s) you fear is universal among individuals struggling with all forms of anxiety. Werner emphasized the importance of empathy in the initial phase of treatment, and throughout the treatment, since trust and the courage to face your fears is so central in the treatment of all forms of anxiety and, of course, depression as well. Rhonda invited Werner and another TEAM-CBT colleague, Lee Flowers, to stay with her in Berkeley during the recent TEAM intensive that David and Jill Levitt directed at the South SF Conference Center near the airport. She drove the group to and from the workshop to face her fears and get some motivation and support at the same time. You can see many of her negative thoughts about driving on Rhonda's completed Daily Mood Log, including these: The bridge will collapse. 95% Other cars will make the bridge unstable. 100% I'll have a heart attack. 95% I'm so dumb for not driving on this overpass. 1005 I'm an ass. 100% I can't do this. 100% I'll die. 100% Lee and Werner will see me at my worst. 100% I need to study the exact route before I start. 100% I'll get into an accident. 100% As you can see, the list includes a mixture of fear-inducing thoughts as well as self-critical thoughts and shame-inducing thoughts, like "Lee and Werner will see me at my worst." Whenever you are working with anyone with anxiety, you have to emphasize first, to create trust, warmth, and understanding. This won't cure anyone of anything, but will give your patients the courage to face their fears when you get to the M - Methods portion of your TEAM session. After you get your A in empathy, you can move on to A = Paradoxical Agenda Setting. That where you bring Outcome and Process Resistance to conscious awareness. Then you melt them away using a variety of TEAM-CBT techniques. Outcome Resistance means that Rhonda may have mixed feelings about a “cure” for her driving phobia. In other words, although she WANTS to get rid of this fear, she may subconsciously NOT want to get rid of it. Can you think of why? Take a moment to think about it, and make a guess. You'll find the answer at the end of the show notes. Process Resistance means she may WANT a cure for her driving phobia, but may not be willing to do what it takes to defeat this fear. What will she have to do? Take a moment to think about it, and make a guess. You'll find the answer at the end of the show notes. Werner and Rhonda described a number of TEAM-CBT M = Methods that they used to reduce Outcome Resistance, including The Miracle Cure Question The Magic Button Positive Reframing The Pivot Question The Magic Dial. To put this phase in a nutshell, Werner highlighted how Rhonda's intensely negative feelings helped her and revealed many positive things about her core values as a therapist and human being. This is a shame-reducing technique and you can use the Magic Dial to ask your patient what they would like to dial each negative feeling down to, without reducing them all the way to zero. You can see Ronda's goals on Rhonda's completed Daily Mood Log in the Emotions Table Next, Werner worked on Process Resistance, bringing the work on Paradoxical Agenda Setting to closure. At the start of the M = Methods portion of their work, Rhonda identified the distortions in two of her thoughts (“I'm dumb,” and “I can't do this.”). See how many distortions you can find. Wrote them down on a piece of paper and when you're done you can see the answers at the end of the show notes. Werner pointed out that Rhonda's anger, directed against herself, had become a springboard for agitation which intensified her anxiety. Werner and Rhonda challenged some of her negative thoughts with Examine the Evidence, Externalization of Voices (illustrated live during the podcast),Double Standard Technique and the Paradoxical Double Standard Technique as well as a Fear Hierarchy, which you can see if you click here. The also did Cognitive Flooding (also called Imaginal Exposure) three times, and by the third time Rhonda could only increase her negative feelings into the mild range, whereas they had started out in the extremely elevated range. They also used breathing exercise plus getting into the here-and-now to calm herself while driving over overpasses. All of this was background work for actually driving during the intensive, and the highlight was driving home in the dark on the third evening of the intensive. For Rhonda, this was the most fearful thing of all!  She said at the start her anxiety was "greater than 100%," but she felt triumphant when she arrived home. Werner gave her specific homework, like driving over a specific overpass four times, and also encouraged Michael, Rhonda's husband, not to give in to her requests to do the driving on a planned trip to visit friends in Sacramento. I am deeply grateful to Rhonda for giving us such a raw and real glimpse into her courageous and victorious win over her intense driving phobia, and a big thanks also to Werner for being such a kind and powerful TEAM-CBT therapist, teacher!, and beloved friend! Thanks for listening today, Rhonda, Werner, and David Solution to puzzles above Outcome Resistance: If she's “cured,” she'll have to start driving much more, and that will include driving over overpasses and bridges. This concept will freak her out now, because she's still afraid something horrible might happen if she stops avoiding them. Process Resistance: To overcome her fears, she'll have to face them and experience some fairly intense fear along the way. Werner can support her, and drive with her, as he did, but she will still freak out at first when driving on overpasses and bridges. The distortions in those two negative thoughts included All-or-Nothing Thinking, Overgeneralization, Mental Filtering, Discounting the Positive, Mind-Reading, Magnification and Minimization, Emotional Reasoning, Hidden Shoulds, Labeling, and Self-Blame.

Feeling Down? Try the Feeling Great App for Free! The Feeling Great App is now available in both app stores (IOS and Android) and is for therapists and the general public, and you can take a ride for free! Check it  out at FeelingGreat.com! What's a Give-Get Imbalance? What's the Best Treatment for Anxiety and Dysthymia? Can you do Externalization of Voices on Your Own? The show notes for today's podcast were largely written prior to the show. Tune in to the podcast to hear the discussion of these questions by Rhonda, Matt, and David. And keep the questions coming. We enjoy the exchange of ideas with all of you. Thanks! Suzanna asks: What's a “Give-Get” imbalance? And how can you get over it? Martin asks: What's the best treatment for anxiety and dysthymia? Eoghan (pronounced Owen) asks: Can you do Externalization of Voices on your own?  1. Suzanna asks: What's a “Give-Get” imbalance? And how can you get over it? Description of Suzanna's problem. Suzanna is a woman with a grown daughter with severe brain damage due to a severe brain infection (viral encephalitis) when she was an infant. Suzanna was constantly giving of herself and catering to her daughter. She explains that her daughter can be very demanding and throws tantrums to get her way, and kind of controls the entire home in this way. She can only talk a little and has the vocabulary of about a two-and-a-half-year-old. She can mostly express the things she wants or doesn`t want on a very basic level. She mostly understands what I want from her, but mostly does not want to do what I ask her to do. She can be very stubborn. And I cannot reason with her because she has her own logic and, in her eyes, only her logic is valid. Maybe all a little bit like a two-and-a-half-year-old. Suzanna struggles with negative feelings including guilt, anxiety and depression, because she is constantly giving, giving, giving and feeling exhausted and resentful. And she tells herself, “I should be a better mum.” Can you spot any distortions in this thought? Put your ideas in the text box, or jot them down on a piece of paper, and then I'll share my thinking with you! What are the distortions in the thought, “I should be a better mum”?   There are many distortions in this thought, including All-or-Nothing Thinking, Overgeneralization, Mental Filtering, Discounting the Positive, Magnification and Minimization, Emotional Reasoning, Self-Directed Should Statements, and Self-Blame. There may be one or two more, too! The first step in change nearly always includes dealing with motivation and resistance. Suzanna decided to do a Cost-Benefit Analysis, as you can see below, and a revision of her Self-Defeating Belief, as you can see below. Another helpful step might include “No Practice,” which simply means saying “no” so you don't constantly get trapped by “giving,” as well as “giving in.” A third critically important strategy involves the mom and dad making the decision to work together as a loving team in the management of a troubled child, rather than fighting and arguing with each other, as we've discussed on previous podcasts. However, in many, or possibly most cases, the parents are not willing to do this. They are more concerned about being "right" and so they continue to do battle with each other, as well as the child who needs a more loving structure. David Cost-Benefit Analysis Self-Defeating Belief: I should be a better mum to my daughter Advantages of this belief(How does believing this help me?) Disadvantages of this belief(How does believing this hurt me?) This thought motivates me to: Put myself out. Push myself to give what I have.  Find ways to advance her development.  Find ways to involve her in everyday life. Invest myself into her and her life as much as I can, physically, emotionally and time wise. Try to find ways that my daughter can have a fulfilling life. Try hard to connect to her, her pain, her needs, her sadness and her frustration. Try to make her life as easy as possible. Try my hardest to see her world through her eyes and gain deeper understanding of how she feels. Try to understand what is upsetting her when she throws a tantrum. Stay healthy and fit to have energy for her. Try to make her life rewarding and meaningful. Fulfill my duty as a mum to my daughter who needs my support. I can feel good about myself. I satisfy other people's expectations of me.  Protects me from criticisms from my husband               I am a prisoner to my daughter. No matter how hard I try I don`t seem to make a meaningful difference to her life and to her development. I am a “Siamese Twin” to her. I cannot move or do anything if she doesn`t want to. I reason with my emotions instead of thinking rational at times. I let my daughter get away with “murder”. I find excuses for her behaviour.  I find excuses for her why she cannot behave differently. I beat up on myself when I feel I failed her. I take all responsibilities away from My daughter and make them my own. I blame myself when I cannot motivate her to do something. I blame myself when she is bored and unhappy. I feel guilty doing my own things. I feel guilty when I do not involve her in my activities. I feel guilty when I expect her to do entertain herself for a while.  I cannot live my own life. I cannot be myself at times. She rules my life, and she lives my life. I feel trapped and frustrated.  I feel I need to constantly entertain her. I feel responsible for her happiness. I feel responsible when My daughter is sad and frustrated. I feel exhausted and overwhelmed at times.  I feel unhappy and unfulfilled.           Advantages: 20 Disadvantages: 80  Semantic Method: Re write your personal value I want to be a mum to My daughter and help her along and invest myself into her. But I also want to treat myself the way I treat her. She has a “right” to live a happy and fulfilling life, but so do I. Our needs and desires are equally important and deserve the same attention and care. I can only continue to look after My daughter well if I look after myself too and take myself and my needs and desires as seriously as I do hers. There needs to be a give-get balance so that both of us can be healthy and happy and stay healthy and happy. I want to help her to slowly take new steps into independence and support her lovingly along the way.   2. What's the best treatment for anxiety and dysthymia? Hello Dr. Burns, What method of treatment would you suggest for GAD and dysthymia? 3rd wave CBT, ACT? What is best based on science? Can you recommend some books please? thank you Martin David's Reply My books are listed on my website, FeelingGood.com. They all describe my approach, which is a bit like CBT on steroids. But every patient is treated individually and uniquely, following a structured and systematic approach that facilitates rapid and dramatic change. I don't recommend “methods of treatment” or “schools of therapy” based on so-called “diagnoses,” but treat the individual with TEAM. Every session with every patient is an experiment, with precise measures at the start and end of every session. The new Feeling Great App, now available, gets a mean of 50% or more reductions in seven negative feelings, such as depression, anxiety, and more, in 72 minutes of starting to use the bot. You can check it out for free! Anxiety and depression often co-exist, and the app targets both. My book, When Panic Attacks, describes my approach to anxiety, based on four models of treatment: the Motivational, Cognitive, Exposure, and Hidden Emotion Models. If you use the search function, you can find podcasts describing those models. Also, there's a free anxiety class on this website. Thanks, Martín, for your excellent question! Best, david 3. Can you do Externalization of Voices on your own? Hi David, Long time listener of your great podcast and huge fan of your book Feeling Great. I've often heard you mention that “externalization of voices” is one of, if not the most powerful CBT techniques. I am just wondering if it is still almost as effective when done solo without a therapist i.e. the person takes on both the roles of positive and negative by recording themselves talking or similar? Also, have you any data comparing the efficacy of TEAM CBT work carried out solo using Feeling Great/your podcast as a guide vs. TEAM CBT performed with a trained TEAM therapist? I am very much looking forward to the Feeling Great app launch in the UK as hopefully that will be a much more effective way to do personal work without a therapist. Many thanks, Eoghan (pronounced Owen) David's reply Thank you, Eoghan! Appreciate your support and thoughtful question. I don't have any data on the use of EOV on your own. One could use a recording device, like your cell phone, and record  your negative thoughts in second person, “you,” and try to defeat them when you play them back, one at a time. But in my experience, people nearly always need an experienced role player to do role reversals to show them how to get to a “huge” win. People almost never get a huge win when doing it for the first time, because the therapist (in the role of positive self) can model unfamiliar strategies for the patient. Generally, a hugely successful response involves a combination of self-defense, self-acceptance, and the CAT, or counter-attack technique. And sometimes other methods as well, like Be Specific, for example Radical new learning is definitely the key to success with EOV. Now, thanks to the app, everyone can practice, since we've trained our Obie Bot to role-play with users, do role reversals, give feedback, and so forth. Great question that I will include in the next Ask David if that's okay! We are also exploring the combination of the Feeling Great App plus a trained TEAM therapist from the Feeling Good Institute in Mountain View, California. We are hoping that 1  + 1 may equal 3. Wouldn't that be awesome? What I've found when doing research is that the results are virtually always wildly unexpected! Somethings come out great, and some things come out dismally. I always tell myself that “the Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away!” Seems to be the rule in research! Especially when you're wanting to be guided by the truth, and not so much by your hopes and expectations. Best, David

"We see the world not as it is, but as we are." In this episode, Tina invites parents unwillingly estranged from their adult children to take a step back and consider their beliefs about themselves, others, and the world. She compares our individual worldview to a pair of glasses, with lenses of a particular color. We can't help but perceive the world in a limiting way as long as it reaches us through a fixed filter. The central idea in this episode is that even if your adult child's estrangement is an objective fact, the meaning of it, and your response to it, will mirror your habitual feelings, beliefs and expectations. This is a contemplative episode. Listen when you have time and energy for reflection. For information on why adult children become estranged and what parents can do about it, read Tina's book, Reconnecting With Your Estranged Adult Child. Reconnection Club members can discuss this and every episode in the General Discussion forum inside the Reconnection Club. Not a member yet? Learn more and join. EPISODE LINKS: RCP Ep. 160: Emotional Reasoning

Special Announcement #1 Attend the Legendary Summer Intensive Featuring Drs. David Burns and Jill Levitt August 8 - 11. 2024 Learn Advanced TEAM-CBT skills Heal yourself, heal your patients First Intensive in 5 years! It will knock your socks off! Limited Seating--Act Fast Click for registration / more information! Sadly, this workshop is a training program which will be limited to therapists and mental health professionals and graduate students in a mental health field  Apologies, but therapists have complained when non-therapists have attended our continuing education training programs. This is partly because of the intimate nature of the small group exercises and the personal work the therapists may do during the workshop. Certified coaches and counselors are welcome to attend. Special Announcement #2 Here's some GREAT news! The Feeling Great App is now available in both app stores (IOS and Android) and is for therapists and the general public, and you can take a ride for free! Check it Today's Podcast Practical Philosophy Month Part 2, Do Humans have “Selves”? This is our second podcast in our Practical Philosophy Month. Last week, in our first episode, we focused on the “free will” question. As humans, we all feel like we have “free will,” but is it just an illusion, especially if all our actions are the result of the physical processes in our brains and the laws of the universe? The Bible certainly dealt with this in the book of Genesis, where we learn that the first humans, Adam and Eve, were given a wonderful Garden of Eden to live in, but they had to choose whether or not to obey God's rule NOT to eat the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. They chose to eat the fruit, implying that humans have free choice. But the philosophical arguments rage on. In today's podcast, we are joined by two beloved and brilliant colleagues, Drs. Matthew May and Fabrice Nye, as we explore the question of whether or not the “self” exists. We all feel like we have a “self,” but is this real or just an illusion? When you try to define your “self,” you may run into problems. For example, you might think that the “self” has to be the part of us that does not change from moment to moment, and is always ‘the same.” For example, I might think back on my childhood and feel convinced that I was the “same David Burns” then that I am now. And, if you are religious, you might also be comforted by the idea that your “self” is the same as your “soul,” and that you will therefore live on after you die. This concept of a “soul” is a core belief in many religions. But are we fooling ourselves? And what was the Buddha thinking about 2,500 years ago when we talked about enlightenment as resulting from the “Great Death” of the “self.” He seemed to be hinting that something wonderful can happen when you give up the idea that you have a “self.” In the original draft of my book, Feeling Great, I had a chapter on entitled, “Do you need a “self?” Join the Grateful Dead.” I tried to persuade readers that the existence of a “self” is nonsense, based on the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein in his famous book, Philosophical Investigations. But readers found the chapter so upsetting that I decided, on their urging, to delete it from the manuscript, which I did. My goal is not to disturb people, but to provide a path to joy and to loving connections with others. But to this day, I still get emails from people asking me to offer that chapter, or to deal more deeply with this concept of the “self” vs “no self” in a podcast. So, here is my attempt today. I will start with my own take, and then summarize some of the views about the self that were expressed by Fabrice, Matt, and Rhonda during the show. Here's my thinking. There are many key questions you could ask about the concept of the “self?” including: Do we have a “self?” And if so, what is it? Does the first question even make sense? I'm sure you would agree that if a question doesn't make sense, then it isn't a “real” question, and there really isn't anything to talk about. Then we can just stop feeling frustrated and perplexed, and move on with our lives. That is the precise position that the late Wittgenstein would probably have taken. He stated that words have no ultimate or “true” meaning outside of the various contexts in which we use them in daily life. Most words have many meanings, because they are used in different ways, and you can find most of the meanings in any dictionary. So, if you think of the word, “game,” you will quickly realize that it does not have one “true” or essential meaning. It can mean a sports competition, with two teams competing against each, like soccer. But you can have two teams competing in some way other than a sport. And you don't even need two teams to have a “game.” For example, some games are played by one individual, like solitaire with a deck of cards. Or you can think about the “dating game,” or refer to “game birds,” or a “game boxer.” In short, there is not some single “correct” meaning to the word, “game.” Some uses have overlapping meanings, and some uses do not overlap at all with other uses. So, there is no point in trying to figure out if “games exist,” or what the ultimate or essential meaning is of the word, “game.” Now, how do we use the word, “self,” and what does it mean in each context? You might tell your child to behave themself. This simply means that they are misbehaving and will be punished if they don't behave more politely. You do not have to tell the child that their “self” also has to behave better, because that would be meaningless. We already told the child to change their behavior. You could ask friends, as I did this morning, if they are planning to join me on the Sunday hike. Two of them confirmed and said that “they” would join me today on our hike. I did have to ask them if they would be bringing their “selves,” because I just do not know what that would mean! They already told me they're coming to the hike. (They did come and we had a lot of fun.) In my extremely challenging freshman English class at Amherst College, we had to write two or three papers per week on odd topics. The teachers were relentlessly critical in their feedback, and would nearly always point out that we sounded incredibly phony and need to find our true voices, which came from our real selves, as opposed to the false fronts we often used to try to impress people. Almost every student got dumped on constantly! The professors weren't referring to some metaphysical “true selves.” They were just referring to the fact that our writing didn't sound natural, compelling, or vulnerable, and so forth. Our writing was, for the most part, an enormous turn-off. Most of us never could figure out quite what that class was all about, but it was useful as I became more sensitive to the “tone” or “voice” in any writing. I would have to concede that it was a sobering but helpful class. But they were not referring to some mystical “true self” we had to find. They just wanted us to stop writing in such a sucky way! So here is my point, which you might “not get.” When you keep the word, “self,” in the context of everyday life, it is obvious what it means, and it never refers to some metaphysical “thing” that we could “have” or “not have.” It is just a vague, abstract concept that is devoid of meaning when it's all by itself. A “self,” just like “free will,” is not some “thing” that we might, or might not, have. The question, “Does the self exist,” according to Wittgenstein (or his big fan David) has no meaning and so we can just ignore it. It's not a real question. It is, as Wittgenstein was fond of saying, “language that's out of gear.” Now, does this discussion have anything to do with emotional problems, or TEAM therapy? It absolutely does. That's because nearly all depression results from some version of “I'm not good enough,” including: I'm inferior. I'm a loser. I'm a “hopeless case.” I'm a failure. I'm unlovable. I'm a bad parent. I'm defective. And so forth. If you buy into these “self” condemning proclamations, thinking that they mean something, you'll probably feel depressed, ashamed, inadequate, hopeless, and more. As you can probably see, all these self-critical thoughts contain tons of cognitive distortions, like All-or-Nothing Thinking, Overgeneralization, Labeling, Mental Filtering, Emotional Reasoning, Self-Blame, Hidden Shoulds, and more And to put it in a nutshell, they ALL involve the belief that you have a “self” that's broken, or simply not “good enough.” And all of those statements are meaningless. My goal in therapy is NOT to persuade you that you ARE worthwhile, or “a winner,” or a “good” parent, but rather to show you how to let go of these meaningless but painful ways of belittling yourself. I might use techniques like Empathy, Positive Reframing, Explain the Distortions, Let's Define Terms, Be Specific, the Double Standard Technique, the Externalization of Voices, the Downward Arrow, and many more. That's because the VERY moment you suddenly “see” that these kinds of statements are both untrue and unfair, and you stop believing them, your feelings will instantly change. So, you could say that TEAM really IS a “Wittgensteinian” therapy. And when people ask me how to develop better self-esteem, I would not try to get them to discover how to have some magical and wonderful “thing” called self-esteem, because that concept is just as nonsensical as the concept of a “self.” You might say that “self-esteem,” if you want to use the term, is more about what you DO. And there are two things you can do if you want to change the way you feel. First, you can stop beating up on yourself with hostile criticisms like the bulleted statements listed above, and talk to yourself in the same encouraging way you might talk to a dear friend or loved one who was hurting. And second, you can treat yourself in a loving way, in just the same way you might treat your best friend who was coming for a visit. In other words, you can do nice things for yourself. The day my first book, “Feeling Good,” was finally published, my editor called me with some bad news. She told me that the publisher, William Morrow and Company, loses money on 9 out of 10 of the books they publish, so they decide which ones are most likely to sell, and those are the only ones they'll promote. The rest of the books go on a “loser list,” and the company does little or nothing to promote them. She said my book was #1 on their “loser list,” since the president of the company felt it had no commercial potential, and that very few people would be interest in a long book on depression. She added that the one thing they did do was to send my book to ten popular magazines for first serial rights. That means they get to publish an excerpt from your book as an article, so that stirs up some media interest in your book. Sadly, she said that all ten had turned them down. She said that I'd have to be in charge of any further marketing of my book, so I asked what I should do. She said to call all ten magazines right away and persuade them to change their minds. In a panic, I called them all, including Ladies' Home Journal, Reader's Digest, and on and on. Every magazine said the same thing—they did not want my book, had turned it down, had zero interest in it, and to please top calling since authors shouldn't call them and they considered it a form of phone harassment since they'd already made a decision. Yikes! No fun! When I jogged home from the train station that night, I shouted, “You're a loser, you're a failure.” That didn't sound so good so then I shouted, “No, you're not! You'll figure out how to make it happen! Just keep plugging away.” That sounded a lot more loving, so when I got home, I told my wife that the book at just been published and that I'd been turned down by all ten magazines for serial rights, and the publisher decided not to spend any money on marketing or advertising, so we needed to go out and celebrate. She why we would celebrate? I said, “You don't need to celebrate when you win, because you already feel great. But when you lose, that's when you need to celebrate, because you're feeling down. So, tonight we'll celebrate!” We went out for a fancy dinner and celebrated and had fun. And the rest, they say, is history. I just kept trying and getting turned down by newspapers, radio stations, television programs, and more. But eventually, the tide started to turn. To date, Feeling Good has sold more than 5 million copies and it achieved best-seller status. And the reason was that researchers discovered that the book actually had antidepressant properties, so excitement about it spread by word of mouth. I am hopeful that the new Feeling Great App will help even more people. Fabrice made some interesting and wise comments on the notion of the “self.” He said that the idea that we have a “self” is a sense that we nearly all have. Some people feel like the “self” that is located somewhere behind the eyes or in the middle of the head. But, he emphasizes, there is no such “thing” as a “self.” He has quoted someone who has “said it all,” but the statement only makes sense IF you “get it!” Here's the quote: “No Self? No Problem!” This is actually the title of a book by Chris Niebauer, PhD, and the subtitle is How Neuropsychology Is Catching Up to Buddhism. If you want to check it out, here's a link to it on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/No-Self-Problem-Neuropsychology-Catching/dp/1938289978 Fabrice emphasized that the concept of “self” is “nebulous.” He asked, “Is there a ‘David'?” He explained: You wouldn't be able to prove this in court. Well, you could show ID, but that would not be proof. Where does the information on the ID come from? Birth certificate? Who wrote the information on the birth certificate? Probably some doctor back in 1942. And where did he get that information from? Probably some caregiver said “Write ‘David' here.” Was that from a credible source? Not at all. That info was made up on the spot! Now, you can say that there's a “sense” of a David going around, and that there are some patterns that show signs of “David-ness,” but there is no “David.” Matt added that your body is not your “self.” When you break your arm, you don't say that you have broken a part of your “self.” You just say, “I broke my arm.” Rhonda raised the question of whether the “self” is just the same as “consciousness” or “awareness.” Someone in our group added that the “self” is what we DO, and not what we ARE. And, of course, what we are doing is constantly changing from moment to moment. My understanding of all of this is that once you let go of the notion that you have a “self,” you will no longer worry about whether or not you are “good enough” or “special,” or whoever. You can focus instead on living your life and solving the problems of daily living and appreciating the world around you. If you screw up, you can focus on what specific error you made, rather than obsessing about your inferior or defective “self.” You can actually welcome failure as just another teacher, so you can grow and learn, and simply accept your screw ups, or both. In fact, two of the most popular TEAM techniques for challenging the distorted thoughts in bullets above are called “Let's Define Terms” and “Be Specific.” These techniques are right out of Wittgenstein's playbook, and they are prominently featured in the “Learn” section of the new Feeling Great App. If you're feeling depressed, and thinking of yourself as a “loser” or as being “inferior” or even “worthless,” the goal is NOT to “become a ‘winner,” or more ‘worthwhile,' but rather to give up these notions as nonsensical. But once again, many people cannot “get it,” or “see it,” and that's where a caring and skillful therapist can help. Some people wrongly think that letting go of the notion that you could be “worthwhile” would mean a huge loss of something precious. Many people who don't yet “see” what we're trying to say are terrified of the “Great Death” because they think that giving up the notion that you have a “self” means giving up all hope for improvement, for joy, for intimacy, and so forth. But to my way of thinking, the truth is just the opposite. When your “self” dies, you and your world suddenly wake up and come to life. When you accept yourself and your world, exactly as they are right now, everything suddenly changes. Of course, that's a paradox. I believe that leading our patients to the “Great Death” of the “self” is like giving them the understanding and courage they need to throw some garbage in the trash instead of carrying the garbage around with them all the time! I hope some of this makes a little sense, but if not, don't worry about. Sometimes, it takes a little time before you suddenly “see it!” Thanks for listening today. We love all of you! Rhonda, Fabrice, Matt, and David

Thinking traps create more anxiety than necessary! Let's see how your thoughts influence anxiety, panic, and even depression. I'm sharing 12 common thinking traps that exacerbate anxiety. In this episode, I break down how rigid thinking patterns can create undue stress. Understanding these traps is the first step to managing your anxiety. Discover strategies to combat irrational thoughts and celebrate small wins. This episode will help you challenge core beliefs and adopt a flexible mindset. Learn to stay present and reduce anxiety by focusing on current gratitudes. Check out the only podcast for work-life balance for busy moms: It's About Time 3 ways I can help: Discover what kind of people pleaser you are 6 Signs Your Perfectionism is in the Way of Your Happiness Reduce anxiety and stress while also gaining control in your life as a busy working mom. Leave a review on iTunes here.  0:00 - Intro: 12 Thinking Traps That Create Anxiety 1:42 - Magnification and Catastrophizing 4:15 - Overgeneralizing and Fortune Telling 6:32 - Mind Reading and Emotional Reasoning 9:08 - Disqualifying the Positive & "Should" Statements 11:25 - All-or-Nothing Thinking 13:10 - Techniques to Challenge Anxious Thoughts

Is a Civil "Is God Real?" Conversation Possible? In this episode of the Derate the Hate podcast, guest host, Julian Adorney, moderates a conversation between his wife, Cassie Kimbriel, a devout Christian, and his friend, Angel Eduardo, an atheist. The main topic of discussion is the existence of God. Angel argues that belief in God is unreasonable and implausible, while Cassie believes that the complexities of the universe and personal experiences point to the existence of a higher power. The trio discuss the problem of suffering and the concept of hell. The conversation highlights the different perspectives and challenges in discussing such a deeply personal and complex topic. In this conversation, Julian, Angel, and Cassie  delve into the importance of belief in God on an emotional level. They explore the role of emotional reasoning in shaping their beliefs and the significance of finding purpose and meaning in life. They also touch on the need for intellectual humility and open conversations when discussing religion and atheism. The conversation highlights the damaging effects of tribalism and the importance of respectful and compassionate dialogue.Key TakeawaysDifferent perspectives on the existence of God are discussed, with Angel arguing that it is unreasonable and Cassie presenting personal experiences and the complexities of the universe as evidence for God's existence.The problem of suffering and the concept of hell are also explored, with Cassie suggesting that suffering is a result of human choices and brokenness, and hell is the consequence of choosing to be outside of God's presence.The conversation highlights the challenges and complexities of discussing deeply personal and philosophical topics. Belief in God is often rooted in emotional reasoning rather than solely logical explanations.Finding purpose and meaning in life is important for human existence.Intellectual humility is crucial when discussing religion and atheism.Open conversations and respectful dialogue can lead to deeper relationships and a better society.Tribalism and arrogance hinder productive discussions and understanding.Learn more about and connect with Julian, Angel and Cassie by checking out the full show notes for this episode at www.DerateTheHate.com.What have you done today to make your life a better life? What have you done today to make the world a better place? The world is a better place if we are better people. That begins with each of us as individuals. Be kind to one another. Be grateful for everything you've got. Make each and every day the day that you want it to be! Please follow The Derate The Hate podcast on: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter(X) , YouTube Subscribe to us wherever you enjoy your audio or directly from our site. Please leave us a rating and feedback on Apple podcasts or other platforms. Not on social media? You can share your thoughts or request Wilk for a speaking engagement on our site's contact page: DerateTheHate.com/Contact If you would like to support the show, you're welcome to DONATE or shop Amazon by going through our Support Us page and I'll earn through qualifying purchases at no extra cost to you. I look forward to hearing from you!

393 Marina Dyck on TEAM for Insomnia Today we feature Marina Dyck, a TEAM-Certified Clinical Counselor in private practices in Swift Current, Saskatchewan, Canada. She works with individuals and families struggling with trauma, anxiety, depression, and relationship issues. She combines the latest research in neuroscience, powered by TEAM-CBT, and what she calls the "whole person" approach. Marina describes her innovative TEAM-CBT treatment for patients with trouble sleeping. Many of them toss and turn at night, unable to turn off their anxious and agitated brains, so they ruminate over and over about problems that are bugging them. Sound familiar? Here's David's quick, step by step overview of Marina's treatment approach, which is based on the steps of TEAM and the Daily Mood Log. Step 1. Let's imagine you're the patient (or the shrink), so you start with a brief description of the Upsetting Event at the top of the Daily Mood Log. It could be something as simple as ”Lying in bed for several hours, unable to get to sleep because I keep ruminating about a report I have not finished for work,” or some other problem. Step 2. Identify your negative feelings and estimate how intense each one is on a scale from 0 (not at all) to 100 (the worst.) For example, you may be feeling: Sad, down: 80% Anxious, panicky: 95% Guilty, ashamed: 70% Inadequate, incompetent, inferior: 90% Alone: 100% Discouraged: 80% Frustrated: 95% Angry, annoyed: 100% Step 3: Record your negative thoughts and how strongly you believe each one from 0% to 100%. For example, you may be telling yourself: I have to get to sleep! 100% If I don't get to sleep, I'll never be able to function tomorrow. 90% I should have completed my report for my boss today. 100% I should get out of bed and work on it. 90% There must be something wrong with me. 100% etc. etc. Step 4. Identify the distortions in these thoughts, like All-or-Nothing Thinking, Fortune-Telling, Should Statements, Emotional Reasoning, Magnification, and more. Now, if you're a shrink, after you've empathized, do the A = Paradoxical Agenda Setting or Assessment of Resistance. If you're a general citizen, you can do Positive Reframing. In other words, instead of trying to make your negative thoughts and feeling disappear entirely by pushing the Magic Button, you can ask two questions about each negative thought (NT) or feeling: How might this NT or feeling be helping me? What does this NT or feeling show about me and my core values that's positive and awesome? Example. In the current example you are 95% anxious and panicky about your report for work as well as the fact that you can't relax and fall asleep. Could there be some positives in your anxiety and panic? For example, these feelings might show Your intense commitment to your work. They may be a reflection of your high standards. Your anxiety, while uncomfortable, has probably motivated you to work hard and achieve a great deal. Your anxiety may protect you from danger and keep you focused on what you have to do to succeed and survive. Your anxiety could be an expression of your respect for your boss and for the company you're working for. Your desire to do a good job is probably a reflection of one of your core values as a human being. You could make similar lists for other feelings as well, like feeling down, guilty, discouraged, angry, and so forth. At that point, you can set your goals for every negative feeling. For example, you might decide that 15% or 20% might be enough anxiety and panic, and that 15% shame would be enough, and so forth. You can record your goals for each negative feeling in the goal column of your Daily Mood Log. This is much easier than if you try to reduce them all to zero by pressing the Magic Button. And even if you could, then all of the positives you listed would go down the drain, right along with your negative thoughts and feelings. Instead, you can aim to reduce them to some lower level that would allow you to relax while still maintaining your core personal values. Now we're ready for the M = Methods portion of the TEAM session. You will enjoy this portion of the podcast. Marina led Rhonda in three classic TEAM methods: The Paradoxical Double Standard Technique, the Externalization of Voices, and something Marina calls Distraction Training, which is actually a mix of Image Substitution, self-hypnosis, and relaxation training. Essentially, you focus on something positive and relaxing, as opposed to ruminating about all you have to do. This approach will come to life when you listen to the podcast, and I think you will agree that it IS innovative and significantly different and from 99% of what is currently sold as “insomnia treatment!” Marina emphasizes that you, the client, will have to agree to spend 15 to 20 minutes per day doing written work with the Daily Mood Log, or all bets are off. In addition, I would like to add that you and your shrink (or you and your patient) will have to find effective ways to combat each patient's ruminations and negative thoughts, because we're all quite different and our problems will usually be unique. In fact, that's why I (David) have created way more than 100 methods for challenging distorted thoughts. But here's the basic idea: When you learn to CHANGE the way you THINK, you can CHANGE the way you FEEL as well as the way you SLEEP! Thanks so much for listening today, and happy dreams! Marina, Rhonda and David  

Navigating Complex Issues in Faith and Modern Life (feat. Chad Ragsdale and Daniel McCoy). This extensive discourse features a dialogue with Chad Ragsdale, discussing how various philosophies outside the church influence Christian thinking negatively, with a focus on emotional reasoning and the impact of technology on faith. Ragsdale expresses concerns over the church's adaptation to modern cultures, emphasizing the need for sober-mindedness against hollow and deceptive philosophies. The conversation also explores the conflict between following one's heart versus adhering to biblical truths, the challenges posed by a technologically driven culture, and the philosophical shift towards a therapeutic societal approach. Further, it delves into practical applications of faith in modern societal roles like the military and law enforcement, touching on navigating political landscapes as Christians. The dialogue also touches on dealing with disagreements within the church community, the importance of nuance in forming convictions, and balancing the dynamic between embracing cultural shifts and maintaining spiritual integrity. Get the Book Key Takeaways  00:00 Introduction and the Dangers of External Philosophies 00:51 The Seduction of Emotional Reasoning 02:29 The Impact of Technology on Our Thought Processes 03:41 The Influence of Artificial Intelligence on Our Lives 04:46 The Dangers of Offloading Our Abilities to Technology 06:57 The Influence of Emotional Reasoning and Technology on Our Faith 07:11 The Struggle to Cultivate a Genuine Inner Life 09:19 The Impact of Moral Therapeutic Deism on Our Decisions 12:34 The Role of Church Leaders in Addressing Cultural Philosophies 19:14 The Importance of Deep Thinking in Our Spiritual Life 22:00 The Challenge of Addressing Controversial Issues in the Church 22:50 Navigating Disagreements and Differences 23:01 Understanding the Complexity of Social Issues 23:05 The Role of Passion and Perspective in Faith   Join us this April at our 2024 Courageous Renewal Gathering            

Featured Photo is Dr. Amy Huberman The Amy Story, Part 2: The Joys of Doing the Laundry! Amy and her exuberant son, Sasha, and wife, Alena Last week you heard Part 1 of the Amy session, which included T = Testing, E = Empathy, and A = Assessment of Resistance. Today, you will hear Part 2 of Amy's exciting journey from perfectionism to JOY. M = Methods We used a variety of Methods to help Amy challenge her negative thoughts, starting with the first, “I'm failing my patients.” We started with Identify and Explain the Distortions, then went to the Double Standard Technique, and ended up with the Externalization of Voices. As a reminder, you can see Amy's  Daily Mood Log at the start of her session here.. As an exercise, see how many distortions, or thinking errors, you can find in her first Negative Thought, “I'm failing my patients,“ using the list of cognitive distortions on the bottom of her Daily Mood Log. You'll find the list of the ten cognitive distortions if you click here.  After you've identified each distortion, see if you can explain two things about it: Why is this distortion in Amy's thought unrealistic and misleading? Why might it be incredibly unfair and hurtful? You'll find my list of the distortions in this thought at the end of the show notes. But don't look until you've made your list! These techniques we used were effective , as you'll hear on the podcast, especially the Externalization of Voices. You'll hear us doing role-reversals with Amy, and the method that “won the day” was the CAT, or Counter-Attack Technique, combined with the Acceptance Paradox. The Acceptance Paradox involves finding truth in a negative thought with a sense of peace or even humor. The CAT involves confronting the hostile voice in your head and tell it to go fly a kite, or other gentle but firm message You'll enjoy seeing some striking changes in Amy, as her tears and feelings of intense self-doubt are suddenly transformed into joy and laughter. Those changes created strong feelings of joy for Jill and me as well. We both have incredibly fondness and admiration for Amy, and feel great joy as well when she feels joy. Here are Amy's final scores at the end of the session. Emotions % Now % Goal % After Sad, blue, depressed, down, unhappy 80 25 0 Anxious, worried, panicky, nervous, frightened 80 20 0 Guilty, remorseful, bad, ashamed 90 5 0 Worthless, inadequate, defective, incompetent 100 15 5 Lonely, unloved, unwanted, rejected, alone       Embarrassed, foolish, humiliated, self-conscious       Hopeless, discouraged, pessimistic, despairing 90 5 0 Frustrated, stuck, thwarted, defeated 80 5 5 Angry, mad, resentful, annoyed, irritated, upset, furious       Other         The Joyous Dr. Amy! Sudden and dramatic change is pretty trippy, but it isn't much good if it doesn't last. And it won't! Negative thoughts and feelings will always return, because no one can be happy all the time. That's why some relapse prevention training and ongoing practice and refinement of what you've learned can be vitally important. In our follow-up session with Amy one week later she said she'd felt way better during the week, but did, in fact, have some relapses and had to challenge her negative thoughts again. She'd been helped a lot by the idea that it was okay to fail, to seek consultation, and learn, and that failing with patients gave us endless opportunities to learn and grow as therapists. And it was also okay not to have to listen so intently to the attempts of the negative self to put her down. In fact, our misery almost never results from our failures, but from telling ourselves that we “shouldn't” ever fail, and from punishing ourselves mercilessly when we do. One of her most exciting statements in our follow-up session was that she discovered that even something as humble as putting the dirty clothes into the washing machine could be a joyous experience without that negative voice in her brain constantly hollering at her that she wasn't good enough! Teaching points It was hard, at first, for Amy to “see” how distorted and unfair her negative thoughts were. She is an extremely intelligent, accomplished, and beloved colleague, and yet most of us cannot “see” or really “grasp” that we can be pretty mean to when we're feeling down and anxious. I have often said that feeling anxious and depressed is a lot like being in a deep hypnotic trance, telling yourself and believing things that just aren't true. For example, Amy is doing beautiful work with the great majority of her patients, and is doing the exact same thing with the patients who are responding beautifully as she is with the two who are stuck. So, when she tells herself she's a failure, she's clearly involved in All-or-Nothing Thinking. In other words, she's thinking that if she's not perfect, she's a complete failure and a fraud. She also seems to have many Hidden Shoulds (e.g. I SHOULD be able to help every single patient quickly) and Mental Filtering (focusing only on the negatives) and Discounting the Positive (ignoring the positives, as if they didn't count.) The techniques that were the most helpful for Amy were Positive Reframing: that's where we pointed out the positive aspects of Amy's Negative Thoughts and feelings. The Externalization of Voices with Self-Defense, the Acceptance Paradox, and the CAT. Be Specific: Amy was Labeling herself as a “fraud” and a “failure,” and she was Overgeneralizing from two patients to her entire self and career. Jill emphasized Be Specific. In other words, focus on and accept what's real. What's real is that Amy has been valiantly struggling to help two patients who are stuck. She can just accept that, and get some consultation and guidance from a colleague, which would probably help her get unstuck. So, instead of labelling yourself as “a failure” and “a fraud,” which are just mean, vague words, you can tell yourself that you have a specific problem—in Amy's case, getting stuck with two very anxious patients. Then you can focus on getting some help in solving that specific problem—for example, by seeking consultation from a colleague. Jill said that's what she does when she gets stuck. I used to do that every week, especially when I was first learning cognitive therapy. Getting stuck, then, can simply be an opportunity for growth and learning cool new tools. If we never got stuck, we'd never learn anything new! The very moment Amy stopped believing her negative thoughts, her feelings instantly and dramatically changed. That change happened suddenly, over the course of about 30 seconds, and you can SEE it in her face and hear it in her voice. But it won't last forever! Jill pointed out that the belief at the root of Amy's problem was Perfectionism, and the idea that “I should know exactly what to do with all of my patients.” That may be a pleasant fantasy, and it might even motivate us to work hard and achieve, but it's also a recipe for misery! Follow-up Rapid recovery is great, but will it stick? You will hear excerpts from our brief follow-up session one week later for Relapse Prevention Training. The idea is that none of us can feel happy forever, and negative thoughts will creep back into our minds sooner or later. However, you can anticipate this and prepare for it by challenging your negative thoughts with the same techniques that helped you the first time you improved. That's because the details will usually be different every time you're upset, but the pattern of self-critical negative thoughts will usually be the same. And this DID happen to Amy, just as it will happen to you. But this was an opportunity for her to deepen her understanding of perfectionism and to refine and enhance her ability to respond to her negative thoughts. During the weeks following the recording of this podcast, Amy found that she experienced some resistance to using the counterattack technique. She began to feel like she was relating to her perfectionism as an enemy and attacking it—and in doing so, was discounting all the good in it, including the values that came shining through during the Positive Reframing. She found that a better fit for her, instead of the counterattack, was to disarm her perfectionistic thoughts by seeing the truth in them. In fact, you could view this as yet another form of acceptance. When she did this, the perfectionistic voice in her head naturally backed down and gave her the space to do what matters to her unencumbered by self-criticism. I thought it was cool when she described experiencing waves of joy while doing the laundry—an activity that had always felt like a chore to her before, when it was accompanied by thoughts like “I should have finished this laundry days ago.”   She discovered that without beating up on herself, something as humble as doing the laundry could be incredibly rewarding! After our follow-up meeting, I got a lovely email from Amy about the joys of giving up the need for perfection, and sent this follow-up reply to Amy: Thank you, Amy, you are the BEST! I did a four-day intensive in San Antonio years ago with a small group of about 25 therapists. As you know, I always BS and say “As the Buddha so often said . . . “ followed by something goofy or quasi-mystical or whatever, and most people seem to kind of like that and see it as fun or humorous or whatever. Well, I was doing that at the workshop, and at one of the breaks a woman approached me and said she was interested in my Buddhist remarks because she had been raised as a Buddhist in an Asian country where Buddhism is prominent. I panicked and thought I'd been found out and exposed as a fraud. She went on to say that their family gave up Buddhism, however, and she was sad. I asked why they gave up Buddhism, and she explained that her mother suffered from severe depression, and the Buddhists taught that's because you think you “need” things, and if you're a good Buddhist you won't think that way and you won't ever suffer. Since she suffered, she felt like a failure as a Buddhist, so the family gave up Buddhism. I told her that she might not be aware that there are actually two schools of Buddhism. There's low-level Buddhism and high-level Buddhism. In low-level Buddhism, you're not allowed to want or need anything, and you're not allowed to suffer. That's sounds like that was the school of Buddhism your family was raised in. But there's another type of high-level Buddhism. In high level Buddhism you're allowed to suffer and struggle, and screw up, and fail, and all sorts of stuff. She got animated and said, “I didn't know that. Thank you so much. You've restored my faith in Buddhism, and I can't wait to tell my mother!” Aside from my being elderly and half-demented, I hope that makes some sense in light of our work together with Jill! So, if you need any translation or explanation, Amy, I'm inviting you to join the high-level Buddhist therapist group where you're allowed to screw up with some of your patients, or even many! Warmly, david Subsequent Follow-Up I forgot to tell you what happened to Amy's two “stuck patients.” Well, she got some consultation about why these patients might be stuck, which is nearly always an Agenda Setting problem—the therapist is working harder than the patient due to the need to “help,” and this plays into the patient's ambivalence. This struck a chord, and Amy was very excited to see her patients again, and both suddenly got “unstuck,” although in somewhat different ways. And that is why I call it the Acceptance Paradox. The moment YOU change, and accept yourself, your world will also change! Or, to put it differently. We often see the world as “different” or as “other,” thinking we are separated. The Buddhists see the world as “one,” and that is certainly true in therapy as well. Answers to the Quiz Question David's list of Distortions in Amy's Negative Thought: “I'm failing my patients.” 1.     All-or-Nothing Thinking. This is not realistic because Amy is not stuck with all of her patients. And even though she's still far short of her hopes for these two patients, they may feel they are getting lots of TLC and support from Amy. 2.     Overgeneralization. This is misleading because she's overgeneralizing from her two failures to her “self,” and labeling herself as “a fraud and a failure.” She also overgeneralizing to the future, thinking things will never change or improve so she should get a new career. 3.     Mental Filtering. She only focusing on the two patients who are stuck. 4.     Discounting the Positive. She's overlooking the fact that she's going excellent work with a great many people, and has tremendous integrity, skill, and commitment to her patients. 5.     Magnification and Minimization. She's kind of blowing things out of proportion, although it's always good to focus on patients who aren't yes improving. 6.     Emotional Reasoning, She FEELS like a failure so thinks she IS a failure. 7.     Hidden Should Statement. She thinks she SHOULD be perfect! 8.     Labeling. Same as Overgeneralization. See above. 9.     Self-Blame. She's blaming herself instead of loving herself and focusing on getting she help she needs and deserves! Thanks for listening today! Rhonda, Amy, and David  

In today's episode, Gina discusses how to use our emotional reasoning and thinking to our advantage, rather than let it contribute to our anxiety and defeat. A number of cognitive distortions are identified as well as how to combat these tendencies. Looking to the positive, or even simply the neutral, can go a long way to preserving our mental health and emotional stability.n Listen in to find out how to do this effectively today! Please visit our Sponsor Page to find all the links and codes for our awesome sponsors! https://www.theanxietycoachespodcast.com/sponsors/ Thank you for supporting The Anxiety Coaches Podcast. Find even more peace and calm with our Supercast premium access membership! https://anxietycoaches.supercast.com/ Here's what's included for $5/month: ❤ New Ad-Free episodes every Sunday and Wednesday ❤ Access to the entire Ad-free back-catalog with over 600 episodes ❤ Premium meditations recorded with you in mind ❤ And more fun surprises along the way! All this in your favorite podcast app! To learn more go to: https://www.theanxietycoachespodcast.com Join our Group Coaching Full or Mini Membership Program  Learn more about our One-on-One Coaching What is anxiety? Quote: Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don't resist them; that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like. -Lao Tzu Chapters 0:00:24 Introduction and the theme of self-defeating beliefs 0:01:19 Example 1: Filtering - Focusing on the negative 0:03:30 Example 2: Black and white thinking - All or nothing mentality 0:05:39 Example 3: Overgeneralization - Exaggerating or taking things to the extreme 0:07:22 Example 4: Mind reading - Making assumptions about others 0:09:14 Example 5: Catastrophizing - Expecting and projecting the worst 0:12:46 Ignoring Emergencies and Seeking Immediate Relief 0:14:39 Seeking Help and Relief from Anxiety Summary In this episode of the Anxiety Coaches Podcast, Gina Ryan discusses the impact of cognitive distortions on our mental well-being. She explores the concept of emotional reasoning and how it contributes to self-defeating beliefs. Drawing from personal experience, Gina shares her journey of recognizing and overcoming these beliefs. Gina delves into various cognitive distortions, highlighting real-life examples and their solutions. She first explores the concept of filtering, where individuals focus solely on the negative aspects of a situation. She offers strategies for shifting perspective and finding balance. Next, Gina addresses black and white thinking, where individuals perceive things as either perfect or a complete failure. She provides tools for challenging this rigid mindset and finding the shades of gray. Overgeneralization, which involves exaggerating or taking things to the extreme, is another cognitive distortion discussed by Gina. She shares techniques for reframing thoughts and practicing self-compassion. Mind reading, the act of making assumptions about others' thoughts or motivations, is also tackled in the episode. Gina offers guidance on cultivating open communication and directly asking others for clarification. Throughout the conversation, Gina emphasizes the importance of mindfulness in identifying and challenging these self-defeating beliefs. She encourages listeners to embrace the concept of present-moment awareness and engage in self-reflection. In addition to cognitive distortions, Gina addresses other patterns of thinking, such as catastrophizing and personalization. She stresses the significance of seeking professional guidance or support from loved ones when necessary. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Break the Anxiety Cycle in 30 Days- Online Course- https://courses.therapyinanutshell.com/anxietyskills I'm going to teach you an important skill to be less emotionally reactive. Essentially, how to control your emotions. Emotions lie to you all the time. But they feel so real. They are very powerful motivators, but they aren't always accurate. You'll learn how to be less emotionally reactive by learning to combat emotional reasoning. You'll learn 4 ways to slow yourself down in an intense moment and 3 steps to combating emotional reasoning.  Looking for affordable online counseling? My sponsor, BetterHelp, connects  you to a licensed professional from the comfort of your own home. Try it now for 10% off your first month: https://betterhelp.com/therapyinanutshell Learn more in one of my in-depth mental health courses: https://courses.therapyinanutshell.com Support my mission on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/therapyinanutshell Sign up for my newsletter: https://www.therapyinanutshell.com Check out my favorite self-help books: https://kit.co/TherapyinaNutshell/best-self-help-books  Therapy in a Nutshell and the information provided by Emma McAdam are solely intended for informational and entertainment purposes and are not a substitute for advice, diagnosis, or treatment regarding medical or mental health conditions. Although Emma McAdam is a licensed marriage and family therapist, the views expressed on this site or any related content should not be taken for medical or psychiatric advice. Always consult your physician before making any decisions related to your physical or mental health. In therapy I use a combination of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Systems Theory, positive psychology, and a bio-psycho-social approach to treating mental illness and other challenges we all face in life. The ideas from my videos are frequently adapted from multiple sources. Many of them come from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, especially the work of Steven Hayes, Jason Luoma, and Russ Harris. The sections on stress and the mind-body connection derive from the work of Stephen Porges (the Polyvagal theory), Peter Levine (Somatic Experiencing) Francine Shapiro (EMDR), and Bessel Van Der Kolk. I also rely heavily on the work of the Arbinger Institute for my overall understanding of our ability to choose our life's direction. And deeper than all of that, the Gospel of Jesus Christ orients my personal worldview and sense of security, peace, hope, and love https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/comeuntochrist/believe If you are in crisis, please contact the National Suicide Prevention Hotline at https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org or 1-800-273-TALK (8255) or your local emergency services. Copyright Therapy in a Nutshell, LLC  

This podcast episode builds off of the concept of four different types of reasoning simultaneously performed by distinct parts of the brain. The inner Artist engages in Emotional-Reasoning, associating experiences with emotions. The inner Scout employs Magical-Reasoning, finding patterns and correlations to make sense of the world. The inner Warrior relies on Logical-Reasoning, basing actions on evidence and logic. The inner Chief, responsible for regulating the brain, uses Influencer-Reasoning, considering factors like relationships, authority, power, charisma, expertise, and fame. Despite the common perception of Logical-Reasoning's superiority, it's Emotional-Reasoning that often determines choices after weighing the different types of reasoning. The skilled residential counselor can help child-clients become more skilled at each of the four types of reasoning, and at blending the four types together to arrive at a richer understanding of how the world works.  Emotional-Reasoning can be improved by assisting clients with Affect-Labeling, which involves clients using words to describe their emotions, contributing to a calming effect on the brain. Other tools, such as Feelings Maps, Feelings Word Banks, and the Feelings Thermometer can help clients with Affect-Labeling.  Residential Counselors can nurture Magical-Reasoning in children, especially those on the autism spectrum, through copying games and pretend play. Magical-Reasoning is often times the basis of social principles and friendships. Logical-Reasoning can be helped along by teaching the use of pro-con lists, the scientific method, and activities that exercise executive functions such as planning, prioritizing, organizing, working memory, and flexibility. Influencer-Reasoning is addressed through positive role modeling and awareness of peer influence. The episode concludes by highlighting the importance of cognitive flexibility and practicing all four reasoning types for the developmental growth of children.

Featured photo is Mina as a child (more pics below!) 374 Anger, Part 2 You Have Always Hated Me! In the Anger Part 1 podcast (371 on November 20), Rhonda, Matt and David discussed the fact that when you're feeling angry, there's always an inner dialogue—this is what you're saying to yourself, the way you're thinking about the situation—and an outer dialogue—this is what you're saying to the other person. In Part 1, we focused on the inner dialogue and described the cognitive distortions that nearly always fill your mind with anger-provoking inner chatter about the ‘awfulness” of the person you're mad at. Those distortions include All-or-Nothing Thinking, Overgeneralization, Labeling, Mental Filtering, Discounting the Positive, Mind-Reading, Fortune Telling, Emotional Reasoning, Other-Directed Should Statements, and Other-Blame. That's a lot—in fact, all but Self-Blame. And sometimes, when you're ticked off, you might also be blaming yourself, and feel mad at yourself at the same time. Matt suggested I add these comments on Self-Blame or it's absence:: Another possible addition would be when you identify the absence of Self Blame when we're angry. For me, it's been easier to think of that as a positive distortion, because you are blind to, or ignoring, your own role in the problem. In other words, when I'm blaming someone else, it's me thinking my poop smells great and tit's all the other person's fault.. I've wondered if we fool ourselves like this because of the desire to have a special and perfect “self,” which we then defend. Because nobody's perfect, our "ideal self," as opposed to our "real self," is just a pleasant, but potentially destructive, fantasy. Still, we try to preserve and project the fantasy that we are free of blame and the innocent victim of the other person's "badness," , and we imagine there we have a perfect “self” to defend. Or, as you've said, at times, David, “anger is often just a protective shell to hide and protect our more tender and genuine feelings.” We also discussed the addictive aspect of anger, since you probably feel morally superior to the “bad” person you're ticked off at when you're mad, and this makes it fairly unappealing to change the way you're thinking and feeling. Your anger also protects you from the risk of being vulnerable and open and genuine. Today we discuss the Outer Dialogue, and how to express angry feelings to another person, as well as how to respond to their expressions of anger. The main concept is that you can express anger in a healthy way, by sharing your anger respectfully, or you can act out your anger aggressively, by attacking the other person. That's a critically important decision! Toward the start of today's podcast, Rhonda, Matt and David listed some of the distinctions between healthy and unhealthy anger. The following is just a partial list of some of the differences:   Healthy Anger Unhealthy Anger You treat the other person with respect, even if you're angry. You want to put the other person down. Your goal is to get closer to the other person. You want to get revenge or hurt or humiliate the other person. You hope to improve the relationship. You want to reject or distance yourself from the other person. You want to understand the other person's mindset and find the truth in what they're saying, even if it sounds ‘off' or ‘disturbing' or offensive. You want to prove that the other person is ‘wrong' and persuade them that you are ‘right'. You want to understand and accept the other person. You insist on trying to change the other person. You express yourself thoughtfully. You express yourself impulsively. You come from a mindset of humility, curiosity, and flexibility. You come from a position of moral superiority, judgement, and rigidity. You are patient. You are pushy and demanding. Optimism that things can improve and that there's a great potential for a more meaningful and loving connection. Hopelessness and feelings of certainty that things cannot improve. Open to what I've done wrong and how I've hurt you. Focus on what you've done wrong and how you've hurt me. I-Thou mindset. I-It mindset. You're vulnerable and open to your hurt feelings. You put up a wall of toughness and try to hide your vulnerable true feelings.. You look for positive motives, if possible, and don't assume that you actually understand how the other person is thinking and feeling.. You attribute malignant motives to the other person and imagine that you can read their mind and know exactly why they feel the way they do. You accept and comprehend the idea that you can feel intensely angry with someone and love them at the same time.. You may believe that anger and love are dichotomies, and that conflict and anger, in some way, are the ‘opposite' of love or respect.. To bring some dynamics and personality to today's podcast, Mina, who's made a number of noteworthy appearances on the podcast, agreed to describe what she learned on a recent Sunday hike. (I've started up my Sunday hikes again, but in a small way now that the pandemic has subsided, at least for the time being. I'm struggling with low back pain when walking and that severely limits how far I can go.) Mina began by explaining that when she was talking to her mom on the phone. Her mom described a conflict with woman friend who seemed angry with Mina's mom. Mina said, “I can see why that woman got angry with you.“ Mina explained that her mother, who is “conflict phobic,” paradoxically ends up with conflicts with a lot of people. However, Mina's mother sounded hurt by Mina's comment, and said, “You've always hated me since you were a little girl! You always looked at me hatefully!” Here are some of Mina's "angry" childhood photos:   Mina explained how she felt when her mom said, "You've always hated me.” My jaw dropped when she said that! It was such a shock. I've always felt like she was my best friend! . . . I hate feeling angry. It makes me every bit as uncomfortable as anxiety. If I express my anger, it goes away, and I feel better. But I don't usually express it, and then it comes back disguised as weird neurologic symptoms. And that, of course, is the Hidden Emotion phenomenon that is so common in people who struggle with anxiety. When you try to squash or hide negative feelings your think you're not “supposed' to have, they often resurface in disguised form, as phobias, panic, OCD symptoms, chronic worrying, or any type of anxiety, including, as in Mina's case Health Anxiety—that's where you become convinced you have some serious neurologic or medical problem, like Multiple Sclerosis. Matt suggested that I might remind folks of my concept that “anger allays get expressed, one way or the other.” He's found this idea to be both true and incredibly helpful for “us nice folks who think we can get away without expressing our anger, thinking we can avoid conflicts, entirely. This always backfires, in my experience!” On the recent Sunday hike, Mina practiced how to talk with her mom, using the Five Secrets of Effective Communication. After that, she used what she'd practiced on the hike to talk to her mom about their relationship, and then got an “I love you” message from her mom the next morning. This made Mina very happy, but because she had a full day of back to back appointments, Mina decided to spend time crafting a thoughtful reply at the end of the day, when she had a little free time. But when she went back to her computer at the end of the day to send a message to her mom, she discovered that her mother had deleted the loving message she sent early in the day, and Mina felt hurt. When Mina asked her mom about it, her mom said that deleting the message was just an error due to ‘old age.” However, Mina did not really buy this, and thought her mom probably felt hurt and angry because Mina had not responded sooner. In the podcast, we practiced responding to mom using the role-play exercise I developed years ago. Essentially, one person plays the role of Mina's mom, and says something challenging or critical. Mina plays herself and responds as skillfully as possible with the Five Secrets, acknowledging the other person's anger and expressing her own feelings as well. We practiced responding to mom's statement, “You've always hated me.” Matt played the role of mom and Mina gave a beautiful Five Secrets response. You'll enjoy hearing her response, and Matt's and Rhonda's helpful feedback, when you listen to the podcast. Then Mina asked for help responding to another statement from her mom, who had also said: All of the kids your age are angry, because you were neglected a lot of the time because of the war in Iran, and your dad and I were busy doing what we had to do to survive and avoid being arrested. All of my Iranian friends with children your age are experiencing the same thing. Matt and Rhonda did more role plays with Mina, followed by excellent feedback on Mina's Five Secrets response. Again, I think you'll enjoy the role-playing and fine tuning when you listen to the podcast. One of the obvious take-home messages from today's podcast is to use the Five Secrets of Effective Communication when you're feeling angry and talking to someone who's angry with you as week, As a reminder, these are the Five Secrets. LINK TO 5 SECRETS And to make it simple, you can think of talking with your EAR: E = Empathy (listening with the Disarming Technique, Thought and Feeling Empathy, and Inquiry) A = Assertiveness (sharing your feelings openly with “I Feel” Statements) R = Respect (showing warmth and caring with Stroking) However, here's the rub: People who are angry will usually NOT want to do this! When you're ticked of, you will almost always have a huge preference for expressing yourself with the Unhealthy Anger described above. Matt urged me to publish my list of 36 reasons why this intense resistance to healthy communication. LINK HERE for the LIST 12 GOOD Reasons NOT to Empathize 12 GOOD Reasons NOT to Share your Feelings 12 GOOD Reasons NOT to Treat the Other Person with Respect. So, as you can see, there's a lot more to skillful communication of anger than just learning the Five Secrets of Effective Communication, although that definitely requires tremendous dedication and practice. But motivation is the most important key to success or failure. When you're upset with someone, you can ask yourself, “Do I want to communicate in a loving, or in a hostile way?” The reward of love are enormous, but the seduction of hostility and lashing out is at least as powerful! This battle between the light and the dark is not new, but has been blazing for tens of thousands of years. And, of course, the decision will be yours. Thanks for listening today, Mina, Rhonda, Matt, and David

This podcast presents a way to understand the brain's ability to use reasoning to become cognitively centered.  Emotional centering involves regulating the intensity and switching between emotional states. Behavioral centering, particularly physiological centering, focuses on transitioning from extremes to a calm baseline. It's a little harder to understand the concept of becoming cognitively centered, but a good place to start is with a look at how the brain employs reasoning. A traditional dictionary definition of reasoning states that it has to be logical in nature.  However, reasoning is better understood as a broader action of figuring out reasons why the world is the way it is.  Early in life, before the parts of your brain that are capable of logical reasoning have sufficiently developed, parts of your brain understand the world in terms of emotions.  The Artist parts of your brain process sensory information as feelings and find patterns and associations between your experiences and your feelings. Your feelings and your Emotional-Reasoning evolve as you mature, accommodating more nuanced and contradictory feelings.  Emotional-Reasoning doesn't go away as your mature.  It's the only kind of reasoning that some sections of your brain are capable of doing.  Other parts of your brain, the more cognitively sophisticated parts I call The Scout, develop the ability to do Magical-Reasoning.  This develops out of experiencing correlations and connections between people, objects, and places, often based on imitation and symbolism. Magical-Reasoning also persists into adulthood, coexisting with Logical-Reasoning.  Magical-Reasoning becomes the basis for much of how you make sense of social situations and social rules. As your frontal cortex develops, Logical-Reasoning becomes better at moving beyond correlation and predicting cause and effect.  Logical-Reasoning takes more energy.  It doesn't take the place of Emotional- and Magical-Reasoning; instead it exists simultaneously in different parts of your brain.  The Chief parts of your brain, that specialize in regulating the rest of your brain and body, use yet a fourth type of reasoning that I call Influencer-Reasoning.  This type of reasoning guides you in who to copy and follow.  There's six sources of influence: Relationship, Authority, Power-Broker, Charismatic, Expert, and Fame influences. By blending the four types of reasoning, you'll become more centered.  You can also help your child-clients to become more skilled at using each of the four types of reasoning.  That's the focus of the next episode. 

Parents of estranged adult children may feel – and believe – that estrangement is an emergency requiring immediate action on their part. It's as though they stand to lose their adult child(ren) forever if they don't do something about it right now. No wonder it feels like an emergency! And if those parents don't know what to do, or if everything they do seems to make matters worse, they can fall into a state of terrible limbo. They become vulnerable to desperation, anxiety, depression, and more. Not taking immediate action to end estrangement (whatever that would be) does not mean losing your child forever. It's just one example of a trick of the mind called “emotional reasoning.” Emotional reasoning is a cognitive distortion, or mental mistake, that can cause parents more pain than necessary during unwanted estrangement. In this informative episode, Tina explains the negative impact of emotional reasoning and gives examples she sees in parents she works with. Some of the examples might sound familiar to you. If so, this episode can help you begin to free yourself from the painful prison of emotional reasoning. For much more information on coping with, and responding effectively to, estrangement by your adult child(ren), read Tina's book, Reconnecting With Your Estranged Adult Child. Reconnection Club members can discuss this and every episode in the General Discussion forum inside the Reconnection Club. Not a member yet? Learn more and join.

Listen to this Whinypaluza Wednesday Live vlog episode with The Greene Family! An extension of the weekly blog, join Rebecca and her family on the live vlog, brought to you here in case you missed it last week!   Here is what to expect on this week's show: What are cognitive distortions, and why do they interfere with your thinking? All Or Nothing Thinking- if it isn't perfect, it is bad. Overgeneralization- applying a label to everything because it happened once. Mental Filter- ignore the positive and focus on the negative. Discounting the positives- not valuing positive things that happen Jumping to Conclusions- decisions not based on evidence Magnification or Minimization- making things more significant or less significant than they are. Emotional Reasoning- reasoning yourself into negative thoughts Should Statements- criticism in form of “you should have” or “I should have” Labeling- applying negative labels to yourself or others in reaction to a mistake or because something didn't happen the way you expected. Personalization and Blame- thinking you are to blame for things you have no control or influence over. How to identify cognitive distortions Showing yourself compassion and understanding in training yourself to break these habits. Look for evidence to support what you are thinking or saying to yourself or others. Is it true? Transformational vocabulary- instead of automatically falling into your cognitively distorted thoughts, how you can reframe what you say and how you think. Follow Rebecca Greene Blog  https://www.whinypaluza.com/ Book 1  https://bit.ly/WhinypaluzaBook Book 2 https://bit.ly/whinybook2 Facebook  https://www.facebook.com/whinypaluzaparenting Instagram https://www.instagram.com/becgreene5/ @becgreene5 TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@whinypaluzamom?lang=en @whinypaluzamom YouTube https://www.youtube.com/WhinyPaluza Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to our fourteenth episode; this episode was actually recorded on October 13, but life kind of got in the way for me, so I apologize. Here, I speak with Sarah Tolle, content strategist working as a Content Director for Black and White Zebra! You can find her online via her website: sarahtolle.com. Thank you again to Sarah for being my guest on LM4LM!Have feedback for me? Please send me questions, comments, constructive criticism, and anything else that comes to mind at rothleyk@gmail.com.I've started a website! Find me online at: www.thelibrarianmarketer.wordpress.com. (It's pretty basic for right now). There is a quick 3-question survey you can take.Until next time!Intro & Outro Music Credit: Royalty Free Music by MusicUnlimited from Pixabay.By accessing this Podcast, I acknowledge that the entire contents are the property of Katie Rothley, or used by Katie Rothley with permission, and are protected under U.S. and international copyright and trademark laws. Except as otherwise provided herein, users of this Podcast may save and use information contained in the Podcast only for personal or other non-commercial, educational purposes. No other use, including, without limitation, reproduction, retransmission or editing, of this Podcast may be made without the prior written permission of Katie Rothley.This podcast is for educational purposes only. The host claims no responsibility to any person or entity for any liability, loss, or damage caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly as a result of the use, application, or interpretation of the information presented herein.

Often you need a little acronym to remind you of a path to follow. Here are nine acronyms to help your mental health.  Over the years, I have collected a set of acronyms that have helped my mental health and those I have conversations with. These are acronyms that aid in recovery. They are like little guide posts to get you thinking. I am sure there are probably others, but here are my contributions. Mental Health Acronyms F.A.S.S. – No Fixing, Advising, Saving, or Setting one straight This comes from the work of Parker Palmer and focuses on the kind of relationship we need to offer others.In my conversations, I keep F.A.S.S. in the back of my mind as a kind of guiding light.I try not to fix, advise, save, or set the person straight. Instead, I ask gently curious questions. Now there are exceptions. Sometimes you need to give advice and even save if someone is seriously unwell, but these are the exceptions, not the rule.I want to ‘listen people' into wellness and help them discover their path to change. F.A.S.S. challenges our need to be in control and to soothe our anxieties.Read further here. Please. No Fixing, Advising, Saving, or Straightening Out P.L.O.M. – Poor Little Old Me I discovered this one from Brennan Manning. It's the unhealthy victim mentality.There are healthy and unhealthy victims.Healthy victimhood sees the pain of life and wants help to go through it. They take responsibility for their lives and don't constantly blame others.An unhealthy victim has a P.L.O.M. attitude and wallows in what has happened. There is no shift in focus. If you talk to them a year later, they will still have a  P.L.O.M. in their mouth. It's an attitude all of us can easily slip into, but for some, it becomes a home where they live everything out of. Self-pity can be seen as a season, a time which you are passing through, but if you always stay in the winter, something of spring will never emerge.Mental health comes when we accept responsibility for ourselves and do not perpetually be the victim.Read further here – 7 Steps to Help Those with P.L.O.M's (Poor Little Old Me) in the Mouth  S.H.A.M.E. – Should Have Already Mastered Everything. Do you make mistakes, or are you a mistake?S.H.A.M.E. helps me understand that I am discovering and learning. Have I mastered everything? Of course not. It's the ‘Should have's' that dig in deep into the soul. Either we say them to ourselves, or others say it to us.It recognizes the shame stones we pile up for ourselves. Read further here – What to Do With Shame Slingers H.A.L.T. – Hungry Angry Lonely Tired This acronym comes from the recovery movement and acts as a kind of warning system reminding you to pause (halt!) and take notice of what's going on for you that makes you want to go to the pain relief strategy, such as picking up a drink or a drug.The question to ask is, ‘Am I Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired, or Stressed?' Then, ask yourself further questions such as ‘What are the healthy options I can choose rather than the old destructive patterns my brain is offering me? Read further here. What Is HALT? The Dangers of Being Hungry, Angry, Lonely, or Tired   S.T.A.N. Plan – Simple, Timed, Aimed, Negotiated This is a little acronym that I discovered in the story of Daniel and the plan he created to get him out of a tough situation.I often use S.T.A.N. when helping someone create a plan of action.  When creating a plan of action, I like to ask these questions.Is the plan … Simple to understand by all involved. It's not complex, long, or difficult. Timed for review, not completion. Good plans have a time for a review to see how progress is going and if anything needs to change in the plan. Aimed at achieving something of deep importance. Sometimes the reason we don't achieve the plan is because the outcome simply doesn't matter that much to the heart. Negotiated with key others. Who is helping you achieve the outcomes of the plan? Have you discussed this with them?Read further here – Lessons Daniel Taught Me About Achieving Goals. Part 2 E+R=O – Event plus Response equals Outcome We all have events happen to us, but how we respond will determine the outcome.The key to a different outcome is to choose a different response. Learning new responses to the events happening around us can bring us new outcomes. Read further here How to Stand Firm when the Rotten Tomatoes are Thrown A.B.T. – And, But, Therefore.  This is an acronym I use in my writing, similar to E+R=O. It comes from the work of Randy Olson and his study of great speeches.And these things happened But this was the response Therefore this was the outcome. Read further here – The ABT Framework for Listening Well B.G.E.S.C. – Brief. Gentle. Early. Specific. Consequences. This comes from the work of David Riddell and relates to expressing yourself to someone else when you have been hurt. Brief. Make your reply short. Don't go on and on. Keep it short Gentle. Speak in a tone appropriate to the situation. We don't need to yell, and we don't need to be meek and whisper. Look at them and speak gently. Early. Give your reply as soon as possible. Don't leave it till later unless you need to prepare your response. You don't want this anger to go on and on. Paul writes,” Don't go to bed angry” Ephesians 4:26 Specific. Make sure your reply is specific to the issue. Don't go on to past hurts and problems. Deal only with the current issue. Consequences. A good reply points out the consequences of what has happened and will happen. It is important to state how you feel about what happened. “By you doing this, I felt very sad, etc.”. You may also need to point out what will happen if they do that again. ” I have decided that if you behave like that again, then I will….”Read further here – 16 Tips When There Is Socially Unacceptable Behavior In A Group Setting J.A.D.E. = F.O.G. – Justifying, Arguing, Defending, or Explaining = Fear, Obligation, Guilt This is one that I have only recently added to my toolbox of acronyms.J.A.D.E. is an Al-Anon 12-step slogan that reminds us not to engage in justifying, arguing, defending, and explaining. When you do this with unhealthy people often they will throw something back at you that will stimulate feelings of Fear, Obligation, and Guilt. F.O.G.Often the healthiest response is to give no response at all.Read further these articles. Dealing with Difficult Family Members: Dont Justify, Argue, Defend, or Explain Circular Arguments, Emotional Reasoning and JADE (Justify, Argue, Defend, Explain) The Narcissist-Codependent Trap: Having Boundaries Ends the Relationship More Thoughts on FOG, Hoovers and No Contact When Ending a Relationship with a Narcissist, Borderline, Histrionic and/or Sociopath Another one, as a bonus. T.T.A.Q. = Title, Theme, Affect, Questions This is a useful acronym to help us understand our dreams Title. Always give it a title. It is a short story or movie and deserves a title. The act of choosing a title offers insight into the meaning of your dream. Theme. What is it principally about? This is a short phrase that describes the topic. If it was a movie, would it be a thriller, a comedy, a romance? Ask God to help you identify the overall theme. Affect. What was the emotional affect expressed in it? What were the feelings felt by the principal character in the story or movie? Were there certain emotions expressed by others? What feelings did you experience when you awoke? Describe the emotional tone or impact of the dream. Questions. What questions does the story seem to be asking of you? The authors of this technique suggest you listen to the story as if it were a friend asking you a meaningful question. The act of formulating the question/s will give an interpretation. Read further here – How To Prayerfully Listen, Interpret, and Understand Your Dreams I hope you found this helpful and will be able to put some of them into action for your mental health. Let me know if you have some acronyms that help you. Use the contact form to send me a message.   Barry Pearman Photo by Carly Kewley on Unsplash     Read this further here FOLLOW ME! Email me: barry@turningthepage.co.nz Website: https://turningthepage.co.nz/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/turningthepage1atatime Twitter: https://twitter.com/barrypearman Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/barry_pearman/ Podcast https://turningthepage.co.nz/podcast-listen-mental-health/ Support Turning the Page with a Donation https://turningthepage.co.nz/give/

353: The Inner Scoop on “No" Practice! The “Inner” and “Outer” Dialogues— The “Inner” and “Outer” Solutions As you know, I have created many powerful communication techniques, including the Five Secrets of Effective Communication and more. One of the additional techniques is called “No” Practice, and it's designed for people who have trouble saying “no,” or setting limits with other people. Essentially, you do a role-play with a colleague or therapist who keeps pestering you with pushy demands, and you have to practice saying “No” in a polite but firm and assertive way. Sounds simple, right? But it's not! People have many reasons for not wanting to say “No.” For example, you may be afraid of hurting the other person's feelings, or letting them down, or running the risk that they may get mad at you if you don't say, “Yes.” In addition, you may feel like you'll miss out on some special activity if you say no, so you end up way over-committed. In this session, you will meet an exceptionally compassionate and highly trained young psychiatrist named Lee, who asked for help with a problem relating to some of his patients. My co-therapist is Dr. Jill Levitt, who is the Director of Clinical Training at the Feeling Good Institute in Mountain View, California. Lee explained how he struggles with saying “no” when patients make inappropriate requests, like pushing for a medication they're addicted to, and wanting premature discharge from the inpatient unit when they have unrecognized safety issues. Instead, he seems to get drawn into long explanations of his thinking and why he's declining the other person's requests, sometimes for half an hour, and ends up frustrated when the other person still doesn't “get it” and with himself for spending the time. People often think that therapy is easy, and that people just need encouragement, advice, or behavioral practice to change the way we interact with others. But as you will vividly see in this session, that is often not the case, and things that may seem simple or obvious can seem almost impossibly difficult to learn. Why does this happen? Why is it so difficult for people to learn new and seemingly simple verbal skills? Well, to find the answer, we have to go back to the teachings of the Buddha and Epictetus, who taught us that our negative feelings do NOT result from what's happening, but from our thoughts. What does this mean? Well, Lee is an incredibly intelligent and compassionate young psychiatrist, and he's clearly highly motivated, and yet he seems very slow in learning how to say “no.” Can his thoughts illuminate his apparent resistance to learning a new approach? During the session, Dr. Levitt reminded us of the fact that whenever you are involved in a conflict with someone, or any interaction for that matter, there are always two dialogues going on: the Inner and Outer Dialogues, and if you ignore either one of them, you may have difficulties triggering change. The Outer Dialogue involves what you say to the other person, and what they say next, and how you respond. For example, Patient says: “Doctor, I want to get discharged from the hospital.” Lee says: “No, I can't do that because you'd be in danger and without a place to live. You'd be living on the streets, and it wouldn't be safe for you.” Patient (who is in a state of psychosis) responds: “No doctor, I'll be okay, because I'm living with Michael Jackson.” Then Lee tries to explain his thinking again, and then the patient asks to be discharged from the hospital again. And this cycle repeats itself many times, over and over, for as much as an hour. And they both end up frustrated and a bit miffed. Why is it so hard for Lee to say no in a kindly way and then move on to some other activity? That's where the Inner Dialogue can be so important. It appears that Lee has two types of distortions that interfere with his ability / willingness to say “no.” Self-Directed Should Statements. Lee appears to believe that he “should” be able to explain his thinking to any patient. He wants to convey respect, responsiveness, and care when denying a request. This is, of course, an expression of his high standards, his compassion, and his desire to communicate clearly to his patients. But, as is so often the case, Lee takes this goal a little to far, think he should “always” be able to do this, regardless of how psychotic or confused or demanding a patient might be. Essentially, the healthy pursuit of excellence as a psychiatrist has gone a little too far and has arguably morphed into a self-defeating kind of medical perfectionism. Self-Directed Shoulds typically trigger feelings of guilt, shame, anxiety, and inadequacy. They are often accompanied by several other distortions, including All-or-Nothing Thinking, Mind-Reading, and Self-Blame, to name just a few. Other-Directed Should Statements. Lee appears to think that his patients “should” understand and acknowledge his thinking if he's being reasonable and realistic. He may also believe that if he's doing his best, then his patients “should” argue fairly and acknowledge when they understand what he tells them and “shouldn't” be manipulative, unreasonable or argumentative. Other-Directed Shoulds often trigger feelings of frustration and anger, and are often associated with All-or-Nothing Thinking, Mind-Reading, Emotional Reasoning, and Other-Blame, to name just a few. Another teaching point is that we nearly always create our own interpersonal reality, but we don't realize that because we feel like victims and see the problem as coming from outside of ourselves. Lee's urge to continue to try to “win” the arguments with patients actually forces them to keep arguing their case and trying over and over again to get their way. That's just human nature. We've all seen that people can be pretty obstinate and determined to get their way, no matter what. That's why a focus on what you can do to change will often lead to a change in other people; in contrast, repeated efforts to persuade them to change is almost never effective. By way of analogy, my wife and I have recently had a bit of a problem with our cat, SweetiePie. She was a rescue cat, and we love her to death, and do everything we can to make her happy. She loves us intensely and shows her gratitude with loud purring almost all day long when she's not asleep or out in the back yard exploring. BUT, she has been pestering us for cat candy, and has gained too much weight. Here's what happens. She jumps up on my desk, and puts her paw on my keyboard, and stands if front of the computer terminal so I can't see. So, I give her two or three pieces of cat candy on her perch next to me. She jumps up and greedily devours it. Next, she jumps back on the desk and puts her paw on the keyboard. I “explain” to her that she's eating too much candy, and try to put her back on her perch, so she swats me with her claws and draws blood if I'm not quick to pull my hand away. So, I give her a few more pieces of candy, which she devours and then goes to sleep. Similar routine with my wife. She follows her, crying like she's on the verge of death, and swatting at her ankles until she gets cat candy and / or a 30 minute lap snuggle. So, in short, we have been “forcing” her, inadvertently,  out of love, to manipulate us for cat candy. In other words, we “reward” her manipulations by giving her cat candy and love. As a result, our pour girl is gaining too much weight. Of course, the solution is simple. Melanie has agreed to give her only four pieces of cat candy per day, and I am limiting her to two pieces, just so she'll know she's still loved. And when she tries to swat me with her claws, I just explain in a kindly way that I don't like that and put her on the floor. She caught on right away and seems to have accepted the new routine. Of course, we continue to give her abundant helpings of love every day, many times a day, as the love has zero calories! So, what's the bottom line? If you're trying to learn the Five Secrets of Effective Communication, and you want to change the way you communicate with others, remember to attend to your Inner Dialogue, as well as what you are actually saying to the other person during the conflict, especially if you're getting anxious, defensive, angry, frustrated or upset. If you write down your negative thoughts, I think you'll find many similar distortions to the ones described above, and this can give you another handle on change the way you think, feel, and connect with the people you care about, as well as the ones you don't! Incidentally, the belief that we are separate from others and from our environment is the essence of evil, according to some Buddhists, and perhaps nearly all of the world's religions have had similar beliefs, though couched in different language. But what this means to me is that when we struggle with friends of loved ones, and we are locked into frustrating conflicts, we typically feel like we are “separate” from the other person who is “doing something” to us. And this perception can not only trigger anger and frustration, but sometimes even violence. As humans, we seem to have great difficulty “seeing” our own role in the conflict. And sometimes, we don't even WANT to, because the so-called “Great Death” of the self can be very painful. This is especially true when we see ourselves as morally superior to the other person who is “bad” or “to blame.” We are indebted to Lee for giving us this superb example of a problem that nearly all human beings struggle with, and also sharing his vulnerability and humanness with all of us in such an open and generous way! And we salute and thank Lee for courageously showing us the way with an intensely personal and real example. Contact info Dr. Rhonda Barovsky practices in Walnut Creek and Berkeley, California. She can be reached at rhonda@feelinggreattherapycenter.com. She is a Level 5 Certified TEAM-CBT therapist and trainer and specializes in the treatment of trauma, anxiety, depression, and relationship problems. You can reach Dr. Burns at david@feelinggood.com. You can reach Jill Levitt, Ph.D. at jilllevitt@feelinggoodinstitute.com. She is the Director of Clinical Training at the Feeling Good Institute in Mountain View, California (www.feelinggoodinstitute.com) You can reach Lee at bananaquitting@gmail.com Group Feedback The following are a few of the comments in the feedback at the end of the Tuesday class. These are comments from the mental health professionals who observed the session with Lee. Please describe what you specifically disliked about the training? What could have been improved? Were there some things you disagreed with or did not understand? LOVED it! NOTHING Can't think of anything I only wish that we could have more time for this work with Lee. I kept feeling like I wanted to jump in and try some of these skills myself.   Please describe what you specifically liked about the training? What was the most helpful? Were there some things you learned? I liked the externalization of resistance and would've like to see more with that or maybe even a “rules & roles” regarding patient/doctor relationships. I really liked Lee's work. I also struggle with saying no, and I liked all of the role reversals and honest feedback from everyone involved. I found Jill's insight at the end of the session regarding the conceptualization of the problem, particularly the internal versus external solution (during the “no” practice), to be quite valuable. It was clear that Lee was facing conflicting desires - the need to act in the best interests of his clients while also seeking acceptance and approval. Taking the time to delve deeper into those internal factors may have further strengthened the effectiveness of the external solution (the “no” practice). Was helpful to see the miracle cure/goal clarified, as well as the 'acid test'. Good to see the model in action! I just enjoyed Lee's honesty , caring and professionalism. He brought up an issue that has been close to my heart as I worked with schizophrenic patients in clinic and day hospitalization settings and have experienced EXACTELY what Lee described. You feel between the devil and the deep blue sea when the medical staff conveniently toss responsibility to the less professional staff and when those in the trenches need to be there for the patients by saying NO. I LOVED David's comment about being disrespectful to patients with schizophrenia by going on and on with lofty brainy arguments while the loving thing to do is to be empathic stroking and firm. From my experience when I am real with my patients, they feel the best. Thank you, Lee, David and Jill. This was beautiful , heartwarming, and I am so touched to belong in this group. David and Jill's exquisite empathy, the Positive Reframe, and the NO practice. EVERYTHING!!! This was truly incredible! David and Jill are an unbeatable tag "TEAM!" Jill's warmth and empathy and teasing out the variables of Lee's story that were not always apparently obvious. Lee's vulnerability and seeing his depth and caring as a Psychiatrist was heartening and impressive. It helped me understand the flow of TEAM CBT and how things fit together better by seeing a live session from the beginning. I LOVED that Dr. Burns and Jill had to go down several different avenues to see what would work best. This closely reflects my own experience of therapy with my patients. Seeing them struggle a little made me feel even more sure that TEAM is the only approach that makes sense and cures people. This was a really wonderful session. I appreciate Lee volunteering, sharing with us his work challenges, and allowing us to see his kind and caring personality. I loved the masterful work of Jill and David. It seems to me that practicing responding to his patients with the use of the 5 secrets was imperative and I was amazed to see how that helped dropping down the feelings on the DML before we got to work on the Negative Thoughts. Once again, TEAM works like a charm! That this was a powerful real life issue that Lee shared. I enjoyed the empathy and how that led to sorting out conceptualization and miracle cure. David and Jill's combined efforts to go in many directions to help Lee see where he is stuck. I struggle in exactly the way Lee does in these sorts of situations, and it was so helpful and inspiring to me to see him do this work. Thank you, Lee! I was deeply moved by your deep caring for your patients and values around wanting your patients to have agency and understanding when there's so little in their world that they can control. I wish every psychiatrist had more Lee in him/her/them! I appreciate that Lee opened up himself in the group and I could observe the personal work of David and Jill, the amazing masters of TEAM-CBT. I admire Lee's compassion and warm heart toward his patients and I owed a lot to Lee who has very high standards to make things clear, just as he has done in his teaching in our Newbie group. And I think his sadness and anger might be an expression of his passion toward justice and dignity of his hospitalized patients. Appreciated Lee sharing with the group and doing personal work on a challenging problem. Liked when Jill brought up the internal versus external solution and then the session switched gears to work on the negative thoughts that made it so difficult for Lee to say no. Really enjoy the personal work, and getting to see the TEAM process unfold in skillful hands. I appreciate that you gave Lee time to explain his points, and that he was able to be truthful and disagree at times, and then you asked why and he explained further. This led to a more nuanced exploration and conceptualization of his issues and goals. I liked the focusing of a major part of the problem of "saying no" to a relationship / Five Secrets issue...resulting from internal and external shoulds. I appreciated the comparison with parent/child discipline, and not getting sucked into arguments. I also appreciate that you were able to pinpoint the problems around trying to get desperate, even schizophrenic patients, to understand one's point of view. It was great seeing the modeling of how to respond to some of these difficult patient situations. And how to clearly define the agenda when a patient is unclear about their goals. Also, so admiring of Lee. I liked how Jill and David navigated figuring out what Lee wanted to work on (when they came up with the three options). Issues that have "internal" and "external" components to them are difficult for me, and I often get confused. Seeing Jill and David work that out helps me wrap my head around how to go about it, thanks. Please describe what you learned in today's group. I appreciate Lee's vulnerability and I have so much respect for how he cares for his patients. I appreciated seeing the multiple role-playing attempts and was bummed when we ran out of time. I have so much admiration for Lee and feel for how much he's struggling. Personal work, externalization of voices, magic dial, Daily Mood Log (DML), 5 secrets, etc. How Five Secrets and No practice fit within the DML work That they could have started on the internal work of negative thoughts or the external work of "NO practice" TEAM at it's best! I observed NO practice and would like to learn more specifically about it ... Seeing the TEAM model unfold step by step in real time is always an incredibly valuable learning experience. Hearing Jill entertain potential directions to go in (i.e. crushing negative thoughts vs. No practice.) Learning challenging scenarios in context of "NO" practice was really awesome! Just magnificent overall! THANK YOU!!! Always feel so privileged to be part of this uniquely wonderful community of like-minded professionals! We are so lucky! I don't have to be smooth and have all the right answers immediately. This process is highly collaborative. How to employ the team model especially conceptualization and role play with NO practice and Five Secrets practice. How dealing with severely mentally ill pts can be so difficult. There's a sixth secret in effective communication: the willingness to use one's power in a kindly way to give the shot and get it over with. It's so helpful to me to add this secret to my armamentarium! Positive reframing and No practice, along with Externalization of Voices and Externalization of Resistance. I learned something about Lee, and about the difficulties of psychiatric hospital work for doctors! Also, seeing the process unfold skillfully, teasing out the problem to work on, Externalization of Resistance, Positive Reframing, Externalization of Voices, No/5 Secrets Practice, etc. How to be clear on agenda setting when patients are unclear on their goals. I was reminded about how to ask about a client's goal in order to guide agenda-setting. It was nice seeing the five secrets role-play / no practice. I've been inspired to start practicing daily like David said he did. Can never get enough of that!

Emotional reasoning is a powerful tool that business leaders can leverage to make fully informed decisions. By integrating emotions with facts and data, leaders can unlock new possibilities and create a more inclusive and meaningful approach to decision-making. Investing in emotional reasoning skills can lead to improved team dynamics, enhanced innovation, and ultimately, greater success in the ever-evolving business landscape.In episode four of the EI Sunday Supplement by HR Gazette, we explore why emotional reasoning is foundational to leadership success and the ways it can positively influence performance, engagement, and overall success.Learn more by listening to this episode with Debbie Muno and Bill Banham.

Live Therapy with Veena: Part 2 of 3 Last week you heard the first half of the session with Veena, a young woman who was devastated by a medical problem that may make it difficult or impossible to conceive the child she is dreaming of. Today, you will hear the inspiring and dramatic conclusion of her story, along with the feedback comments from the individuals in David and Jill's Tuesday training group who witnessed the live work. A = Assessment of Resistance Jill asked if she felt ready to roll up her sleeves and get to work on some aspect of what she'd been telling us, and she was. Jill then asked what she was hoping to get from tonight's session. If we could offer a “Miracle Cure,” what would that look like? She said, “I'd feel a lot less guilty and responsible, so I would no longer feel like the problem was my fault. I'd know that I did my best and that I can be okay even if people don't like me or judge me. Jill asked the Magic Button question, and she said that she love to see her guilt go all the way to zero, but not her many other negative feelings, like depression, anxiety, inadequacy, self-consciousness, hopelessness, upset, insecurity and self-doubt. With Positive Reframing in mind, we listed many of the positives in these negative feelings, including: Sadness. This feeling shows that I care for people and want to give them the best. It shows that I also care for my own dreams of having a baby. And it shows how much I love my mother. Anxiety, worry. This is a warning signal, reminding me to be alert and do my best, and do what the doctors require. Guilt. Shows that I'm humble and willing to be accountable and examine what I've done and look at my own mistakes. Self-Consciousness. Protects me by making me cautious so I don't just blurt out everything. Defectiveness. I see my flaws, and allows me to get closer to others, and to feel happy for the success of others. Hopelessness. When I told my husband I felt hopeless, he became SO supportive. Also, I gave myself some space so I could create an action plan. You can see the goals Veena set for each emotion on her Daily Mood Log if you click HERE. Veena with her in-laws M = Methods During the methods phase of the session, we used a variety of techniques, especially Externalization of Voices with the Acceptance Paradox, Self-Defense, and the CAT (Counterattack Technique.) We did quite a few role-reversals, which is typical, before Veena got to wins that were “huge.” There were lots of tears and laughter, and eventually Veena blew all of her negative thoughts out of the water. It was inspiring to observe this process, and to be a part of it. You can see her final Daily Mood Log if you click HERE. I think it is fair to say the Veena experienced a kind of enlightenment which was profound. Final T = Testing You can see Veena's end-of-session Brief Mood Survey and Evaluation of Therapy Session if you click HERE. You can also see her final Daily Mood LOG if you click here. Our work with Veena was some of the most inspiring work that I can recall. It was tremendously mood-uplifting, and took on a spiritual quality. You will have to listen to the session to get a feel for how majestic it was. But in my opinion, Veena did not just recover, but she achieved enlightenment, which including discovering how to love herself and her extended family as well! The following is an email I sent Veena the next morning: Hi Veena, Thanks. You were totally awesome last night, thanks so much for your contribution. I am sure the podcast will reach huge numbers of people and make a big impact on peoples' lives. I cannot remember a more exciting and loving session. We will see what the groups thinks in the feedback. I did not copy or read the chats during the session, but perhaps you or Jill did. . . We will invite you to join us on a podcast recording to get some follow-up information from you, as folks will be very interested, for the two-part podcast. Yes, I think we really were walking on holy ground last night! Thanks so much for making that happen! I am trying to recall (and will do more of this) the teaching points from last night, and a few seem important to me. They seem awfully basic and simple, but still of towering importance and have to be “seen” to be understood at a deep level. 1. In TEAM, even when a problem is “real,” it is still our thoughts that create our emotions. Our thoughts really DO create all of our feelings. 2. Those thoughts can be subtly distorted in all kinds of ways and seem determined to trick us into believing things that are not true. And even super smart people, like Veena, can be fooled. 3. We are not aiming for improvement, although that is obviously desirable, but a dramatic transformation of the human spirit and outlook. 4. Warmth, tenderness, and compassion—for others and for yourself--are important and powerful. 5. There is a strong mind-body connection, and healing your soul can often help to heal your body. 6. Good therapy can sometimes be much more than just “therapy.” Something almost magical can sometimes happen, and the change can sometimes happen rapidly. However, many people do not like hearing this, and some are even angered by this idea! This is especially true of people who have suffered and struggled for many years without success in changing the way they think and feel. 7. Recovery sometimes requires courage and trust. Just more babbling from the old guy! Apologies if it sounds ridiculous or “off.” If other teaching points come to mind, please let us know so I can add them to the list! I am betting that Jill and Veena can maybe add to this list! (and edit it as well) Warmly, david Below, you will find some excepts from the feedback that the participants provided after the session. Please describe what you specifically disliked about the training? What could have been improved? Were there some things you disagreed with or did not understand?  Nothing. It was beautiful. I wouldn't want to change anything about tonight's experience. It was so moving! Please describe what you specifically liked about the training? What was the most helpful? Were there some things you learned? I loved Veena's personal work and besides my admiration and pride of her and the gratefulness to David and Jill for sharing this wonderful work . . . I enjoy the empathy and validation as well as the trust in the process that was so beautifully demonstrated. Beautiful job by all concerned. Very impressed with Veena and how clearly she "got it" when she used the CAT (Counterattack Technique). I was very moved by Veena's story and her courage in sharing it with us. I felt as if we were witnessing a kind of history because, in the past, wives who couldn't bear children were often devalued and even rejected. Veena pushed back against that kind of thinking and instead chose to love herself. By working toward dispelling the distorted thoughts, she affirmed not only herself, but women with similar experiences now and throughout history. When she affirmed that her mother, mother-in-law, and husband would be empathetic and wouldn't actually reject her, I felt elated, thinking that the world is making progress and becoming a more compassionate place. I was also touched by the following ideas: feeling genuine sadness without distortions; locating the source of pain in distorted self-critical thoughts; painful experiences bringing loved ones closer together. The safe space that was created, the sensitivity with which the topic was handled and the respect accorded to the client. It's incredible how the trainers (Dr. Burns & Jill), set aside their ailments, and were with Veena through her journey of anticipatory loss, and her fears and apprehensions, along with her inner battle of dealing with deeply entrenched social conditionings, that are hard to face and ward off. I loved the session. Enjoyed watching the whole team model unfold. I'm so grateful to Veena for sharing this previous part of her life with all of us. It was a huge honor. I am constantly surprised by Dr Burns' and Jill's mastery of TEAM and their deep empathy skills. This was moving and exhilarating…all at once. Observing two great therapists in action. I liked how Jill and David would make notes to the class about what step they were going on to next. Veena was so amazing and brave to share her experience. As a 23 year old woman with fears of fertility issues myself due to genetics, I found the experience extremely profound and impactful on a personal level. It was awesome to go from the NEWBIE group to this session whereby a lot of the skills we were learning individually were incorporated sequentially into the session. Thank you to everyone!! I liked seeing david and jill go through the entire team model. I liked the pointing out of the Emotional Reasoning distortion and even using the straight forward technique. Excellent! I really liked seeing an entire session completed in one sitting. A very beautiful night. I really felt for Veena and what she is going through, and it was great to see her recovery. David and Jill were empathic and so knowledgeable. The humor in dark moments. the tears from time to time It was exciting to see how as Veena shed the self-blame, simultaneously she was able to see the people in her life as the caring, kind people she knows them to be--and no longer to feel afraid that they would reject her. Accepting herself allowed her to see others as accepting, and not critical. What training could be better than watching David and Jill tag TEAM thru the model! Thanks to Veena's willingness to be vulnerable and her bravery doing this personal work and inviting us all into her world and her pain. It felt like we were all a web of love and support surrounding her and a privilege to get to know her. It was extraordinarily rich and illuminating. I loved everything: the incredible empathy Jill and David demonstrated and how things were turned around for Veena. I was amazed that this was accomplished in such a short period of time; I always am when it comes to live work! I also loved knowing Veena more and seeing how wonderful of a person she is; I have so much admiration for her!!! Incredible empathy and 5 secrets from both Jill & David! So much warmth and love from the group. Seamless incorporation of the steps & methods. Please describe what you learned in today's group15 responses DML at it's best!!!! TEAM-CBT, done by skillful therapists, with open and vulnerable client, can be such a gift! I learned again how to go through the entire team-CBT process of crushing negative thoughts and helping clients to feel better. There were so many moments of subtle shifts by Jill. Each one of them were penny drop moments for me. . . Thank you both. That people have a lot of beautiful qualities. I felt I learnt anew the power of empathy and the importance of asking our clients specifically what caused the change. Thank you so much Veena. I got some therapy by proxy tonight. I felt myself take a kind of journey with you from fearful for you, and judgmental (of your aunties!) to warm and open and loving - by witnessing your transformation. A better understanding and appreciation of the entire team model and using that for a real life situation. More of the artfulness and symphony of the steps being followed with empathy being woven again and again throughout and bringing out the birth of what is really true about the self, mother, mother-in-law, and husband rather than the assumptions and self-deprecation. On how to get from T to M with E and A in the middle! I loved David's insight that this is what it means to be in a loving relationship--to hurt at times. So wonderful to get to watch Jill move through TEAM in her warm, empathic, brilliantly thoughtful way, with David interweaving his work of genius!!! So grateful to be part of this incredible community! Thanks so much! The importance of Thought Empathy and flexibility with using different techniques, as I tend to be quite rigid. For example, I love how David went right into EOV which I believe would work wonderfully with someone who knows TEAM well. It definitely did work for Veena. So very helpful to see TEAM in action in its entirety by the masters of TEAM CBT! Thank you for listening today! Veena, Rhonda, Jill, and David

Emotional reasoning is a condition of being so strongly influenced by your emotions that you assume they indicate objective truth. In this week's episode we break down emotional reasoning, why “I feel it so it must be true " is very harmful, the roles emotional reasoning plays in panic disorders, overthinking and procrastination, why it's important to learn your triggers and do the inner child work, how to overcome emotional reasoning. LET'S STAY CONNECTED ➡️ Instagram: https://instagram.com/therapy_thursday_pod?igshid=r88tgg4qyngo Twitter: https://twitter.com/qualityqueenoj/status/1343417947067453440?s=21 If you have a question you'd like to have answered in a future episode, please share it @Ojevweidi@gmail.com

In today's video, I'm going to talk about the cognitive distortion of “emotional reasoning,” a common pitfall of retroactive jealousy sufferers. Read or watch below to learn more about emotional reasoning. Zachary Stockill: Hello and welcome back to my ongoing series on retroactive jealousy and cognitive distortions.  In today's video, we're going to talk about one […] The post What is Emotional Reasoning? (RJ & Cognitive Distortions) [VIDEO] appeared first on Overcoming Retroactive Jealousy.

Emotional Reasoning. This type of cognitive distortion or faulty thinking may be the most difficult to discern in some ways because it is based on feelings and emotions. In part 7 of our Magnificent Mondays series on cognitive distortions, we will take a deep dive into EMOTIONAL REASONING. Admittedly I have been a person who has been incredibly emotionally driven. My emotions and feelings were KING of the show. Instead of using FACTS to make conclusions on various situations, I have based my reactions and decisions (even really important ones) on my FEELINGS instead. Let me tell you this way to do life is extremely caustic, rancid, and harmful to yourself and anybody else involved. It can be the root of anxiety and depression and lead to self destructive behavior such as eating disorders and other addictions that tend to suppress negative feelings (for the moment). If you are emotionally driven you might make decisions based on those feelings that you will really regret later. Today we will answer these questions: What is emotional reasoning? What's the danger in this line of thinking? What can you do about it from a Biblical worldview? Stay tuned for the 4 tips included in Segment 3 of this episode so that

Emotions are an integral part of human experience, but when they dictate our decisions and actions, they can negatively impact our leadership abilities. Emotional reasoning is the act of making decisions based on emotions rather than logic, facts, or rationality. When leaders let their emotions control their decisions, they are more likely to make poor choices that can negatively impact their team and organization. Here are some ways how emotional reasoning can sabotage your leadership and how to overcome it: Poor decision-making: When leaders make decisions based on emotions rather than facts or rationality, they are more likely to make poor choices. Emotional reasoning can lead to rash decisions that are not well thought out and can negatively impact the organization. Lack of credibility: Emotional reasoning can undermine a leader's credibility. When leaders make decisions based on emotions, they can appear irrational and unpredictable. This can lead to a loss of trust from their team and can ultimately harm the organization. Decreased productivity: Emotional reasoning can decrease productivity. When leaders are controlled by their emotions, they can become distracted and lose focus on their goals. This can lead to a decrease in productivity and can ultimately harm the organization. To overcome emotional reasoning and become a better leader, consider the following steps: Be aware of your emotions: The first step to overcoming emotional reasoning is to be aware of your emotions. Take a moment to reflect on how you feel and how your emotions might be influencing your decisions. Practice self-regulation: Once you are aware of your emotions, practice self-regulation. This means controlling your emotions rather than letting them control you. Take a deep breath, count to 10, or step away from the situation to give yourself time to think. Seek input from others: Seek input from others to get a different perspective. Surround yourself with people who can provide honest feedback and challenge your thinking. This can help you make better decisions that are not clouded by emotions. Use facts and data: Use facts and data to inform your decisions. Take the time to gather information and analyze it before making a decision. This can help you make a more informed decision that is not based on emotions alone. In conclusion, emotional reasoning can sabotage your leadership and negatively impact your organization. By being aware of your emotions, practicing self-regulation, seeking input from others, and using facts and data to inform your decisions, you can overcome emotional reasoning and become a better leader. Remember, it is important to be in control of your emotions rather than letting them control you. Please go to www.abqpodcast.com where you can get show notes, resources, and links to everything we talked about today to help you navigate your journey as an entrepreneur and business owner. Be sure to follow me on Instagram at @abqjasonrigby  or Twitter at @abqjasonrigby also don't forget to sign up for our email list where I drop exclusive business strategies & marketing secrets to help you and your business grow!  

Counselor Rachel Schulte joins Noisy Narratives in a conversation about the dangers of black and white thinking and making our decisions with our emotions.

This week is a BIG one for Ends with Z as we celebrate our 50th episode! Cecile, Juan, and Shawn reminisce on the beginnings of the podcast and recall some of their favorite show topics and episodes. This is also the time of year to celebrate the holidays with family and friends. But for some, it can be a time of emotional distress brought on by family triggers, holiday traditions, loss, and loneliness. We bring back our favorite, psychotherapist, John Tsilimparis, to help us navigate the 62-day, holiday season journey and give us tools that we all can use to make the holidays more joyous and less stressful this year.

In today's Distortion of the Day!, I talk about Emotional Reasoning. Distortions of the Day! are brief episodes running under 10 minutes where I introduce psychological concepts in a fun, practical, useful way. Thanks for tuning in!

Months back I promised that I would circle back and cover common cognitive distortions from time to time on The Anxious Morning. Today we're going to look at one of my favorite cognitive distortions. Emotional reasoning.Emotional reasoning is what we call it when you use your emotional state to judge or evaluate yourself or the world around you. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theanxiousmorning.substack.com

Have you ever noticed that we often express our opinions with "I feel that..." instead of "I think that..."? This shift in how we reason culturally has not come without its consequences. Today, many people make decisions by means of their feelings and emotions and our Postmodern culture encourages it with its slogans: "do what feels right" and "you've got to trust your gut!" Additionally, our current cultural climate and the influence of radical ideologies tend to pit us against each other - dividing society into warring tribes. Our media and news outlets constantly frame things in terms of "us versus them" which tend to exacerbate tensions between differing groups. How can we navigate such volatile times? Does the Bible give us wisdom for this? In this episode, we continue to consider some insightful observations from the book by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, "The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure". Their book has been very helpful in the task of cultural analysis to understand how we got to this present moment. In response to these analyses, we will seek Biblical wisdom to guide our response and how we process these things from a Christian worldview. ----------------- Please visit theotivity.com for more content. Sign up for our monthly email Newsletter to stay updated on all the latest content. Please consider sharing this episode and leaving a 5-star review on your podcast app to help us grow. Follow us at @theotivity on social media (Facebook, Instagram, Gettr, YouTube, Rumble). #Fragility #Coddled #Culture #Christianity #Theology

In Episode 2, PK and Rob discuss thought distortions they struggle with such as "All or Nothing", "Disqualifying the Positive", "Emotional Reasoning" and others. Tune in and see if any of these resonate with you. . . .  #loudroosterpodcast #pissedoffandpositive #thingsaredifferentnow #nonscalevictory #weightloss #transformation #weightlossjourney #healthylifestyle #pissedoffandpositive #pelatonbike #habanahaba #weightlosssupport #noomweightloss #noomnation #caloriesincaloriesout #selflove #selfcare #loudroosterpodcast #cockadoodledoit #mealprep #fluffybutfit #walkingforhealth    Music from Uppbeat (free for Creators!):  https://uppbeat.io/t/all-good-folks/t... License code: IUH8WUQZZT5QQHG3

Episode Introduction:  It's time to challenge your stinking thinking. Tune in to find out how!   Episode Summary:  In today's episode of the Rise Station Podcast, Prunella Harris walks us through 10 different stinking thinking traps and how we can acknowledge as well as challenge them to create a more positive life for ourselves.   Rise Tribe Takeaways:  Some common themes of stinking thinking: Compare & Despair. Being Overly Judgmental. Black & White Thinking. Wearing Sunglasses or Rose Colored Glasses. Catastrophizing. Mind Reading. Making Predictions. Emotional Reasoning. Shoulds & Musts. Over Generalizations. How to challenge your stinking thinking habits: Focus on celebrating your uniqueness. Learn to agree to disagree to handle judgments. Remember that people and situations can have both good and negative sides in co-existence. Have the self-awareness to know when you're filtering a person's behavior based on your own bias. Instead of thinking about the worst-case scenario, look at the past evidence. Consider looking at the situation in a more balanced manner. Thinking about the likelihood of a predicted situation actually happening. Remember that your emotions are your feelings, not facts. Set realistic expectations and avoid putting unnecessary pressure on yourself. Work on improving the current situation instead of dwelling on the past.   Help us grow and reach out to more amazing individuals such as yourself by leaving a positive rating + review on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/rise-station/id1565362467   Connect With Us:    Email: media@restorativefamilyservices.com Website: https://restorativefamilyservices.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/restorativefamily/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RestorativeFS

Podcast 296: Forced Empathy: A Master Class--Part 2 of 2 Last week you heard part ! of our work witt Zeina, a young professional woman struggling with a conflict with her mom. Zeina feels like her mother is too critical of her, and she finds the criticisms devastating. In today's podcast, you will hear my co therapist, Dr. Jill Levitt, and I, doing Forced Empathy with Zeina, and you will hear the exciting conclusion of the session. I am including the entiere show notes from last week, in case you have not yet reviewed them. Show notes from last week commence here. Today Dr. Jill Levitt and I do live work with Zeina Halim who has been experiencing some intense negative feelings because of her mother's criticisms of her. Zeina is a member of my weekly training group at Stanford and has appeared on the podcast on several previous occasions (Please provide numbers plus link to podcast page on website.) Zeina is one of our small group leaders in our Tuesday training group.  She works with teens and adults in-person in her office in Menlo Park and also provides tele-health sessions for clients living anywhere in California. Dr. Jill Levitt is the co-leader of my Tuesday training group at Stanford and will be my co-therapist today. We hope for some more of the “magic” that frequently appears when we do therapy together. Today's podcast will illustrate a number of teaching points, including these: Forced Empathy: We illustrate exactly how to use this powerful and sophisticated technique. When I first created this technique many years ago, I thought there would be little interest in it, so I rarely taught it in my workshops or training groups. In the past several years, an intense interest in this technique has emerged, so you will get to see exactly how it works. Five Secrets Resistance: There has been great interest in the Five Secrets of Effective Communication that are featured in my book, Feeling Good Together. When used skillfully, they can have a phenomenal effect on any troubled relationship. I am even aware of a case of a woman who was kidnapped at gunpoint by a violent serial rapist who planned to kill her. Out of desperation, she used the Five Secrets I had presented at a workshop he had just attended, and he let her go and turned himself in to the police. The Five Secrets literally saved her life. And yet, many of us stubbornly refuse to use the Five Secrets with family, friends and loved ones. Why do we fight against the very tools that would rapidly bring us peace, love and joy? And what can we do about our own internal “resistance”? The “inner” and “outer” solutions: Whenever you are involved in a conflict with someone, there are two battles raging at the same time. One is the “inner battle” with your own negative thoughts, telling you that you're no good, or that the other person is to blame, and the voice that powerfully urges you to do battle. We approach the “inner battle” with the familiar Daily Mood Log, that helps you pinpoint the distorted messages you are giving yourself. You will see that those messages—the way you talk to yourself when you're upset—are loaded with distortions; such as All-or-Nothing Thinking, Overgeneralizations, Mental Filtering, Discounting the Positive, Mind-Reading, Labeling, Should Statements and Hidden Should Statements, Emotional Reasoning, Other-Blame, and more.In today's session, we do battle with Zeina's distorted thoughts with the Externalization of Voices, arguably one of the most powerful psychotherapy tools ever created. The EAR Checklist / Relationship Journal. The “outer battle” involves the words you use when you respond to the other person's criticisms of you. Here we use the Relationship Journal, another super powerful tools that allows you to analyze your own statements with the EAR Checklist and see the shocking reality that you are creating the very conflict that you are complaining about so vigorously. This involves one of the “Great Death” of the self, which can be profoundly painful, but it also leads to liberation from your self-created misery and the chance for renewed love and connection with the person you feel so alienated from. Two-hour sessions. You can do far more in a single, two-hour session than in many 50 minute sessions scheduled at weekly intervals. I have often said that this is how I always do therapy, and if you have some therapy skills, this model is vastly more effective and cost-effective as well. It puts you under pressure to accomplish something today, right now, and not in the vague or distant future. Uncovering Techniques. You will see how you can use the Man from Mars Technique to uncover more of your patient's negative thoughts and core beliefs. This is just another way of doing the classical “Individual Downward Arrow Technique” that I developed way back in the 1970s. The Acceptance Paradoxes. There is a great deal of talk these days about Acceptance is being an important key in many schools of psychotherapy. But what is acceptance, and how do we teach it to our patients and colleagues? Today's session with Zeina, who has a great interest in Buddhist philosophy and practices, illustrates one of more than 20 paths to acceptance, and this one in particular will teach you the steps in accepting others, especially when you are desperately trying to change them and you are insisting that they “shouldn't” be the way they are! Self-acceptance is always about grasping a gigantic paradox—and that's why I've always called it the Acceptance Paradox, which states: Accepting yourself as you are, warts and all, is actually the greatest change a human being can make. Can you see why this is a paradox? It's because the very moment you accept yourself, everything about you and your world will appear to change. Now here's another acceptance paradox we will explore today. The very moment when you accept another person exactly as she or he is, that person will suddenly change. Of course, that is the exact opposite of what we usually do when we desperately keep trying to “change” them, a strategy that actually forces them to be the very monster you are trying so hard to destroy. By the way, do you know what the plural form of paradox is, when you combine Self- and Other-Acceptance? The plural form is called the Acceptance Paradise. T = Testing is crucial! You cannot do truly effective therapy without the T = Testing. You will find out EXACTLY how effective—or ineffective—you are in every session with every patient. When you listen to the podcasts, you can ask yourself questions like these: How effective are Jill and David being? Will they get good empathy and helpfulness ratings from Zeina? Will we see any reductions in Zeina's powerful negative feelings at the start of the session? Will she make a breakthrough in her relationship with her mother? At the end of the session, you will see the answers to these questions. And if you're a therapist, that kind of powerful and precise information will allow you to grow and learn as a therapist, especially if you approach the information with humility and respect for yourself and your patients. There is almost no limit to the evolution of your therapist skills if you use the T = Testing model I have developed. There is almost no chance for personal growth if you do not use these or similar assessment tools. However, the price of growth is steep. You have to be willing to see your own failures and errors at every session with every patient, and this will often be painful. But this is the pain that can lead to your own personal transformation along with the blossoming of your own superb therapy skills. Today, in Part 1 of the Zeina session, you will hear the T = Testing and E = Empathy parts of the session. Next week, in Part 2, you will hear the very brief A = Assessment of Resistance, which really only included the “Miracle Cure Question: ”What, really, are you, Zeina, hoping for in tonight's session?” You will also hear the amazing M = Methods portion, which will start with Forced Empathy, followed by Externalization of Voices and Five Secrets Practice, along with the final T = Testing and homework assignments for Zeina following the session. Rhonda, Jill, Zeina and I hope you enjoy the podcasts and learn a great deal from them. And we all want to thank you, Zeina for your courageous and brilliant work, sharing your inner self so openly and generously. I believe that sessions like the one our fans will witness today and next week have the potential to provide hope and healing to people around the world, not only today, but for decades to come. At least, that is my hope! I also want to thank you, Jill, for your extraordinary teaching and clinical skills, and for your brilliance and warmth. Thank you for tuning in! Rhonda, Zeina, and David Here is a follow-up note from Zeina Hello David, Jill, and the Tuesday group, Boy, do I have an update for you all! So, at first, I struggled, and I was very worried to have to potentially send an update to the group that may have been disappointing. On Saturday, I saw my mom, and I shared with her the insights that I had in our session. She was appreciative, but I didn't feel very connected to her. I had talked with her about this while she and I were on a walk, and I wondered if maybe walking while talking was taking away some of the intimacy or connection that might have happened if we had been looking at each other while talking. I also noticed that while I was externally behaving somewhat better if my mom criticized me, internally, I still hadn't progressed very far. I would still feel very distant from her; and I still wasn't doing the five secrets. Today, on Sunday, I saw my mom again. While she did not criticize me, we still got into a little bit of an argument. I was a bit angry, but as I let myself cool off, I noticed myself feeling incredibly sad inside--like a sadness that had been building and building over the past few weeks. I tried to talk with my mom about it, but she resisted at first. We had a project that we were working on together today and she thought it would be better if we talked on another day and got back to our project; I insisted, however, and asked that we please talk today. I did not realize it at the time, but I think I had some major hidden emotion stuff happening with my mom (more on this later, perhaps some hidden sadness that was masquerading as anger). I shared with her that I had felt incredibly sad and genuinely worried about our relationship. I recently moved in order to live closer to her and see her more often, but I had noticed that almost every time she came over to visit me at my new place, we would get into an argument at least once. I shared that these arguments had really been weighing on me and worrying me. I also told her that I noticed that we would get into arguments when we were at my place, but not as much when I visited her at her place, maybe because I am so particular about how I like things to be at my place. She, then, said in a very gentle and loving way, "I think ‘particular' about your space is the operative word here." I realized that she was totally right, and I was so pleasantly surprised by how gentle and loving she was when she said it. Feeling encouraged by how the conversation was going, I shared more and said that I had noticed that I had become more sensitive around our arguments lately and that I was feeling very disconnected from her, and I didn't know how to get reconnected with her. I also shared that I had been feeling lonely in my life in general lately and made a guess that maybe my loneliness was making me expect more from our relationship. Additionally, I also guessed that I might be feeling more drained emotionally because I am doing more hours of therapy per week than I have ever done in my life, and maybe I had yet to find the right balance of how to recreate and regenerate my energy in my off-hours. I shed many tears all throughout this whole conversation. I checked in with myself and noticed that I was feeling more connected to my mom, but there felt like there was still more, particularly about my loneliness. This next paragraph might seem like a major tangent, but hang in there!--I promise it is all connected :) Then, I switched gears a little bit to share with her a different conversation and insight I had had in the past week or so about my recent feelings of loneliness. I had been having a conversation with my very dear friend, James, about how I had been feeling lonely, but was not feeling as drawn to connecting with most of my girlfriends, but only really drawn to my guy friends. Initially, I thought it was a male-female difference, but then I noticed that I was feeling drawn to my new friend Leigh Harrington, who is female. I realized that maybe the difference had more to do with the fact that almost all my male friends and Leigh were quite funny and playful people, whereas most of my girlfriends were more serious people. As for myself, I tend to be a more serious person and am not as funny or playful as many people. I realized that I was relying on other people for my laughter, playfulness and fun, rather than learning how to create that myself. Having just done some flirting training with Matthew May earlier that week, I saw that humor, like flirting, can be a learned skill and might have more to do with a willingness to take risks than an innate quality that people either have or don't have. I was feeling excited that I could learn to be funnier and flirtier and create more laughter in my life, instead of relying on other funny people for this. I shared all of this with my mom. She then went on to make a further connection that really blew me away. She said, "I bet if you start to be funnier and create more laughter for yourself and others, you will also start to feel less lonely." It felt so true! The times I feel most connected to people are when I am laughing with them. THIS is the kind of relationship and connection with my mom that I had been missing lately--when I share deeply with her and, because she knows me so well, she is able to further my insight and understanding of myself and help me to grow. I feel so connected to her now. I realize now that I think part of my resistance to using the 5 secrets with my mom was maybe a hidden emotion component--I had these deep feelings and worries about our relationship; I was confused if moving closer to her had actually helped our relationship or if it was harming it, and I was genuinely missing these kinds of deep, connecting conversations with her, which we had not had in a while. My mom has been hanging out at my place all day today and now I notice myself being easily loving and patient with her and my being "particular" about my things and my space has vanished--at least temporarily! There are a lot of take-aways for me from this whole thing, but one of the biggest ones is that I think I was trying to do five secrets without really fully going into my "I feel" statements as much as I needed to--I feel statements are often the secret that I neglect the most as a person and as a therapist. So, to connect to what we are doing this week in class, I think I would make a guess that when I ignore the five secret that I need to do the most and struggle with, it can hamper my ability to do the rest of the five secrets effectively and genuinely. I could write a lot more about all of this, but I think I will stop here for now. I hope this wasn't too confusing as I know I touched on a lot of different things. Thank you all for your time and attention. I'm open to comments or questions. Warmly, Zeina Here is a reply to Zeina from one of the Stanford Tuesday group members Gosh! Zeina, this is beautiful and so straight from the heart. Takes immense courage to do a deep dive in exploring oneself. I have been marveling at how meticulously you‘ve sifted through and worked towards addressing the different dimensions of the relationship between you and your mum. You are also an amazing raconteur, you've brought out the subtle nuances so beautifully! Your mail took me on an emotional roller coaster ride. It was such a compelling read and had me as a captive co-traveler, holding my breath, and crossing my fingers! I loved your insights on the “I feel”. Reading that was a personal breakthrough for me, where my relationship with my mum is concerned. That's exactly what is missing in our relationship too … whoaaaaa! I just don't share my feelings with her! I love how you were able to do that though, because I can feel this huge wave of resistance engulfing me, despite my insight. I know I'm not yet ready to take the next step! Funny, how tough it can be to be vulnerable before one's own mom! More power to you Zeina for ‘daring greatly' and taking the next step after the Tuesday class. Also, for keeping us posted and for sharing with us in such a detailed manner, and in the process, helping us all learn and grow. Deep regards for your mum as well. She comes across as a tenacious mother of a tenacious daughter … if I may say so. Warmly, Nivedita. Here is a second follow-up from Zeina. Hello David, Jill and Tuesday group, I just wanted to send another update as my relationship with my mom has continued to evolve in quite beautiful and magical ways since I sent this last email.  It seems to me that maybe she has stopped criticizing me entirely--I'm not quite sure.  Maybe I need to pay more attention.  Perhaps if she does criticize me, she does it in a gentler way or maybe I am less sensitive to it.  All I know is that she has been wonderfully supportive of me in these past few weeks and we have not gotten into a single argument.  Our relationship suddenly seems easy in a way that I have never experienced before.  I am so profoundly grateful.  I know that we will probably relapse at some point and this may not last forever, but, now I know this is possible.  Now, I know my way back here.  I have always wanted a relationship like this with my mother, and I always thought it wasn't possible because of who she was as a person. Little did I know that to have the mother I always wanted, I needed to do the changing. I knew that the 5 secrets were powerful, but I had thought that their power was more confined to a single interaction or the moment when you use them.  I don't know that I have been especially good at practicing the 5 secrets with my mom lately, yet the effect seems to keep lasting and lasting. I am truly speechless at the profound transformation that has happened.  Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I would love any responses! Zeina Here is some of the feedback from the training group in the section, “What did you like the best about today's training session?” Jill's thoughtfulness in selecting the Forced Empathy technique over the Relationship Journal. Jill looked at what had worked in the past for Zeina and saw it as a potential strategy for her current concerns and the result was tremendously positive. I loved the training! I loved watching forced empathy and I began to empathize with a close relative simply by watching Zeina empathize with her mom. I was crying throughout. It is hard to describe how touched I was Zeina's honesty and her responses to forced empathy was amazing! Amazing personal work. Entire session was great learning experience for me. How Forced Empathy brought the shift in Zeina's way of thinking. I really enjoy witnessing the live sessions including this one with Zeina. Seeing how the totality of the model comes together in real time with the clinician's judgment and intuition guiding the specific process is really enlightening and seeing someone's beliefs shift in real time is very inspiring and moving. It was a really nice way to re-join the larger group and I'm glad to hear that went into David's thinking in scheduling it. I really like the Forced Empathy. Zeina had a lot of resistance at the beginning. However, She shed tears during doing the Forced Empathy. I also like the role reversal when doing the Externalization voices. I can always learn how to deal with the difficulties of life from David and Jill's wisdom. The whole thing was so great. I was really moved by the forced empathy. I always LOVE seeing forced empathy modeled to get better at this complex skill, and I am also, like many others, almost always blown away with how powerful it is. I also thought this was a great example of multiple paths (individual mood and relationship work) and multiple methods being all used in one two-hour session so skillful and masterful. I loved the open ended approach and the ongoing exploration until the goal was formed/explored/ discovered. For me, it was a demonstration of trust in the process. I especially liked David's "The Man From Mars" that seemed to me an amazing tool with sorting out the mess of relationship work. I also loved Forced Empathy especially here with the work on mother daughter's relationship. I am really intrigued to explore it for myself in regard to my relationship with my parents and my daughter. Seeing the whole encounter with Zeina and seeing how Jill and David thought through it together, it was all so organic and incredible to witness Very helpful to see the progression of the session. Zeina's session has been a gift not only to us, but also to our mothers. Forced empathy felt like a pivot point in treatment and I loved that Z was able to go deep and connect with her mother's feelings. I have plans to travel and visit my mother next month and have been feeling anxious about it. I was reminded of the unconditional love of a mother that is beautiful and spiritual. David and Jill did amazing and transformational work. This is so inspiring! I liked everything and how the methods and techniques were woven together very skillfully. Personal work is really the best and so gratifying to see. David made a comment at the end about how it would help with motivation to use the skills and work more on them after seeing them in action and I do agree with his comment even if I'm totally not paraphrasing correctly. I LOVE personal work because it bring these skills to life in a way that role plays don't. and of course, it's all the better that someone gets a personal benefit, that's all good too. David and Jill did an amazing job again! However, Zeina's honesty and vulnerability was the greatest gift during this session. I could relate to her struggle as well, so I was extra impressed about her determination to work on this issue. It was amazing personal work for me. I feel so grateful for this experience. This was another example of the "magic" of TEAM, especially when the therapists are the incredibly skilled Jill and David. What a great, vulnerable and poignant example of relationship issues with a parent. I was very impressed and moved by the power of the Forced Empathy technique. By Zeina's ability to feel into the point of view of her mother, and her insights and connections, especially around how the times of criticism can be seen as opportunities for greater acceptance and love. Moving and really beautiful personal work!!! I was moved to tears when Zeina cried her mother's tears during the Forced Empathy exercise and said "I need her to accept me as I am." Wow--that was so powerful! And as for so many others, this experience felt super relevant and helpful to me for one of my own important relationships, and I'm feeling excited to try out Sergio's approach on my own loved one. Forced Empathy: I loved all of it! So helpful and informative to witness live work. I immediately got why the “what's my grade?” question was skipped (since the use of the Forced empathy technique had yielded such powerful results). I am eager to try this with a particular client who is having similar issues with their mom. On a more personal level, I felt extremely close to Zeina and seeing how vulnerable and open she was willing to be. This has melted away a lot of my resistance in using the 5 secrets with my own mom. Thank you Zeina! I liked seeing the "visitor from Mars" used to uncover Zeina's thoughts when David was having trouble understanding what the issue was. It was great to see David feeling a little "lost" and see how he worked through that. Watching the Forced Empathy technique was amazing! I also appreciated when Jill offered several options for which direction to go and explained her rationale. I found it to be a helpful learning moment and also liked the warmth that came across. I saw my mom's critical behavior as coming from love-brought tears. Same for my Dad Zeina did really powerful and enlightening work! It was also a great learning experience to observe David & Jill. I have enjoyed listening to and learning wonderful techniques from Jill and David. I can definitely relate to parent's/child criticism conflict myself, so I have learned some methods of effective communication, empathy skills, especially the opposite empathy (where you step into the shoes of a person you have a conflict with) and learn to empathize strongly vs feeling frustrated and having blame thoughts I love every time we do personal work. I always learn and grow so much personally and professionally. Thank you, Zeina for this amazing gift, and thank you, David and Jill for your masterful work. I loved every moment of it! Amazing personal work! I enjoyed the entire process. I appreciated the partnership between David and Jill. I so appreciated Zeina's work and vulnerability. I like David's creative way of doing the Ind. Downward arrow using "man from Mars" perspective. I liked getting to see, again, the power of Forced Empathy, as it illuminated how we create the very behavior in the other, that we then complain about. I loved how Zeina surrendered to doing the Forced Empathy exercise with such wonderful openness. I loved the seamless way Dr Burns and Jill moved between the methods. And Zeina's courage to be vulnerable. Had an aha moment myself - of course her mother will criticize her because the last thing she wants is for Zeina to have disastrous finances like her own. It shows deep love and caring Another Master Class! I loved watching David and Jill working with Zeina. Change the Focus is just an amazing Method. I appreciate Zeina's vulnerable disclosures. Such generosity is much appreciated. This is an amazing group, and I feel privileged to learn from such sophisticated practitioners, who are so generous with their insights and decades' worth experiences. Some days I just can't believe my luck to be with such heartfelt, dedicated, compassionate and wise folks! I very specifically like seeing a long personal work session...the big picture seeing the whole session. Thank you! I learned so very much and how things smooth into each other as session progresses. It was great seeing Forced Empathy demonstrated as I've never seen it before and learned so much from the overall training with Zeina, David and Jill. So glad Zeina was willing to be so vulnerable; really appreciated at the end when she said she felt pressure to empathize with her mom if she was vulnerable with her and mom laid it on thick, was wondering the same exact thing in that very moment! Loved how David diffused that for her and put less pressure on how she would handle it! So grateful to be part of this awesome group where I am growing and learning every moment! The hi quality demonstration of Five Secrets empathy by David and Jill Jill's patience. David waiting for AHA MOMENTS and pointing them out and best of all ZEINA! Personal work is always insightful. I really like the forced empathy technique. I also enjoyed the display of creativity and flexibility of the team model. Amy would regularly explain that it was a model to be used creatively and it's exciting to know there is so much to learn. It can be adapted to each individual. Viewing therapy as a series of skills to learn rather than a step-by-step instructional book is what makes me really love TEAM. Loved how Dr Burns used the individual downward arrow so seamlessly during the empathy phase. Dr Burns empathy too was spot on when he said to Zeina that "she could not lean on her Mom." This one line was really powerful for me and resonated deeply. Loved Jill's internal solution as well as the forced empathy option along with the option of working on the good reasons not to do the 5 secrets. Jill was on a roll with her empathy ... "feels like you're walking on eggshells and don't know what will hurt her." I also liked Jill's disclosure about the times she gets critical with her boys are times when she is most concerned about them. Also liked Jill highlighting how Zeina practicing the Five Secrets was not working at a point because she was not using enough feeling empathy unlike as when doing the Forced Empathy  

Podcast 295: Forced Empathy: A Master Class--Part 1 of 2 Podcasts 294 (Part 1) and 295 (Part 2) Forced Empathy: A Master Class Today Dr. Jill Levitt and I do live work with Zeina Halim who has been experiencing some intense negative feelings because of her mother's criticisms of her. Zeina is a member of my weekly training group at Stanford and has appeared on the podcast on several previous occasions (Please provide numbers plus link to podcast page on website.) Zeina is one of our small group leaders in our Tuesday training group.  She works with teens and adults in-person in her office in Menlo Park and also provides tele-health sessions for clients living anywhere in California. Dr. Jill Levitt is the co-leader of my Tuesday training group at Stanford and will be my co-therapist today. We hope for some more of the “magic” that frequently appears when we do therapy together. Today's podcast will illustrate a number of teaching points, including these: Forced Empathy: We illustrate exactly how to use this powerful and sophisticated technique. When I first created this technique many years ago, I thought there would be little interest in it, so I rarely taught it in my workshops or training groups. In the past several years, an intense interest in this technique has emerged, so you will get to see exactly how it works. Five Secrets Resistance: There has been great interest in the Five Secrets of Effective Communication that are featured in my book, Feeling Good Together. When used skillfully, they can have a phenomenal effect on any troubled relationship. I am even aware of a case of a woman who was kidnapped at gunpoint by a violent serial rapist who planned to kill her. Out of desperation, she used the Five Secrets I had presented at a workshop he had just attended, and he let her go and turned himself in to the police. The Five Secrets literally saved her life. And yet, many of us stubbornly refuse to use the Five Secrets with family, friends and loved ones. Why do we fight against the very tools that would rapidly bring us peace, love and joy? And what can we do about our own internal “resistance”? The “inner” and “outer” solutions: Whenever you are involved in a conflict with someone, there are two battles raging at the same time. One is the “inner battle” with your own negative thoughts, telling you that you're no good, or that the other person is to blame, and the voice that powerfully urges you to do battle. We approach the “inner battle” with the familiar Daily Mood Log, that helps you pinpoint the distorted messages you are giving yourself. You will see that those messages—the way you talk to yourself when you're upset—are loaded with distortions; such as All-or-Nothing Thinking, Overgeneralizations, Mental Filtering, Discounting the Positive, Mind-Reading, Labeling, Should Statements and Hidden Should Statements, Emotional Reasoning, Other-Blame, and more. In today's session, we do battle with Zeina's distorted thoughts with the Externalization of Voices, arguably one of the most powerful psychotherapy tools ever created. The EAR Checklist / Relationship Journal. The “outer battle” involves the words you use when you respond to the other person's criticisms of you. Here we use the Relationship Journal, another super powerful tools that allows you to analyze your own statements with the EAR Checklist and see the shocking reality that you are creating the very conflict that you are complaining about so vigorously. This involves one of the “Great Death” of the self, which can be profoundly painful, but it also leads to liberation from your self-created misery and the chance for renewed love and connection with the person you feel so alienated from. Two-hour sessions. You can do far more in a single, two-hour session than in many 50 minute sessions scheduled at weekly intervals. I have often said that this is how I always do therapy, and if you have some therapy skills, this model is vastly more effective and cost-effective as well. It puts you under pressure to accomplish something today, right now, and not in the vague or distant future. Uncovering Techniques. You will see how you can use the Man from Mars Technique to uncover more of your patient's negative thoughts and core beliefs. This is just another way of doing the classical “Individual Downward Arrow Technique” that I developed way back in the 1970s. The Acceptance Paradoxes. There is a great deal of talk these days about Acceptance is being an important key in many schools of psychotherapy. But what is acceptance, and how do we teach it to our patients and colleagues? Today's session with Zeina, who has a great interest in Buddhist philosophy and practices, illustrates one of more than 20 paths to acceptance, and this one in particular will teach you the steps in accepting others, especially when you are desperately trying to change them and you are insisting that they “shouldn't” be the way they are! Self-acceptance is always about grasping a gigantic paradox—and that's why I've always called it the Acceptance Paradox, which states: Accepting yourself as you are, warts and all, is actually the greatest change a human being can make. Can you see why this is a paradox? It's because the very moment you accept yourself, everything about you and your world will appear to change. Now here's another acceptance paradox we will explore today. The very moment when you accept another person exactly as she or he is, that person will suddenly change. Of course, that is the exact opposite of what we usually do when we desperately keep trying to “change” them, a strategy that actually forces them to be the very monster you are trying so hard to destroy. By the way, do you know what the plural form of paradox is, when you combine Self- and Other-Acceptance? The plural form is called the Acceptance Paradise. T = Testing is crucial! You cannot do truly effective therapy without the T = Testing. You will find out EXACTLY how effective—or ineffective—you are in every session with every patient. When you listen to the podcasts, you can ask yourself questions like these: How effective are Jill and David being? Will they get good empathy and helpfulness ratings from Zeina? Will we see any reductions in Zeina's powerful negative feelings at the start of the session? Will she make a breakthrough in her relationship with her mother? At the end of the session, you will see the answers to these questions. And if you're a therapist, that kind of powerful and precise information will allow you to grow and learn as a therapist, especially if you approach the information with humility and respect for yourself and your patients. There is almost no limit to the evolution of your therapist skills if you use the T = Testing model I have developed. There is almost no chance for personal growth if you do not use these or similar assessment tools. However, the price of growth is steep. You have to be willing to see your own failures and errors at every session with every patient, and this will often be painful. But this is the pain that can lead to your own personal transformation along with the blossoming of your own superb therapy skills. Today, in Part 1 of the Zeina session, you will hear the T = Testing and E = Empathy parts of the session. Next week, in Part 2, you will hear the very brief A = Assessment of Resistance, which really only included the “Miracle Cure Question: ”What, really, are you, Zeina, hoping for in tonight's session?” You will also hear the amazing M = Methods portion, which will start with Forced Empathy, followed by Externalization of Voices and Five Secrets Practice, along with the final T = Testing and homework assignments for Zeina following the session. Rhonda, Jill, Zeina and I hope you enjoy the podcasts and learn a great deal from them. And we all want to thank you, Zeina for your courageous and brilliant work, sharing your inner self so openly and generously. I believe that sessions like the one our fans will witness today and next week have the potential to provide hope and healing to people around the world, not only today, but for decades to come. At least, that is my hope! I also want to thank you, Jill, for your extraordinary teaching and clinical skills, and for your brilliance and warmth. Thank you for tuning in! Rhonda, Zeina, and David Contact information for Jill and Zeina: please provide what you want to have included in the show notes. Here is a follow-up note from Zeina Hello David, Jill, and the Tuesday group, Boy, do I have an update for you all! So, at first, I struggled, and I was very worried to have to potentially send an update to the group that may have been disappointing. On Saturday, I saw my mom, and I shared with her the insights that I had in our session. She was appreciative, but I didn't feel very connected to her. I had talked with her about this while she and I were on a walk, and I wondered if maybe walking while talking was taking away some of the intimacy or connection that might have happened if we had been looking at each other while talking. I also noticed that while I was externally behaving somewhat better if my mom criticized me, internally, I still hadn't progressed very far. I would still feel very distant from her; and I still wasn't doing the five secrets. Today, on Sunday, I saw my mom again. While she did not criticize me, we still got into a little bit of an argument. I was a bit angry, but as I let myself cool off, I noticed myself feeling incredibly sad inside--like a sadness that had been building and building over the past few weeks. I tried to talk with my mom about it, but she resisted at first. We had a project that we were working on together today and she thought it would be better if we talked on another day and got back to our project; I insisted, however, and asked that we please talk today. I did not realize it at the time, but I think I had some major hidden emotion stuff happening with my mom (more on this later, perhaps some hidden sadness that was masquerading as anger). I shared with her that I had felt incredibly sad and genuinely worried about our relationship. I recently moved in order to live closer to her and see her more often, but I had noticed that almost every time she came over to visit me at my new place, we would get into an argument at least once. I shared that these arguments had really been weighing on me and worrying me. I also told her that I noticed that we would get into arguments when we were at my place, but not as much when I visited her at her place, maybe because I am so particular about how I like things to be at my place. She, then, said in a very gentle and loving way, "I think ‘particular' about your space is the operative word here." I realized that she was totally right, and I was so pleasantly surprised by how gentle and loving she was when she said it. Feeling encouraged by how the conversation was going, I shared more and said that I had noticed that I had become more sensitive around our arguments lately and that I was feeling very disconnected from her, and I didn't know how to get reconnected with her. I also shared that I had been feeling lonely in my life in general lately and made a guess that maybe my loneliness was making me expect more from our relationship. Additionally, I also guessed that I might be feeling more drained emotionally because I am doing more hours of therapy per week than I have ever done in my life, and maybe I had yet to find the right balance of how to recreate and regenerate my energy in my off-hours. I shed many tears all throughout this whole conversation. I checked in with myself and noticed that I was feeling more connected to my mom, but there felt like there was still more, particularly about my loneliness. This next paragraph might seem like a major tangent, but hang in there!--I promise it is all connected :) Then, I switched gears a little bit to share with her a different conversation and insight I had had in the past week or so about my recent feelings of loneliness. I had been having a conversation with my very dear friend, James, about how I had been feeling lonely, but was not feeling as drawn to connecting with most of my girlfriends, but only really drawn to my guy friends. Initially, I thought it was a male-female difference, but then I noticed that I was feeling drawn to my new friend Leigh Harrington, who is female. I realized that maybe the difference had more to do with the fact that almost all my male friends and Leigh were quite funny and playful people, whereas most of my girlfriends were more serious people. As for myself, I tend to be a more serious person and am not as funny or playful as many people. I realized that I was relying on other people for my laughter, playfulness and fun, rather than learning how to create that myself. Having just done some flirting training with Matthew May earlier that week, I saw that humor, like flirting, can be a learned skill and might have more to do with a willingness to take risks than an innate quality that people either have or don't have. I was feeling excited that I could learn to be funnier and flirtier and create more laughter in my life, instead of relying on other funny people for this. I shared all of this with my mom. She then went on to make a further connection that really blew me away. She said, "I bet if you start to be funnier and create more laughter for yourself and others, you will also start to feel less lonely." It felt so true! The times I feel most connected to people are when I am laughing with them. THIS is the kind of relationship and connection with my mom that I had been missing lately--when I share deeply with her and, because she knows me so well, she is able to further my insight and understanding of myself and help me to grow. I feel so connected to her now. I realize now that I think part of my resistance to using the 5 secrets with my mom was maybe a hidden emotion component--I had these deep feelings and worries about our relationship; I was confused if moving closer to her had actually helped our relationship or if it was harming it, and I was genuinely missing these kinds of deep, connecting conversations with her, which we had not had in a while. My mom has been hanging out at my place all day today and now I notice myself being easily loving and patient with her and my being "particular" about my things and my space has vanished--at least temporarily! There are a lot of take-aways for me from this whole thing, but one of the biggest ones is that I think I was trying to do five secrets without really fully going into my "I feel" statements as much as I needed to--I feel statements are often the secret that I neglect the most as a person and as a therapist. So, to connect to what we are doing this week in class, I think I would make a guess that when I ignore the five secret that I need to do the most and struggle with, it can hamper my ability to do the rest of the five secrets effectively and genuinely. I could write a lot more about all of this, but I think I will stop here for now. I hope this wasn't too confusing as I know I touched on a lot of different things. Thank you all for your time and attention. I'm open to comments or questions. Warmly, Zeina Here is a reply to Zeina from one of the Stanford Tuesday group members Gosh! Zeina, this is beautiful and so straight from the heart. Takes immense courage to do a deep dive in exploring oneself. I have been marveling at how meticulously you‘ve sifted through and worked towards addressing the different dimensions of the relationship between you and your mum. You are also an amazing raconteur, you've brought out the subtle nuances so beautifully! Your mail took me on an emotional roller coaster ride. It was such a compelling read and had me as a captive co-traveler, holding my breath, and crossing my fingers! I loved your insights on the “I feel”. Reading that was a personal breakthrough for me, where my relationship with my mum is concerned. That's exactly what is missing in our relationship too … whoaaaaa! I just don't share my feelings with her! I love how you were able to do that though, because I can feel this huge wave of resistance engulfing me, despite my insight. I know I'm not yet ready to take the next step! Funny, how tough it can be to be vulnerable before one's own mom! More power to you Zeina for ‘daring greatly' and taking the next step after the Tuesday class. Also, for keeping us posted and for sharing with us in such a detailed manner, and in the process, helping us all learn and grow. Deep regards for your mum as well. She comes across as a tenacious mother of a tenacious daughter … if I may say so. Warmly, Nivedita. Here is a second follow-up from Zeina. Hello David, Jill and Tuesday group, I just wanted to send another update as my relationship with my mom has continued to evolve in quite beautiful and magical ways since I sent this last email.  It seems to me that maybe she has stopped criticizing me entirely--I'm not quite sure.  Maybe I need to pay more attention.  Perhaps if she does criticize me, she does it in a gentler way or maybe I am less sensitive to it.  All I know is that she has been wonderfully supportive of me in these past few weeks and we have not gotten into a single argument.  Our relationship suddenly seems easy in a way that I have never experienced before.  I am so profoundly grateful.  I know that we will probably relapse at some point and this may not last forever, but, now I know this is possible.  Now, I know my way back here.  I have always wanted a relationship like this with my mother, and I always thought it wasn't possible because of who she was as a person. Little did I know that to have the mother I always wanted, I needed to do the changing. I knew that the 5 secrets were powerful, but I had thought that their power was more confined to a single interaction or the moment when you use them.  I don't know that I have been especially good at practicing the 5 secrets with my mom lately, yet the effect seems to keep lasting and lasting. I am truly speechless at the profound transformation that has happened.  Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I would love any responses! Zeina Here is some of the feedback from the training group in the section, “What did you like the best about today's training session?” Jill's thoughtfulness in selecting the Forced Empathy technique over the Relationship Journal. Jill looked at what had worked in the past for Zeina and saw it as a potential strategy for her current concerns and the result was tremendously positive. I loved the training! I loved watching forced empathy and I began to empathize with a close relative simply by watching Zeina empathize with her mom. I was crying throughout. It is hard to describe how touched I was Zeina's honesty and her responses to forced empathy was amazing! Amazing personal work. Entire session was great learning experience for me. How Forced Empathy brought the shift in Zeina's way of thinking. I really enjoy witnessing the live sessions including this one with Zeina. Seeing how the totality of the model comes together in real time with the clinician's judgment and intuition guiding the specific process is really enlightening and seeing someone's beliefs shift in real time is very inspiring and moving. It was a really nice way to re-join the larger group and I'm glad to hear that went into David's thinking in scheduling it. I really like the Forced Empathy. Zeina had a lot of resistance at the beginning. However, She shed tears during doing the Forced Empathy. I also like the role reversal when doing the Externalization voices. I can always learn how to deal with the difficulties of life from David and Jill's wisdom. The whole thing was so great. I was really moved by the forced empathy. I always LOVE seeing forced empathy modeled to get better at this complex skill, and I am also, like many others, almost always blown away with how powerful it is. I also thought this was a great example of multiple paths (individual mood and relationship work) and multiple methods being all used in one two-hour session so skillful and masterful. I loved the open ended approach and the ongoing exploration until the goal was formed/explored/ discovered. For me, it was a demonstration of trust in the process. I especially liked David's "The Man From Mars" that seemed to me an amazing tool with sorting out the mess of relationship work. I also loved Forced Empathy especially here with the work on mother daughter's relationship. I am really intrigued to explore it for myself in regard to my relationship with my parents and my daughter. Seeing the whole encounter with Zeina and seeing how Jill and David thought through it together, it was all so organic and incredible to witness Very helpful to see the progression of the session. Zeina's session has been a gift not only to us, but also to our mothers. Forced empathy felt like a pivot point in treatment and I loved that Z was able to go deep and connect with her mother's feelings. I have plans to travel and visit my mother next month and have been feeling anxious about it. I was reminded of the unconditional love of a mother that is beautiful and spiritual. David and Jill did amazing and transformational work. This is so inspiring! I liked everything and how the methods and techniques were woven together very skillfully. Personal work is really the best and so gratifying to see. David made a comment at the end about how it would help with motivation to use the skills and work more on them after seeing them in action and I do agree with his comment even if I'm totally not paraphrasing correctly. I LOVE personal work because it bring these skills to life in a way that role plays don't. and of course, it's all the better that someone gets a personal benefit, that's all good too. David and Jill did an amazing job again! However, Zeina's honesty and vulnerability was the greatest gift during this session. I could relate to her struggle as well, so I was extra impressed about her determination to work on this issue. It was amazing personal work for me. I feel so grateful for this experience. This was another example of the "magic" of TEAM, especially when the therapists are the incredibly skilled Jill and David. What a great, vulnerable and poignant example of relationship issues with a parent. I was very impressed and moved by the power of the Forced Empathy technique. By Zeina's ability to feel into the point of view of her mother, and her insights and connections, especially around how the times of criticism can be seen as opportunities for greater acceptance and love. Moving and really beautiful personal work!!! I was moved to tears when Zeina cried her mother's tears during the Forced Empathy exercise and said "I need her to accept me as I am." Wow--that was so powerful! And as for so many others, this experience felt super relevant and helpful to me for one of my own important relationships, and I'm feeling excited to try out Sergio's approach on my own loved one. Forced Empathy: I loved all of it! So helpful and informative to witness live work. I immediately got why the “what's my grade?” question was skipped (since the use of the Forced empathy technique had yielded such powerful results). I am eager to try this with a particular client who is having similar issues with their mom. On a more personal level, I felt extremely close to Zeina and seeing how vulnerable and open she was willing to be. This has melted away a lot of my resistance in using the 5 secrets with my own mom. Thank you Zeina! I liked seeing the "visitor from Mars" used to uncover Zeina's thoughts when David was having trouble understanding what the issue was. It was great to see David feeling a little "lost" and see how he worked through that. Watching the Forced Empathy technique was amazing! I also appreciated when Jill offered several options for which direction to go and explained her rationale. I found it to be a helpful learning moment and also liked the warmth that came across. I saw my mom's critical behavior as coming from love-brought tears. Same for my Dad Zeina did really powerful and enlightening work! It was also a great learning experience to observe David & Jill. I have enjoyed listening to and learning wonderful techniques from Jill and David. I can definitely relate to parent's/child criticism conflict myself, so I have learned some methods of effective communication, empathy skills, especially the opposite empathy (where you step into the shoes of a person you have a conflict with) and learn to empathize strongly vs feeling frustrated and having blame thoughts I love every time we do personal work. I always learn and grow so much personally and professionally. Thank you, Zeina for this amazing gift, and thank you, David and Jill for your masterful work. I loved every moment of it! Amazing personal work! I enjoyed the entire process. I appreciated the partnership between David and Jill. I so appreciated Zeina's work and vulnerability. I like David's creative way of doing the Ind. Downward arrow using "man from Mars" perspective. I liked getting to see, again, the power of Forced Empathy, as it illuminated how we create the very behavior in the other, that we then complain about. I loved how Zeina surrendered to doing the Forced Empathy exercise with such wonderful openness. I loved the seamless way Dr Burns and Jill moved between the methods. And Zeina's courage to be vulnerable. Had an aha moment myself - of course her mother will criticize her because the last thing she wants is for Zeina to have disastrous finances like her own. It shows deep love and caring Another Master Class! I loved watching David and Jill working with Zeina. Change the Focus is just an amazing Method. I appreciate Zeina's vulnerable disclosures. Such generosity is much appreciated. This is an amazing group, and I feel privileged to learn from such sophisticated practitioners, who are so generous with their insights and decades' worth experiences. Some days I just can't believe my luck to be with such heartfelt, dedicated, compassionate and wise folks! I very specifically like seeing a long personal work session...the big picture seeing the whole session. Thank you! I learned so very much and how things smooth into each other as session progresses. It was great seeing Forced Empathy demonstrated as I've never seen it before and learned so much from the overall training with Zeina, David and Jill. So glad Zeina was willing to be so vulnerable; really appreciated at the end when she said she felt pressure to empathize with her mom if she was vulnerable with her and mom laid it on thick, was wondering the same exact thing in that very moment! Loved how David diffused that for her and put less pressure on how she would handle it! So grateful to be part of this awesome group where I am growing and learning every moment! The high quality demonstration of Five Secrets empathy by David and Jill Jill's patience. David waiting for AHA MOMENTS and pointing them out and best of all ZEINA! Personal work is always insightful. I really like the forced empathy technique. I also enjoyed the display of creativity and flexibility of the team model. Amy would regularly explain that it was a model to be used creatively and it's exciting to know there is so much to learn. It can be adapted to each individual. Viewing therapy as a series of skills to learn rather than a step-by-step instructional book is what makes me really love TEAM. Loved how Dr Burns used the individual downward arrow so seamlessly during the empathy phase. Dr Burns empathy too was spot on when he said to Zeina that "she could not lean on her Mom." This one line was really powerful for me and resonated deeply. Loved Jill's internal solution as well as the forced empathy option along with the option of working on the good reasons not to do the 5 secrets. Jill was on a roll with her empathy ... "feels like you're walking on eggshells and don't know what will hurt her." I also liked Jill's disclosure about the times she gets critical with her boys are times when she is most concerned about them. Also liked Jill highlighting how Zeina practicing the Five Secrets was not working at a point because she was not using enough feeling empathy unlike as when doing the Forced Empathy  

Ryan talks Cognitive Distortions after a special request. Ryan pulls from the  "Feeling Good" book by Dr. David Burns. This episodes talks about the 10 cognitive distortions and how they pop up in all of our lives. 1. All or Nothing Thinking2. Overgeneralization 3. Mental Filter4. Disqualifying the Positive5. Jumping to Conclusions6. Magnification/ Minimization 7. Emotional Reasoning 8. Should Statements9. Labeling 10. Personalization#cognitivedistortions #feelinggood #veterans #CBT #CPT #cognitivetherapy #military #army #navy #marines #airforce #coastguard #nationalguard #therapy #mentalhealth #mentalhealthmatters #mentalhealthawareness #effPTSD #effDepression link to Feeling Good : https://www.amazon.com/Feeling-Good-New-Mood-Therapy/dp/0380810336 https://www.vetwithamic.com/https://www.facebook.com/VetwithaMichttps://www.instagram.com/vetwithamic/Support the show

"My way is to seize an image the moment it has formed in my mind, to trap it as a bird and to pin it at once to canvas. Afterward I start to tame it, to master it. I bring it under control and I develop it. "— Joan MiroIn this episode, Dr. Curtis delves into common thinking traps that impair our ability to think clearly.    When it comes to Self-Mastery, the quality of our thought can make or break our long term success.  This episode encourages listeners to reflect on the content and origin of thought.  Dr. Curtis shares insights into five very common patterns of thinking that lead to false conclusions.Thinking Traps DiscussedAll or Nothing ThinkingJumping to ConclusionsType 1 - Mind ReadingType 2-  Fortune TellingEmotional ReasoningOver GeneralizingIgnoring the GoodEpisodes Mentioned EP 48 Thinking TrapsJoin the conversation, join the Future Focus Health Network....love to hear from you!

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9 For in Him all the fullness of Deity dwells in bodily form, 10 and in Him you have been made complete, and He is the head over every ruler and authority;COLOSSIANS 2:9-1024 Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in Christ's afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church, 25 of which I became a minister according to the stewardship from God that was given to me for you, to make the word of God fully known, 26 the mystery hidden for ages and generations but now revealed to his saints. 27 To them God chose to make known how great among the Gentiles are the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory. 28 Him we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom, that we may present everyone mature in Christ. 29 For this I toil, struggling with all his energy that he powerfully works within me.COLOSSIANS 1:24-29 THE POINT IS MATURITY (message title)Maturity: the state, fact, or period of being mature.Mature: fully developed physically; full grown. Having reached an advanced stage of mental or emotional developmental characteristics of an adult.JESUS IS THE FOCUS; MATURITY IS THE GOAL.Emotional Reasoning: letting your feelings guide your interpretation of reality. “I feel depressed; therefore, my life is not working out.”Catastrophizing: focusing on the worst possible outcome and seeing it as most likely. “It would be terrible if I failed.” Overgeneralizing: perceiving a global pattern of negatives is based on a single incident. “This generally happens to me. I seem to fail at a lot of things.” Dichotomous Thinking: viewing events or people in all-or-nothing terms. “I get rejected by everyone,” or “it was a complete waste of time.”Negative Filtering: focusing almost exclusively on the negatives and seldom noticing the positives. “Look at all the people who don't like me.” Discounting Positives: claiming that the positive things you or others do are trivial, so that you can maintain a negative judgement. Labeling: assigning global negative traits to yourself or othersMind Reading: assuming that you know what people thinking without having sufficient evidence of their thoughts.IMMATURITY/MATURITY IS NOT A RESULT OF WHO YOU ARE.13 Now when Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” 14 And they said, “Some say John the Baptist, others say Elijah, and others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.” 15 He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?” 16 Simon Peter replied, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”17 And Jesus answered him, “Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven. 18 And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock[b] I will build my church, and the gates of hell[c] shall not prevail against it. 19 I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed[d] in heaven.”20 Then he strictly charged the disciples to tell no one that he was the Christ 21 From that time Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things from the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised. 22 And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, “Far be it from you, Lord![e] This shall never happen to you.” 23 But he turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a hindrance[f] to me. For you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man.”MATTHEW 16:13-23Jesus exposed how Peter came into this satanic way of thinking. He didn't make a deliberate choice to reject God and embrace Satan; he simply let his mind settle on the things of men instead of the things of God, and Satan took advantage of it. Peter is a perfect example of how a sincere heart coupled with man's thinking can often lead to disaster.DAVID GUZIKIMMATURITY/MATURITY IS NOT A RESULT OF WHO YOU ARE. IT'S A RESULT OF HOW YOU THINK.Do not copy the behavior and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think. Then you will learn to know God's will for you, which is good and pleasing and perfect.ROMANS 12:21. MATURITY IS NOT AUTOMATICTo them God chose to make known how great among the Gentiles are the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.COLOSSIANS 1:27CHRIST IN YOU, not Christ (at church), not Christ (in me, Paul), not Christ (in them), not Christ (in theory). Your hope for maturity is Jesus in YOU. Maturity STARTS with Jesus in YOU. 2. MATURITY IS A PROCESS And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord,[e] are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another.[f] For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.2 CORINTHIANS 3:18(TRANSFORMED GRAPHS) 52 And Jesus grew in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man.LUKE 2:523. MATURITY IS GROWN THROUGH THE WORDYou are a hindrance[f] to me. For you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man.”MATTHEW 16:13-23All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be competent, equipped for every good work.1 TIMOTHY 3:16-17 Maturity starts with Jesus IN YOU. It is grown by you IN THE WORD. The end result is HUMILITY.Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of God.MATTHEW 5:1“WE SHOULD GROW UP IN OUR THINKING SO WE CAN GROW DOWN IN OUR HUMILITY.”JOHN PIPERFor I am the least of the apostles, unworthy to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. 10 But by the grace of God I am what I am,1 CORINTHIANS 13:11To me, though I am the very least of all the saints, this grace was given, to preach to the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ, EPHESIANS 3:8Here is a trustworthy saying that deserves full acceptance: Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners—of whom I am the worst. 16 But for that very reason I was shown mercy so that in me, the worst of sinners, Christ Jesus might display his immense patience as an example for those who would believe in him and receive eternal life. 1 TIMOTHY 1:15

It's a bit hard to introduce a topic as wild and heavy as sociopathic behaviors and emotional manipulation… but here we are. Let's dive into it! Listen in to this episode of the RQ Podcast as Kira talks about the new Netflix documentary, The Tinder Swindler, and five lessons we can take away from it. Then, she gives you a brand new freebie you can use to make sure you never EVER get swindled by a Tinder date. Kira also breaks down the concepts of cognitive biases and emotional reasoning, shedding light on how these biases can show up in your life and impact your relationships. Plus, she highlights the interconnection between self-worth, emotional reasoning, and toxic relationships. From sociopathic behaviors to justifying getting on a plane with a stranger by embodying the phrase “you only live once” … we're covering almost all the red flags in the book! So buckle up! “Every day, throughout the day, we are talking to people, we are invested in people, we are surrounded by people, so let's have the best friendships and relationships possible to make that all feel good and worthwhile and not exhausting.” - Kira In This Episode, You Will Learn: Scientific fact of the day: Emotional Reasoning bias creates an emotional truth which may be in direct conflict with the actual, perceptual truth…    5 takeaways from The Tinder Swindler    How to become an online dating ninja    Questions Answered:   What is a sociopath? (:)     Did you love this? Subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts! https://apple.co/3eFMCxS    Slide into my DMs to tell me what you liked MOST about this episode & SHARE this episode with a friend or loved one who could benefit from it! Join the conversation on Instagram: www.instagram.com/kirasabin  Visit the Relationship Quotient website: www.relationship-quotient.com 

►  DOWNLOAD FREE CHEAT SHEET: https://bit.ly/15biases   In today's podcast episode, I'm going to share with you cognitive biases examples. And we'll specifically dive deeper into one of the most common cognitive distortions called emotional reasoning.   ► JOIN THE SECRET WAITLIST: https://bit.ly/thesecretwaitlist   ►  DISCOVER 111 WAYS TO SIMPLIFY YOUR LIFE: https://coachsimona.com/book    ►  JOIN THE WAITLIST FOR "THE QUEEN WITHIN": https://coachsimona.com/waitlist   ►  SUBSCRIBE TO MY YOUTUBE CHANNEL: https://youtube.com/coachsimona   ►  SUBSCRIBE TO THE SIMPLIFY YOUR LIFE PODCAST: https://coachsimona.com/podcast

If there's one thing that stands in the way of people making changes in their lives, it's their thoughts. Our thoughts can be powerful barriers to change, but they can also be helpful tools for growth. In this episode, we'll explore how to overcome the #1 barrier: our thoughts. We'll look at some healthy thinking patterns that can help us make positive changes in our lives, and we'll learn how to use these patterns to our advantage.In this episode of Trail Angels powered by Cairn the Load, Mark and Annette will be discussing Healthy Thinking Patterns. We share some powerful tools that will be helpful to understand our true identity, our worth, and how worth is different than "worthiness." We discuss common inaccurate thinking patterns and "triggers," what they are and how we respond to them, and ultimately healthy thinking patterns and how we can change our thoughts to a healthier way of thinking.  Grab a paper and pencil, and be prepared to join us as we learn how to create Healthy Thinking Patterns. Common Inaccurate Thinking PatternsAll or Nothing, Mislabeling, Jumping to Conclusions, Personalizing, Emotional Reasoning, Overgeneralization, Negative Mental Filter, Discounting the Positive, Magnification, "Should" Statements. At the core of every thought, you have a belief. Your beliefs determine your thoughts, feelings, actions, and behaviors. In other words, your beliefs are what shape your entire experience of reality.If you don't believe something is possible, you'll never be able to make it happen. If your beliefs limit your progress towards your goals, your life will always be stuck in a rut, and you'll never achieve your full potential.What makes your life better: your time, energy, or thoughts?It takes as much mental effort as positive thoughts as negative ones. If we want to change our lives for the better, we need to stop accepting our limiting beliefs just because they're comfortable. Sometimes your thoughts can help your efforts, but other times your thoughts will do nothing but reinforce your current situation.If you want to move forward in your life, you have to start thinking differently. You need to take control of your mind and take responsibility for your mental patterns. 

If there's one thing that stands in the way of people making changes in their lives, it's their thoughts. Our thoughts can be powerful barriers to change, but they can also be helpful tools for growth. In this episode, we'll explore how to overcome the #1 barrier: our thoughts. We'll look at some healthy thinking patterns that can help us make positive changes in our lives, and we'll learn how to use these patterns to our advantage.In this episode of Trail Angels powered by Cairn the Load, Mark and Annette will be discussing Healthy Thinking Patterns. We share some powerful tools that will be helpful to understand our true identity, our worth, and how worth is different than "worthiness." We discuss common inaccurate thinking patterns and "triggers," what they are and how we respond to them, and ultimately healthy thinking patterns and how we can change our thoughts to a healthier way of thinking.  Grab a paper and pencil, and be prepared to join us as we learn how to create Healthy Thinking Patterns. Common Inaccurate Thinking PatternsAll or Nothing, Mislabeling, Jumping to Conclusions, Personalizing, Emotional Reasoning, Overgeneralization, Negative Mental Filter, Discounting the Positive, Magnification, "Should" Statements. At the core of every thought, you have a belief. Your beliefs determine your thoughts, feelings, actions, and behaviors. In other words, your beliefs are what shape your entire experience of reality.If you don't believe something is possible, you'll never be able to make it happen. If your beliefs limit your progress towards your goals, your life will always be stuck in a rut, and you'll never achieve your full potential.What makes your life better: your time, energy, or thoughts?It takes as much mental effort as positive thoughts as negative ones. If we want to change our lives for the better, we need to stop accepting our limiting beliefs just because they're comfortable. Sometimes your thoughts can help your efforts, but other times your thoughts will do nothing but reinforce your current situation.If you want to move forward in your life, you have to start thinking differently. You need to take control of your mind and take responsibility for your mental patterns. 

Emotional reasoning is a type of faulty thinking in which a person concludes that something is true based on their emotional reaction. Join Bola and Yazmir as they discuss: - How emotional reasoning can impact your finances - Key tips to combat it and become more objective CATCH OUR OTHER LIVE YOUTUBE SESSION REPLAYS: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhyh7wVTaE1IZRcbGOZA_c4Hy6QdV2EHt ❤ Get the best-selling Clever Girl Finance Books: https://clevergirlfinance.com/books ❤ Get access to 30+ free courses, worksheets, savings challenges, and our favorite banking resources: https://clevergirlfinance.com/course-packages ❤ Read the Clever Girl Finance Blog: https://clevergirlfinance.com/blog ❤ Follow us on Instagram: http://instagram.com/clevergirlfinance

Reasons why you don't see the world clearly. Overgeneralization, Personalization, Catastrophizing, Jumping to Conclusions, Emotional Reasoning, Discounting the Positive, 'Should' Statements.The Jossman Method; Conquering Life's TransitionsMusic credit: (copyright not owned)Artist: Tune SurfersTitle: Blood, Sweat and TearsCopyright provided by: SoundCloud.com

Have the words “calm down” ever successfully ended an argument? We all know what a mistake that phrase can be. When emotions are high, logic goes out the window… yet, we allow our emotions to cloud our day-to-day judgment. From the way we handle tension to the things we allow our children to be taught, emotions have been allowed to dictate the decisions we make about our lives and the lives of our children. Today, we explore Biblical reasoning to eschew emotional reasoning and embrace faith in God's plan.

#252: Sadness as Celebration, Part 1 In today's podcast, Rhonda and David present Part 1 of their work with a young woman named Rose. Rose is a 38-year-old mother of two boys aged 2 and 5. She works as a Therapist at an outpatient clinic, the East Bay Center for Anxiety Relief, and is a member of our Tuesday training group at Stanford. Rose sought help because of her profound grief after talking to her mother about her father's recent visit to his oncologist. Her father has had many severe health problems in the past several years. He's been a survivor, but suddenly the outlook seems bleak, and Rose feels tremendous sadness and fear, because of her deep love for her father. In most cases, grief does not need treatment. Clearly, grieving is healthy and even necessary when you lose someone you love. However, it can be helpful to distinguish healthy from unhealthy grief. From a cognitive therapy perspective, all feelings, including grief over the loss or impending loss of someone you love, result from your thoughts. Healthy grief results from negative thoughts that are not distorted. For example, if a loved one dies, you may think of all the things you loved about that person and the experiences you will no longer be able to share. Your sadness is actually an expression of your love. Healthy grief, in contrast, results from distorted thoughts. For example, in my book, Feeling Good, I described a young physician who became suicidal when her brother committed suicide because she told herself; “I should have known he was suicidal that day. His death was my fault, and so I, too, deserve to die.” This thought triggered intense guilt, and it contains many of the familiar cognitive distortions, including Self-Blame, Emotional Reasoning, Should Statements, and Discounting the Positive, and Fortune-Telling, to name just a few. With my help, she was able to challenge and crush her distorted thoughts, and her depression disappeared. Then she was then able to grieve his tragic death. Paradoxically, the distorted thoughts that triggered the unhealthy grief had actually prevented her from grieving in a healthy way. Today's podcast is illuminating because Rose is experiencing a combination of healthy and unhealthy grief resulting from a mix of undistorted and distorted thoughts. The work that Rose did is incredibly inspiring, and sad. Today we will publish the first half of the session, including T = Testing and E = Empathy. Next week, we will publish the second half of the session, starting with the question, “What do we have to offer our patients once we've empathized?” Then you will hear the A = Assessment of Resistance and M = Methods portion of our work with Rose. T = Testing Take a look at the Daily Mood Log (LINK) that Rose shared with us at the start of her session. You will see that she had very elevated scores in 8 different categories of negative feelings, suggesting she was in pretty intense distress. We will ask her to rate these feelings again at the end of the session so we can see if she experienced any changes during the session. I'm a firm believer that all therapists should use testing at every session, and many are now doing this, but lots of therapists still refuse for a variety of reasons. I was going to say “bogus reasons,” but didn't want to sound harsh or dogmatic! To me, the refusal of psychotherapists or psychiatrists to measure symptoms at every session is the “unforgiveable sin!” I don't believe it is possible to do good therapy, much less world class therapy, without Testing, for a wide variety of reasons: Therapists perceptions of how patients feel, and patients feel about them, are not accurate. Measuring suicidal urges at the start and end of every session can save lives. Seeing how effective. or ineffective, you were at every session allows you to fine tune the therapy and abandon strategies and methods that aren't working in favor of better techniques. This turns your patients into the greatest teachers you've ever had—IF you can take the heat! You will see, for the first time, how your patients rate your Empathy and Helpfulness at every session. At first, this information can be incredibly shocking, but if you process it with your patient at the next session in the spirit of humility, warmth, and curiosity, the experience can be transformative. E = Empathy Rose explained that she was feeling acute grief because of her father's health problems. He had extensive surgery to remove a cancerous kidney in 2014, but the surgeons found additional unusual growths around his spleen. Her dad has also had open heart surgery, surgery to remove a bone tumor, and many other serious medical problems. She said, “he's like a cat with nine lives, but we're concerned that now he's near the end.” He experienced GI distress and vomiting in September of 2020, and was hospitalized again in February of 2021, but they found nothing. In March, he was again hospitalized, and the doctor found an aggressive cancerous liposarcoma in his abdomen. Then they found more tumors in his back, and determined that it was Stage 3. The usual treatment would include radiation and more surgery, but he simply cannot stand any more surgeries, so we began to lose hope. Rhonda commented that he's suffered greatly, and the family has suffered as well, since 2014. Rose and her family finally got to visit him in San Diego on Memorial Day, and this was helpful. She said he's still really active with the activities he loves, including golf and gardening, and treasures every moment, and loves spending time with his two grandsons. Rose painfully described the impact of the pandemic, which meant they were only able to visit him twice in the past year. That made it especially nice to connect and see his grandsons during their Memorial Day visit. She said he was especially “present” and cherished those moments. She said: He was doing pretty well, and was telling his friends that he's happy with what he's accomplished in his life. He grew up in Bosnia, and was poor, with many challenges, so family is really important to him. Catholicism was the center of his culture. The whole family feels more connected now. The grief has brought us closer together. He's started chemotherapy, but I'm pessimistic. The doctor said it was only 20% effective, and it's expensive: $3,000 a month. I do not really know what the timeline is, but it was helpful to visit in person and to see that he can feel joy. My negative feelings typically run in the range of 50 to 60, but they can be suddenly triggered and spike much higher; for example, when I tell myself that he won't get to see his grandchildren and share so many important moments with them when they're growing up. He tries to comfort us when we ask how he's doing, and he says, “I'm okay; I'm just a little tired.” My anxiety fluctuates because so much is not known. I'm not sure how this will affect him. What will the impact be? I'm afraid he'll get depressed because he may not be able to do the activities he loves, like golf. I also struggle with feelings of guilt. Should we have visited more? Should we move from the Bay Area to San Diego? We've been having some zoom calls, but they're hard. The boys compete for his attention on the calls. Rhonda asked: “You seem to have so much love for him. What has it been like to have him for a dad?” Rose answered: I have two brothers, and I'm the only daughter, so there's always been a special connection between my dad and me, and his values of hard work and family. Soccer has been really important, and he was so proud when Croatia won the world cup. Connection has always been so important. I wanted to go to South America when I was in my 20's, because I wanted to learn more Spanish and seek adventure. Everyone said it could be dangerous, so don't go alone. So my dad went with me, and we had our own wonderful adventures. When I think about that, it makes the feelings of loss all the more painful, because we're losing that connection. Rhonda and I asked for a grade on empathy. She said: “The session feels warm and I feel connected with both of you. A+” End of Part 1 Next week, you can hear the inspiring and moving conclusion of today's session.

What is the proper role of your emotions?  Should you trust them?  How do you know when they are helping and when they are hurting?  Today we’ll take a look at another exciting advantage that Christianity provides.  In this episode, you’ll learn about the problems endemic to emotional reasoning, the robust biblical teaching about your Read more about 400 Why Christianity 13: The Heart (Sean Finnegan)[…]

What is the proper role of your emotions?  Should you trust them?  How do you know when they are helping and when they are hurting?  Today we’ll take a look at another exciting advantage that Christianity provides.  In this episode, you’ll learn about the problems endemic to emotional reasoning, the robust biblical teaching about your Read more about 400 Why Christianity 13: The Heart (Sean Finnegan)[…]

Live Work with Elizabeth, Part 2 (of 2) “I’m tired of being terrified. I want to be at peace!” Last week, we brought you Part 1 of a session with a women who's been struggling with anxiety and the fear of poverty every since she was 13 years old. that included T = Testing and E = Empathy, including an empathy error that David and Jill corrected. Today, we bring you the conclusion of that amazing session! After the empathy correction, Elizabeth suddenly said: “I don’t talk about this stuff very much as an adult. I’m feeling overwhelmed in a good way right now. A sense of peace is opening up.” You can review the partially completed Daily Mood Log Elizabeth gave us at the start of the sess if you click here. Her goal for the session was to get some relief from the constant pressure she put herself under to function and to keep her practice full. A = Assessment of Resistance Together, we did Positive Reframing with her negative thoughts and feelings, asking: What does this thought or feeling show about you and your core values that’s positive and awesome? What are some benefits, or advantages, of this thought or feeling? Together, we came up with this list of the positives. They keep me moving. They are very familiar. They show I’ve got a good work ethic. They show I’m a responsible human being. They show I care deeply about my family and my business. They show I’m determined to change the family history of failure and deprivation. The anxiety protects me from failure. It has kept me alive. It has paid the bills. Keeps me independent and self-supportive. Shows I’m strong and confident. Shows my love for my daughter. You can see Elizabeth’s Daily Mood Log with her goals for each negative feeling cluster if you click here. M = Methods Next we helped Elizabeth challenge her negative thoughts using Identify the Distortions, Explain the Distortions, and Externalization of Voices, starting with her seventh Negative Thought, “I need the pressure to function,” which she initially believed 100%. She identified the following cognitive distortions in this thought: All-or-Nothing Thinking, Jumping to Conclusions (Fortune Telling), Emotional Reasoning, and Magnification / Minimization. She decided to challenge the Negative Thought with this Positive Thought: I do not need pressure to function. I have functioned many times without pressure just fine. She believed this thought 100%, and this reduced her belief in the Negative Thought to 10%. Then we did Externalization of Voices with this thought and many others. Then David suggested Cognitive Flooding. The idea is to flood yourself with anxiety by imagining whatever it is that terrifies you the most. Every minute or two you record the time, your anxiety (0 to 100), and any fantasies you are having. The goal is to make yourself as anxious as possible for as long as possible. Over time, your anxiety falls, and eventually disappears. This can be frightening, and requires some courage on the part of the therapist and patient, but it can be extremely helpful and often works rapidly. Cognitive Flooding Flow Sheet   Time Anxiety Fantasy Comment 6:34 100 I am looking at my appointment schedule, which is only half full, and the phone is not ringing with new patients   6:35 100 Only two patients are scheduled, no one is calling to inquire about therapy   6:36 110 My throat is getting tight, and I’m telling myself that other clinicians in our practice rely on me, and I’m letting them down.   6:37 Eliz can fill in anxiety ratings, perhaps I’m asking myself, “What will we do? What’s going to happen?”   6:38 Eliz can fill in anxiety ratings, perhaps My schedule is drying up. My associates don’t have any patients. Jill begins with the What-If Technique. What’s the worst that could happen? 6:39 Eliz can fill in anxiety ratings, perhaps The economy is crashing. I have to let go of my associates. This is devastating. And then what? What’s the worst that could happen? 6:40 Eliz can fill in anxiety ratings, perhaps I’m standing in my office by myself. Everyone is gone. I’m alone. No one is calling for training or treatment. And then what? What’s the worst that could happen? 6:42 50 I have to keep working alone in a dark office until I’m 80 years old. And then what? What’s the worst that could happen? 6:43 30 Now I’m 85 years old, still trying to make things worse. My husband has a heart attack and Parkinson’s Disease. Now I have to treat people for free.   At this point something unexpected happened. Elizabeth burst into tears, and said: “I’m angry because this is what I’ve always wanted to do. . . I don’t want to have to charge people for therapy. I just want to treat people for free. She said the flooding was powerful, and melted the conflict she’d been experiencing: “I want to embrace therapy, and do something for free. I love doing therapy. And my biggest fear is that I cannot do that!” David suggested doing the cognitive flooding whenever she felt a pang of anxiety about her practice. You can see Elizabeth's end-of-session Daily Mood Log if you click here. Jill suggested a homework assignment for Elizabeth after the session: You can develop a cognitive flooding script with the What-If Technique. Record it on your phone, and listen to it daily until you get bored and your anxiety no longer flares up. Here is Elizabeth’s follow-up report: I did two rewrites on the script and listen to it daily for about two weeks. The in vivo exposure was to take my schedule offline for at least two weeks and stop trying to keep it full.  I took my schedule offline until Saturday, March 13th thru Tuesday, April 6th.  I have not scheduled anyone new or additional clients during this time.  And clients have not had access to my online schedule during this time. I have gone through varying degrees of anxiety and woke up once in the wee hours of the morning to worry, but overall, there has been a significant decline in my anxiety, worry and checking to see if my schedule is full. This exposure has been very powerful! Jill added this teaching point about Cognitive Flooding: You have the patient imagine the worst thing that could possibly happen and tell it in the narrative form, so it sounds like the What-If Technique playing out...For example, someone with OCD and fears of contamination can tell the story of the worst thing that could happen... "and then I would be dirty, and then I would contaminate my child, and she would get sick, and end up in the hospital, and . . . " etc. At the same time, you also focus on the patient's negative thoughts and feelings and take anxiety ratings every minute or so. The M = Methods illustrated in the podcast include: What’s my grade? What-If Technique Downward Arrow Technique. Daily Mood Log Positive Reframing Identify the Distortions Examine the Evidence Externalization of Voices Cognitive Flooding (combined with What-If Technique) In vivo exposure and response prevention (Jill’s homework assignment for Elizabeth) After each Tuesday group, we get quantitative and qualitative feedback from the members about the quality of the teaching. You can see some of the teaching feedback for the session if you click here. Rhonda and I, and all the members of our Stanford Tuesday training group, and all of our thousands of podcast fans, want to thank you, Elizabeth and give you a great virtual hug! Rhonda and David Follow-Up I just received this lovely note from Elizabeth to report on what has happened since her session in the Tuesday group. Hello Group, Last week April 7th, my schedule went back online after being offline for three weeks.  The process was seamless, my practice did not fall apart.  The other clinician's schedule did not become empty and we did not get a bad reputation.   I no longer fear I will be 80 years old, desperate with a handful of clients and supporting my husband who has a terminal illness.  Or my daughter having to financially support us both.  Even as I write this I am smiling and laughing a bit.  I do not feel driven by the fear of financial ruin nor have I compulsively checked my schedule making sure it is full.  I have more brain space for other things. I believe I have the peace I requested in my miracle cure.  Of course, I will relapse, I already have a couple of times and I have quickly recentered. A deep heartfelt Thanks to David, Jill, and all of you who participated with feedback or witnessed my personal work. My Warmest Regards, Elizabeth

Just because you feel it, doesn’t mean it’s true. Just because you think it, doesn’t mean it’s accurate.

In this episode of the Mindset Series I am breaking down the Emotional Reasoning Cognitive Distortion. A thinking pattern that leads us to create scenarios in our mind based on how we feel.

In this episode of the BrightSpot podcast, Mata and I discuss the cognitive distortion of emotional reasoning. Briefly touched on in the previous episodes, we dive a little deeper on the meaning and prevalence, tell our personal experiences with this distortion, how we coped with the thoughts and how you can too. Enjoy!

Cognitive distortions are habitual ways of thinking that are often inaccurate and negatively biased. Cognitive distortions usually develop over time in response to adverse events. There are at least 10 common distorted thinking patterns that have been identified by researchers. Cognitive Distortions – erroneous patterns of thinking. Examples: All-or-Nothing Thinking; Overgeneralizing; Discounting the Positive; Jumping to Conclusions; Mind Reading; Fortune Telling; Magnification (Catastrophizing) and Minimizing; Emotional Reasoning; Should Statements; Labeling and Mislabeling; Personalization. Interventions: CBT treatment usually involves efforts to change thinking patterns. These strategies might include: Learning to recognize one's distortions in thinking that are creating problems, and then to reevaluate them in light of reality. Gaining a better understanding of the behavior and motivation of others. Using problem-solving skills to cope with difficult situations. Learning to develop a greater sense of confidence is one's own abilities. CBT treatment also usually involves efforts to change behavioral patterns. These strategies might include: Facing one's fears instead of avoiding them. Using role playing to prepare for potentially problematic interactions with others. Learning to calm one's mind and relax one's body. Author & Book that Ayan mentioned Brene Brown The Gifts of Imperfection. Podcasts that discuss various following topic : The Terri Cole Show, Therapy for Black Girls and Angry Therapist Podcast.

In this episode Tracy & Megan help you discover 1 of the 7 deadly distortions and how it can wreck havoc in your life. We all partake in emotional reasoning from time to time, learn how to identify it and how to get yourself out of this distortion. Download the 7 deadly distortions book here.

In this episode, I go over the ten most common forms of unhealthy thinking patterns. Because of the mind-body connection, these toxic thinking patterns can compromise our physical well-being. 1:51 - Why our thought lives matter to our physical well-being 4:24 - A Northwest Airlines crew flies drunk 6:33 - Top Ten unhealthy thinking patterns 13:37 - Emotional Reasoning 17:18 - Summary

Today we wrap up the series on Problematic Thinking Patterns with Emotional Reasoning. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/ihateanxiety/support

Today we wrap up the series on Problematic Thinking Patterns with Emotional Reasoning. Click on the below link to learn more about the I Can Overcome Anxiety 30-Day Challenge and receive a 50% Discount if you purchase by midnight on Sunday November 1st, 2020. https://larryquicksall.podia.com/i-can-overcome-anxiety-30-day-challenge?coupon=KICKOFF-50-OFF --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/ihateanxiety/support

Emotional Reasoning...what is it and how can we work with our emotions instead of letting our emotions work against us? Our minds can become clouded with the strength of our emotions, which is why we need these 3 emotional reasoning steps so we can enter into emotional strength - handling our emotions wisely, appropriately, and with compassion. The Growth Project | Dr. Cory Shaffer & Dr. Katie Nichols

When we reason from how we feel, we can quickly make a mess of things and cause ourselves undue emotional turmoil. Let's learn a better way. If you haven't already, subscribe now so you never miss a Wednesday episode! --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/craig-westhoff/support

When we reason from how we feel, we can quickly make a mess of things and cause ourselves undue emotional turmoil. Let's learn a better way.

Emotional Reasoning --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

Popular culture reasons with emotion. I don’t feel saved therefore I must not be saved. That is an example. We see it in political views and in our walk with God, people ignoring the evidence before them to believe what their emotions are telling them in a distortion of reality. This is how to identify it and change your life.

Today, the Cognitive Distortion Starter Kit Continues with Emotional Reasoning Rhonda begins by reading a beautiful emails from a listener who was greatly inspired and helped by the personal work Marilyn Coffee did on several previous podcast. I also give a brief shout out for my new book, Feeling Great, which can be pre-ordered on Amazon now (see below for the link). Rhonda and David begin with a brief overview of Emotional Reasoning. this is a term i coined when I first created the list of ten cognitive distortions in the mid-to late 1970s. There is the definition: Emotional Reasoning is when you reason from how you feel. Here are several examples: “I feel like a loser, so I must really be a loser.” “I feel hopeless, so I must be hopeless.” “I feel anxious, so I must be in danger.” “I feel like a bad therapist, so I must really be one." “I feel judged. This means that people are judging me.” “I feel guilty. This means that I did something bad.” Emotional Reasoning is a distortion because your feelings all result from your thoughts. And if your thoughts are distorted, then your emotions / feelings will not reflect reality. Sometimes, your feelings are no more realistic than the images you see in funhouse mirrors in an amusement park.  This is worth knowing because for decades mental health professionals have promoted the ideas that getting in touch with your feelings is the key to mental health. There's truth in everything, and this is sometimes true. Being open with your feelings can be an important key to intimacy and to genuine relationships with others. But your feelings can also deceive you. For example, the feeling of hopelessness is always based on distortions and is never true. But sometimes believe it so strongly that they attempt suicide as the only escape from their suffering. David and Rhonda discuss examples of emotional reasoning and the techniques that can be helpful, including, but not limited to: The Double Standard Technique The Socratic Method Truth Based Techniques, such as: Examine the Evidence The Experimental Technique The Survey Technique David describes a father who was convinced he was a bad father because he shouted at his sons, and Rhonda describes an aspiring writer she recently treated who felt like she was dull and unimportant prior to a meeting with prospective agents. We are nearing the end of the distortion series, but still have two mega-important distortions to discuss: Should Statements Blame David mentions that Emotional Reasoning is not only important in emotional problems like depression and anxiety, but also in anger and conflict with others, as well as racial and religious bias. You feel like other racial or religious groups are inferior, and you feel superior, so you think you are right! Thank so much for listening. If you like our podcasts, tell your friends, colleagues, and patients about them! This is all volunteer work, so our only marketing budget is your good will. Each month our downloads are increasing, thanks to you, and we will hit three million downloads early next year or late this year. Rhonda and David  

Looking for an accountability partner as well additional motivation? Check out the Logical Losers Club at *www.logicallosers.com* ( http://www.logicallosers.com ) Here are the 10 Unhelpful Thinking Styles *1. Mental Filter:* *2. Jumping to Conclusions* : *3. Personalization:* *4. Black and White Thinking:* *5. Catastrophising* : . *6. Overgeneralizing:* *7. Shoulding and Musting* :. *8. Labeling:* *9. Magnification and Minimization* : *10. Emotional Reasoning* :

Cognitive Distortions: 1) Emotional Reasoning 2) Catastrophizing 3) Over Generalizing 4) Dichotomized Thinking 5) Mind Reading 6) Labeling 7) Negative Filtering 8) Discounting Positives 9) Blaming 

Our mind reacts emotionally and makes excuses so we don't have to move into uncomfortable situations or things that we find scary and fearful, this may be areas of change. It is important to challenge this emotional reasoning as this may be exactly what is holding us back. The things that fear us the most may well be the things we need to work on the most

Often, we unknowingly set thinking traps for ourselves, which trip us into a cycle of negative thoughts. These thinking traps, otherwise known as COGNITIVE DISTORTIONS, are like our inner bullies, convincing us that we are not good enough, and not worthy of happiness or love. In this episode, we explain 3 forms of Cognitive Distortions: Polarised thinking, Filtering, and Emotional Reasoning, and see how they contribute to depressive states. You will also learn the 4 Ds to overcome these negative thought patterns, and also a very simple Positive Psychology Intervention exercise to shift you into a more positive state! Learn the tools to support yourself and others towards healthier mental states, right now! Brought to you by The School of Positive Psychology

Addiction and Betrayal Trauma both have a dramatic impact on the brain and the heart! And one of the primary barriers to our recovery and healing is our THINKING ERRORS!In this episode Mark and Steve give personal examples from their own lives about two BIG thinking errors—EMOTIONAL REASONING and the UNREAL IDEAL. You'll learn how these to thinking errors work, effect us and get in the way of our healing. You'll also learn HOW to move them out of the way so you can progress forward in your recovery and healing--for you and your marriage!Visit the PBSE website at: pbsepodcast.comFind out more about Steve Moore at: Ascension CounselingLearn more about Mark Kastleman at: Reclaim Counseling ServicesWant to learn more about HOW to break free from porn?—https://www.reclaimcounselingservices.com/overcome-porn-sex-addictionEver wonder WHY LDS men suffer so much shame from porn use?—https://www.reclaimcounselingservices.com/lds-porn-addiction-helpNeed help healing from Betrayal Trauma?—https://www.reclaimcounselingservices.com/healing-betrayal-trauma-videoWant to mend your marriage relationship?—https://www.reclaimcounselingservices.com/how-to-mend-your-marriage

On today's podcast I talk about the difference between evidence-based reasoning and emotional reasoning. Which do you think leads to recovery and which do you think leads to ongoing anxiety? Find out the answer in today's podcast. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/ihateanxiety/support

On today’s podcast I talk about the difference between evidence-based reasoning and emotional reasoning. Which do you think leads to recovery and which do you think leads to ongoing anxiety? Find out the answer in today’s podcast.

Assuming that because we feel a certain way what we think must be true. I feel embarrassed so I must be an idiot.

David and Rhonda are joined in today’s podcast by Dr. Taylor Chesney, a former student of David’s who is now the head of the Feeling Good Institute of New York City. She is a prominent TEAM-CBT therapist and trainer, and specializes in the treatment of children and teenagers. Taylor kindly agreed to do some live work today on her panic and despair because of the impact of the pandemic on her family. Her situation is especially challenging and poignant because her husband, Gregg, is a highly esteemed Emergency Room / Intensive Care physician in New York, and he is constantly working to save the lives of Covid-19 victims. Ten days ago he moved to a separate apartment several blocks away so he will not put his wife and children in harm’s way in case he contracts the Covid-19 virus. But will he, himself, be struck down by this vicious virus? He told Taylor that he recently had to intubate several of his colleagues, which is horrifying. Taylor fears that  she may lose her beloved husband, and that her three children may have to grow up without a father. She also feels overwhelmed because she’s supporting many people now. David begins with a brief overview of the cognitive model, including several key points: All negative feelings result from thoughts, and not from what’s actually happening. So even in a crisis that is as real and devastating as the Covid-19 pandemic, all of our emotions will still result from the way we think about it. Remember the teachings of Epictetus 2,000 years ago, when he wrote: “People are disturbed, not by things, but by the views we take of them.” This is potentially empowering, because we usually cannot change the fact—the pandemic is real and we are powerless to make it disappear—but we may be able to change our perceptions (eg thoughts, or “cognitions”) about what’s happening. There’s a healthy and an unhealthy version of every kind of negative feeling. For example, healthy fear is not the same as unhealthy anxiety; healthy sadness and grief are not the same as clinical depression; healthy remorse is not the same as neurotic guilt. And so forth. Our goal is not teaching you how to be happy all the time no matter what—that would be absurd—but simply to reduce or eliminate unhealthy negative feelings. Healthy negative feelings result from valid negative thoughts, and do not have to be “treated.” Unhealthy negative feelings, in contrast, result from negative thoughts that are distorted and illogical. David reminds us that even in a crisis, depression and anxiety are still the world’s oldest cons, and that you CAN change the way you feel. But is this possible? It just doesn’t sound right! Can Taylor really change the way she thinks and feels when the crisis is so overwhelming and so real? And can you? As the session unfolds, Taylor tearfully describes her intense fears for her husband, who she loves so greatly, as well as their three young children. She says that 75% of the time, she’s “okay,” when she’s awake and involved with caring for her kids, but 25% of the time—especially late at night when she’s alone with the kids—things get pretty desperate, and sobs for 30 minutes or more while experiencing “sheer terror.” What’s making the situation more painful is that Gregg is temporarily living six blocks away in order to protect his family in the event he does contract the potentially deadly virus. Taylor says that “it feels like we’re kicking him out. He’s at war. He’s fighting, struggling, suffering.” She says he’s passionate about his work, but she wishes he’d quit! Take a look at Taylor's  Daily Mood Log at the start of the session. As you can see, she is focusing on how she is feeling every night before going to sleep. She circled seven different categories of negative feelings, and all are intense, including the depression, anxiety and frustration clusters (all are 100%), the lonely and hopeless categories (both 90%), as well as feeling “bad” (50%.) You can also see the negative thoughts she recorded. She is telling herself that: Negative Thoughts % Now 1.      I shouldn’t have to do this alone. 90 2.      I can’t handle parenting alone. 70 3.      I shouldn’t burden Gregg with my feelings. 70 4.      I should share my feelings. 50 5.      I should be strong and tough. 80 6.      I’ll let my patients down if I don’t have enough time for them. 50 7.      I’ll lose Gregg. 50 - 100 8.      I shouldn’t have to do this. 100 9.      I should be able to work and support my family while Gregg stays at           home safely. 50 You can also see that her belief in these thoughts varied from 50% to 100%. After empathizing for 30 minutes, Rhonda and David asked about her goals for the session, which would be to turn down the intensity of her negative feelings. Together, Rhonda, Taylor and David do Positive Reframing, asking two questions about each negative thought and feeling: What does this negative thought or feeling show about Taylor that’s positive and awesome? What are some benefits, or advantages, of this negative thought or feeling? Together, they generate an impressive list of Positives. Then Taylor decides she can use the Magic Dial and reduce her negative feelings, while not eliminating them completely, as you can see at this link. Then they use a variety of techniques to challenge each negative thought, staring with #4, “I shouldn’t share my feelings.” Taylor identifies many distortions in this thought, including Should Statement, Emotional Reasoning, Mind-Reading, Self-Blame, and Mental Filter. Taylor decides to think about it like this instead: “It’s okay to share my feelings. It could bring us closer together. It’s human to be struggling, given the circumstances. My feelings matter to Gregg.” She believes this Positive Thought 100%, and her belief in the Negative Thought fell to 5%, which was enough, since there was a little truth in the thought. You might have to be thoughtful about the timing of self-disclosure. Rhonda and David continue to challenge the rest of Taylor’s Negative Thoughts, using a variety of techniques such as the Externalization of Voices, Acceptance Paradox, Paradoxical Double Standard Technique, and more. The most challenging Negative Thought was #7—her fear that Gregg might die. At the end of the session Taylor recorded a substantial reduction in her negative feelings. Thanks for tuning in, and please let us know what you thought about today’s program! Rhonda, Taylor, and David

With the "Shelter in Place" orders in California, we are recording these podcasts from our homes instead of from the Murietta Studios.  The sound quality may not be as high as usual while we are learning to use the new technology. (I apologize for the echo in this week's podcast. It won't be there again-Rhonda) Let us know what you think!  Thank you, David & Rhonda David and Rhonda are joined again in today’s podcast by Jeremy Karmel, who is working with David on the new Feeling Great app. In our first Corona Cast, we promised to present an example of how TEAM-CBT can be helpful for individuals who feel depressed and anxious about the personal impact of the pandemic. Rhonda kick starts today’s session by describing her treatment with a patient we're calling Alice just a few days ago. Alice woke up feeling stressed and having trouble settling in and getting to work. If you click here, you can see how she filled out the first few steps of the Daily Mood Log just before the start of her session with Rhonda. The Upsetting Event was simply waking up and feeling out of sorts. She circled and rated her negative emotions, which were fairly intense, especially the feelings of depression, anxiety, inadequacy, despair, frustration. Her anxiety was only minimal, but she was also feeling tremendously "jittery." Why was Alice feeling so upset? Her feelings didn't result from the corona virus epidemic, but from her thoughts about it. As you can see, she was telling herself: 1.      This could be the new normal. 2.      My life is going to waste. 3.      I should be handling this better. 4.      I could catch the virus and die. 5.      No one is in charge. She strongly believed all of these thoughts except #4, which she only believed 40%. You may recall that in order to feel upset, two things must be true: You must have one or more negative thoughts on your mind. You must strongly believe these thoughts. How are we going to help Alice? In the old days, I would have jumped right in to help Alice challenge her Negative Thoughts, but now we have a far more powerful and systematic approach called TEAM-CBT, as most podcast fans probably already know! These are the four steps of TEAM-CBT: T = Testing. Rhonda tested how Alice was feeling at the start and end of the session. E = Empathy. Rhonda provided warmth and support without trying to "help" or "cheer-lead." A = Assessment of Resistance. This is one of the unique aspects of TEAM-CBT, and it's the secret of ultra-rapid recovery. Rhonda used the Miracle Cure Question, Magic Button, Positive Reframing, and Magic Dial to bring Alice's "resistance" to change to conscious awareness, then quickly reduced it before trying to "help." M = Methods. Rhonda helped Alice identify the many cognitive distortions in her thoughts. For example, her first Negative Thought, "This could be the new normal," was an example of All-or-Nothing Thinking, Overgeneralization, Mental Filtering, Discounting the Positive, Fortune Telling, and Emotional Reasoning. The goal of the M = Methods phase is to crush the Negative Thoughts that  are upsetting you. Do you know how to do this? You have to come up with a Positive Thought that has two characteristics: It must be 100% true. Positive affirmations and rationalizations and half truths are worthless. Cognitive therapy is based on the Biblical idea the "The truth shall set you free." The Positive Thought must drastically reduce your belief in the Negative Thought you've recorded on your Daily Mood Log, and ideally your belief in it will go all the way to zero. In fact, the very instant you stop believing the Negative Thought, your feelings will change, and often quite dramatically. Rhonda helped Alice challenge her Negative thoughts with a powerful technique called the Externalization of Voices. For example, Alice was telling herself that "I should be handling this better" because she'd been having trouble adjusting to the home isolation and had been procrastinating instead of focusing on her writing, and she was also telling herself that "My life is going to waste," thinking she'd be procrastinating and feeling miserable forever: "The new normal." The Positive Thought that crushed it was, "I have a lot of experience as a self-starter, and I've got eight weeks of free time now to write, which is pretty awesome. In addition, I can give myself a break, instead of putting myself down, and give myself a little to regroup!" After all, there are hundreds of millions of people around the world who are feeling isolated and in distress, and probably most of them aren't being nearly as productive as they usually are, but clearly, that isn't going to go on forever! Instead of putting yourself down, you can give yourself some support and encouragement, in exactly the same way you might talk to a dear friend. Once Alice crushed her Negative Thoughts with strong Positive Thoughts, her feelings suddenly changed. Although the session was only one hour long, Alice experienced incredible improvements in how she felt, thanks to Rhonda's compassion and skillful guidance. Alice's depression went from 95 to 5, and her anxiety dropped from 95 all the way to zero. The rest of her negative feelings dropped to very low levels or zero as well. Did it last? Long-term follow-up isn't possible for such a recent session, but she did call Rhonda the next morning to say that she woke up Feeling Great . . . which is the name of my new book, due for release in September. You can see the cover below! If you want, pre-ordering on Amazon may be available by the time you hear this podcast. In next week's Corona Cast 3, we will switch our focus to the impact of the pandemic on personal relationships, using a real example of a young woman named Zeina who felt her mother, aged 72, was not being sufficiently careful about social distancing. Zeina felt panicky because she feared her mother would get the virus and die. They ended up arguing and feeling frustrated with each other. We will illustrate a sophisticated TEAM-CBT technique called "Forced Empathy" that brought tears to Zeina's eyes, and we'll also talk to you about how you can improve your relationships with friends and loved ones as well during these challenging times. Thanks for tuning in, and let us know what you thought about today’s program! Until next time, Rhonda, Jeremy, and David  

With the "Shelter in Place" orders in California, we are recording these podcasts from our homes instead of from the Murietta Studios.  The sound quality may not be as high as usual until we all get the necessary recording equipment, and learn the new technology.  Please bare with us during this transition.  Thank you, David & Rhonda David and Rhonda are joined in today’s podcast by Jeremy Karmel, who is working with David on the new Feeling Great app, and Dr. Alex Clarke, a former student of David’s who is practicing TEAM therapy / psychiatry at the Feeling Good Institute in Mountain View, California. One of our loyal podcast fans, Phil McCormack, sent a heartwarming email which read, in part: In light of the pandemic taking us into uncharted territories, I thought it might be interesting to hear of some tips from you that would help folks deal with the situation, kind of like the David’s Top Ten Tips podcast but this one focused on the hysteria which is prevalent as I write. I’m sure your fans would appreciate it and it might be a good jump start for your new book and app, both called Feeling Great. I realize you are incredibly busy and don’t expect an answer. And if you want to tell me to screw myself, I can use your techniques to handle that! I responded like this: Thanks, Phil. I’m trying to put together at least two or three podcasts on the coronavirus from a variety of perspectives! Might read you question to kick start the first one we do, if that’s okay. david Phil immediately shot back this email: You’re an animal! I have no idea of where you get all your energy and motivation–obviously your techniques work (drug free!) so that must be part of it! Kudos to you for all your effort. It is so, so much appreciated!! I sincerely hope you someday get the recognition you deserve!!! I think Feeling Great might be your ticket... Hope so. Please feel free to read question and thanks for not telling me to “screw myself!” Really appreciate that! Phil How cool is that! Rhonda and I are planning several podcasts on this important topic including today’s as well as a podcast on how Rhonda used TEAM to help a woman with severe feelings of depression, anxiety, inadequacy, despair and frustration about the current corona crisis in a single session. We are also planning podcasts on how to communicate with friends and loved ones during the crisis, as well as a survey to assess changes in mood (depression, anxiety, anger, relationship satisfaction and happiness) since the corona virus hit, and possibly  more. When the survey is ready, we’ll announce it and send you a link in case you’d like to let us know how you've been feeling, and how your feelings might have changed since the virus hit! Rhonda kick starts today’s session by reading a list of negative thoughts from folks who are freaked out about the corona virus, including these: Negative Thoughts with Probable Cognitive Distortions The world will turn into an apocalypse. I’ll be a carrier and won’t know it and then I'll infect my partner and children who will get really sick. I’m divorced and I think my ex- will try to keep me from my kids. She won’t be as vigilant as I am about keeping our kids healthy. They’ll get sick and infect me. I’m looking for a job right now, but no one will be hiring for a long time and I’ll never get a job. I won’t have enough money to pay my rent and I’ll be evicted from my apartment and end up homeless (or) my business will go out of business. I won't have enough money to have fun for several months. My parents will contract the virus, especially one of my parents who has some chronic health stuff, and get really sick or die. I’m going to get cabin fever. I will lose a sense of self/connection to reality with how surreal everything is. People in my life will die from the virus. * * * Negative Thoughts that are Probably Not Distorted The numbers of infected people are way higher than what's being reported because there's no testing The pandemic is worsening. The pandemic will get much worse than we realize now. Needier populations -- people who have lost work who really need it (restaurant workers, hotel, caterers, production staff, people with no savings, etc) — will suffer. The social fabric is going to break down. Things are going to continue worsening as climate change worsens. I live too far from my parents to help take care of them. Rhonda, Alex, David, and Jeremy begin by discussing several of the basic ideas of TEAM-CBT. We feel the way we think. In other words, the events of this world—like the corona virus—cannot have any effect on how we feel. All of our negative and positive feelings result from our thoughts, or “cognitions.” This idea goes back nearly 2,000 years to the teachings of the Greek Stoic philosopher, Epictetus, who said that people are disturbed, not by the things that happen, but by our views of them. Some negative feelings are healthy and some or not. Healthy fear is not the same as neurotic anxiety. Healthy sadness is not the same as depression. Healthy remorse is not the same as neurotic anxiety. And so forth. Healthy anger is not the same as unhealthy anger. Healthy negative feelings result from valid negative thoughts, like “We are in danger because of the spread of the corona virus, and we need to be vigilant to protect ourselves and our loved ones.” Unhealthy negative feelings result from distorted negative thoughts, like "The world will turn into an apocalypse." Anxiety, panic, and depression, in contrast, result from distorted negative thoughts, like many of those that Rhonda read. For example, think about this thought: “My parents will die and I may never see them again.” Review the list of  cognitive distortions and see if you can spot some! This thought is likely to be at least somewhat distorted since your parents probably won’t die. For example, in China there have been around 3,300 deaths so far, and the epidemic has finally been slowing in the past few days. Since there are more than a billion people in China, the odds that you or someone in your family will die, while significant, appear to be incredibly low. So while there is clearly some risk, the distortion would be Magnification, Fortune Telling, and Emotional Reasoning, the three distortions that trigger all feelings of anxiety. In addition, you can see your parents right now if you like, using Skype, for example. So, while that thought also contains a grain of truth, it arguably involves Discounting the Positive as well. In spite of these considerations, TEAM therapist don’t try to “fix” or “help” just because someone may have distorted negative thoughts. Trying to help without first addressing therapeutic resistance is the most common error therapists make, and the most common error most people us make. For example, you will hear politicians telling people to “stay CALM,” or trying to encourage people with good news or promises which sometimes don’t seem entirely honest. Instead of jumping in and trying to "help," TEAM-CBT therapists first ask the person who is upset if they are looking for help. Sometimes, people aren't asking for "help" or cheer-leading, they just want someone to listen and provide validation and support. If the person does want help with negative feelings like panic, depression, frustration, loneliness, or inadequacy, we do a little thought experiment and say: "Imagine that we had a Magic Button, and if press it, all your negative feelings will instantly vanish, with no effort, and you'll feel terrific. Will you push the Magic Button?" Most people say they'd gladly push the button! Then we say that while we don't have a Magic Button, we've got some tremendous techniques that could help them reduce or even eliminate their negative feelings, but don't think it would be such a good idea to do that because their negative thoughts and feelings may be expressions of their core values as a human being, and what is most beautiful and awesome about them, and that their may be some important benefits, or advantages of their negative thoughts and feelings. And maybe we should list those before making any decision to press the Magic Button and make everything disappear. If you're upset, you can try this right now. First, circle your negative feelings and estimate how strong each category is, between 0 and 100%. If you click here, you can see an example of this on the Emotions table of the Daily Mood Log of a woman who was upset about the corona virus scare. Then ask these two questions about each feeling: What does this negative feelings show about me and my core values that’s positive and awesome? What are some benefits or advantages of this negative feelings are. How might it help me, or my loved ones? I call this new technique Positive Reframing. In other words, I want to honor your negative thoughts and feelings before we think about changing them! This is called Positive Reframing and it is the key to the incredibly rapid changes we typically see when using TEAM-CBT.  Typically, we come up with a list of a long list of compelling positives. Then I point out that if they push the Magic Button, all those positives will go down the drain, along with their negative feelings. Would they really want to do that? Now you're in a trap, or dilemma. One the one hand, you are suffering and desperately want to feel better. But at the same time, you don't want to lose all of those awesome positives! Fortunately, we can resolve this paradox. Instead of trying to make your negative feelings disappear by pushing the Magic Button, imagine that we had a Magic Dial instead, and you could dial each negative feeling down to a lower level that would allow you to keep all the positives on your list, and still feel better. What would you dial each type of negative feeling down to? For example, if you're feeling 80% panic or 90% depressed or angry about the corona virus, and you could dial each emotion down to a lower level, what would you dial them down to? You can see an example of this if you click here. As you can see, this person has put these new levels in the "% Goal" column of the emotion table. Jeremy provides a touching real life example of this. He feel intense anger because his fiancé, a nurse—is working in a hospital with a shortage of protective masks. He becomes tearful when he realizes that his anger is actually an expression of his intense love for her. The change in how he feels is almost instantaneous, and touching. The group further illustrate this by using Positive Reframing with many of the negative feelings our podcast listeners like you may be having. Jeremy concludes by drawing a critically important distinction between Positive Reframing, which is nearly always helpful, and “cheer leading,” which is rarely or never helpful, and  can actually be downright irritating! This table below highlights some of the critical differences. Is Positive Reframing Just Cheerleading Warmed Over? by David and Jeremy Cheer Leading Positive Reframing You’re trying to cheer someone up to make them feel better. You are highlighting the benefits of NOT changing. You say generally nice things about someone, like “you’re a good person,” or “you’re a survivor,” or “don’t be so hard on yourself.” The positives are not general but embedded within specific negative thoughts and feelings. You don’t acknowledge the validity or beauty of the person’s negative thoughts and emotions. In fact, you’re trying to tell them that they’re wrong to feel upset! This is always preceded by doing superb empathy. Positive Reframing is actually a deeper form of empathy because you’re honoring the patient’s core values. Cheerleading is irritating to almost everybody who’s upset, because you aren’t listening or showing any compassion or respect. The effect is enlightening and leads to feelings of relief, pride, peace, and acceptance. You’re trying to control the other person. You’re telling them how they should think and feel. There’s no acceptance. You’re Sitting with Open Hands. You’re bringing hidden motivations to conscious awareness so they can decide where to steer the ship. Hollow praise sounds dismissive, glib, and insincere. This technique is very difficult and challenging to learn because you have to let go of the idea that you know what’s best for other people. Thanks for tuning in, and let us know what you thought about today’s program! Oh, if you clicked on the two links to the Daily Mood Log of the woman who was intensely upset about the corona virus, and want to find out what happened in her magical TEAM-CBT session with Rhonda, tune in to our next CoronaCast! Until then, Rhonda, Alex, Jeremy, and David

In this episode we discuss ways to identify and win the battle over emotional reasoning and reacting. We discuss ways of learning to become more consciously aware of your emotions and the thoughts creating those emotions so you can learn better ways of navigating stress and conflict more effectively and create more positive results in your life and business. 

BROKEN CLOCK - A PODCAST ABOUT THE LOST ART OF CRITICAL THINKING!EMOTIONAL REASONING - Yes, that's an oxymoron, but it's also what guides many people to vote for political parties or candidates - even when that vote is, logically, against their own best interests.Liana Kerzner and Maus Merryjest delve into decision-making paralysis, rationalization fallacies, appeals to antiquity, feelings of betrayal, and other reasons people make political decisions without even knowing why._________ Hey - use some of that re-invigorated critical thinking ability and support our mission at FU_Politics -  restoring intelligent discourse, a sense of humour, civility and fact-based opinions to important conversations. Shows that sound like you - because we are you.  Become a monthly patron at patreon.com/funetworktv or give us a one time boost at Paypal - funetworktv@gmail.com. FU_Politics - where Smartass begins with Smart.Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/funetworktv Paypal: funetworktv@gmail.com Thank you!FIND US HERE UNDER FU_POLITICS:iTunes - Rate, Review and Subscribe!https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/fu-politics/id1472299923Spotifyhttps://open.spotify.com/show/4YQ4rklq8bcsmhTfqgj9jHiHeart Radiohttps://www.iheart.com/podcast/269-fu-politics-48983352/Podbeanhttps://fupolitics.podbean.comStitcherhttps://www.stitcher.com/podcast/fun-the-fu-network/fu-politicsGoogle Podcastshttps://podcasts.google.com/?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkLnBvZGJlYW4uY29tL2Z1cG9saXRpY3MvZmVlZC54bWw%3D&hl=en-CAYouTubehttps://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBRvebbl4FVT9dWt0IdE8ccD1cOkPO5a7Google Playhttps://play.google.com/music/m/Ilgcik5imfx5qwtzxivpyblb2p4Player FMhttps://player.fm/series/fu-politics-2521543Tune In / Alexahttp://tun.in/pjtS0Podtailhttps://podtail.com/en/podcast/fu-politics/Listen Noteshttps://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/fu_politics-fu-politics-jmLPHB1p8FD/Podbayhttps://podbay.fm/podcast/1472299923Castbox.FMhttps://castbox.fm/channel/FU_Politics-id2203478RSS Feedhttps://feed.podbean.com/fupolitics/feed.xml 

What is emotional reasoning? How does it work against us? How can we combat it?

In this episode we discuss the quote 'Reason is the slave of the passions' and work by Haidt such as his book 'The Righteous Mind'.What can be observed, in an array of contexts, is the primacy of emotional reasoning. We make emotional decisions, and work very hard to make our logical thoughts suit that initial decision.The problem is, that this effects the way we see the world, interact and debate. It fuels partisanship and makes it increasingly more acidic, as we commit more and more to our entrenched lines.Humanity, and the movement to unify, needs to understand this impulse, because we can't just make logical arguments, but ones that touch people. We cannot consider humanity in a purely logical sense, but the animals we are underneath, and what it is to truly BE human. We need to honour that humanity has a story, and its a story that continues into the future.Join us as we try and negotiate the topic of emotive reasoning, and see it within ourselves.

In this session we discuss Polarizing, Emotional Reasoning and Minimizing. 

Part two of the cognitive distortion episodes where I discuss the remaining 10 of 20 common cognitive distortions and how they are simply ways that our mind convinces us of something that isn’t really true. I share examples of each type of distortion in addition to helpful mindset shifts to help elevate out when you catch yourself stuck in a distortion cycle.  Cognitive Distortions covered in this episode:      11. Filtering       12. Labeling       13. Control Fallacy      14. Blaming      15. Self-Serving Bias      16. Emotional Reasoning      17. Always Being “Right”      18. “Heaven’s Reward” Fallacy      19. Fallacy Of Fairness      20. Fallacy Of Change Resources: Good Therapy   

Emotional reasoning is about using information in feelings (oneself or others) and combing it with other facts and information when decision-making. "The essential difference between emotion and reason is that emotion leads to action while reason leads to conclusions." Donald Calne I talk with Susan Judd from Dare to Care & HR Culture about how emotional reasoning and how to make those hard decisions. www.thrivingmatters.com.au

Our fourth & final episode in the Mental Health Awareness Series, emotional reasoning is a cognitive distortion affecting many marriages today. Tune in to find out how you might be engaging in emotional reasoning & what to do differently!If you enjoyed this episode, please:Subscribe!Share on your favorite social media platform!Rate & review on iTunes!Music:John Tibbs Music@johntibbsmusicPodcast Editing: Evan Duszynski

In this episode, Larry Quicksall explains the differences between Emotional Reasoning and Evidence Based Logic, and the roles they play in both anxiety developing and treatment. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/ihateanxiety/support

In this episode, Larry Quicksall explains the differences between Emotional Reasoning and Evidence Based Logic, and the roles they play in both anxiety developing and treatment.

This is David and Fabrice's top ten list for the worst errors therapists make. 1. Failure to Measure (symptoms, empathy and helpfulness). Research shows that therapists’ perceptions of how their patients feel, or feel about them, are not accurate. TEAM therapists measure symptom severity at the start and end of every therapy session with brief accurate scales that assess depression, suicidal urges, anxiety, anger, relationship satisfaction, and happiness. This allows therapists to see, for the first time, exactly how effective or ineffective they are in every single therapy session. This can be threatening to the therapist’s ego, but has revolutionized clinical practice. In addition, TEAM therapists assess the patient’s perception of therapist warmth, empathy, understanding, and helpfulness after every single session. The scales are extremely sensitive to therapist errors, and most therapists receive mostly failing grades from their patients initially when they use these scales, which can be a shock to the system! But dialoguing with the patient about the scores at the next therapy session can lead to breakthroughs in the clinical work and dramatic improvements in the quality of the therapeutic alliance. 2. Trying to help, “save,” “rescue” or “reassure” patients. Most therapists are addicted to this, but it simply triggers resistance. When therapists push in their efforts to help, most patients will push back. No one likes to be “sold” on anything. When patients are hurting, they want to be heard, not saved. In TEAM we do Paradoxical Agenda Setting before trying to “help.” We emphasize, in a respectful way, all the really GOOD reasons NOT to change. We also highlight what the patient’s symptoms, such as shame, depression, panic, defectiveness, hopelessness and anger, show about him or her that’s positive and awesome, Then we raise the question: “Given all those positives, why in the world would you want to change?” This strategy has led to breakthroughs in treatment, and I now see recovery from depression and anxiety at rates I would have impossible ten or fifteen years ago. 3. Reverse Hypnosis. Depressive hypnosis. The patient persuades the therapist that s/he really is worthless, inferior, and hopeless, and the therapist false into a trance and believes it! This dooms the therapy. Anxiety hypnosis. The patient persuades the therapist that s/he is to fragile to use exposure, or that the exposure is too dangerous, and the therapist buys right into it! This also dooms the therapy. Recovery from anxiety is more or less impossible without exposure. Relationship hypnosis. The patient persuades the therapist that s/he is the victim of some other person’s bad behavior, and that the other person is entirely to blame for the relationship conflict. Therapists almost always buy this message, and this also dooms the therapy. 4, Believing therapy must be slow and last a long time. This is taught in most graduate school programs, and tends to function as a self-fulfilling prophecy. I met a famous psychoanalyst who was proud that most of her patients had been in therapy for more than ten years, and a few were just now making baby steps, she said, toward change. With TEAM, I usually see a complete elimination of symptoms at the first therapy session, although it has to be a double session (two hours). In addition, the recover usually occurs in a burst, all at once, in just a few seconds, or in several sudden orbital leaps during the session. 5. Believing that the purpose of therapy is to get in touch with your feelings (Emotional Reasoning). This message has been pushed for years, and was the basis of my training. The idea was that people bottle up their feelings, like anger, and then it comes out as depression. The message is still pushed today! I’ve never seen much validity in this point of view. People can express their anger, their panic, and their feelings of worthlessness until the cows come home, but they’ll still be just as angry, panicky, and they’ll still feel worthless! There is at least one notable exception to this rule. Most anxious patients are exceptionally “nice” and sweep their feelings under the table. Then the feelings come out indirectly, as OCD, panic attacks, GAD, or a phobia, or even as somatic complaints such as chronic pain, fatigue, or dizziness. Bringing the suppressed feelings to conscious awareness and expressing them is the basis of my Hidden Emotion Technique, and it often leads to a sudden and complete recovery from any form of anxiety. 6. Confusing your own feelings for how the patient feels. This is a psychoanalytic error. I read an article on the psychoanalytic view of empathy, which was defined as the analyst’s feelings when in the presence of the patient. This is a misguided and almost delusional notion. The analyst’s feelings are the complete creation of the analyst’s thoughts! And those thoughts will often be distorted and completely misleading. Therapist’s perceptions of how their patients feel are less than 10% accurate if you put it to an empirical test! If you ask patients, “How are you feeling right now,” and you ask therapists the exact same question, “How is your patient feeling right now,” the therapist’s answer will usually be way off base. The only way to find out is to use assessment instruments at the start and end of each session, like I described in the first answer above, on failure to measure. 7. Believing therapists should never express their feelings. I was trained never to reveal how I was feeling. But when you think about, that’s nutty! How can we validly encourage our patients to be more genuine and open with their feelings if we are hiding our own at the same time? Of course, there is an art form in how to share your feelings during therapy. It is a high skill, requiring training, and one that can lead to more human and effective treatment. 8. Believing that you are an expert and know the causes of things, and why patients think, feel, or behave as they do. The causes of all psychiatric disorders are unknown. End of discussion. And yet, almost all therapists promote some fraudulent theory about causality. For example, what is the cause of depression? There are lots of theories, but none has been confirmed, and almost all have been disproven. For example, there is no evidence whatsoever that depression results from a “chemical imbalance in the brain,” or from “anger turned inward,” and so forth. Those are just theories that someone made up. I simply tell my patients that we don’t yet know the causes, but have really terrific treatment tools now for rapid recovery. That’s more than enough for the people I treat! 9. Confusing the process of therapy with a good outcome. For example, as a therapist, you could be doing really great job of listening, and give yourself high marks as a therapist because you believe in the importance of empathy, even though your patient is not improving. Therapists have all kinds of things they’ve been trained to do, like hypnosis, or EMDR, or cognitive therapy, exposure therapy, or meditation, or an exploration of childhood traumas, or whatever it is you do and believe in. But if you’re not seeing rapid and dramatic recovery in your depressed and anxious patients, as documented with session by session testing, you’re not really “helping.” 10. Believing that insight will lead to change. This has only happened once in my career! It was a woman who discovered that she thought she always had to be submissive servant in intimate relationships. Not surprisingly, she always felt burned out and broke up with her partners after a while. She said that the discovery of this pattern when we did the Interpersonal Downward Arrow Technique during our first and only session transformed her life. But usually, much more will be required. That’s why I have developed 50 methods to help patients change the way they think, feel, and behave. Correction—I have recently developed 51 additional powerful techniques, so now we have 101 ways to untwist your thinking so you can enjoy greater happiness, intimacy, and productivity! Now, here's the 60 thousand dollar question. Can therapists learn to stop making these errors? In most cases, the answer is NO! It's not so much a problem with intelligence or aptitude, although those are important factors, but it has to do with motivation. Many therapists simply do not want to change, and are committed to what they're already doing, in much the same way that people are committed to their religious beliefs, which they are unwilling to challenge. That's why it is so much easier to train young therapists, whose minds are still open, as well as lay people who do not have so much prior "training" they have to overcome. Well, that's my cynical side coming out, and I apologize! Still, I think I'm right for the most part. Hey, if you liked my rant, I have at least five more common therapeutic errors on my list, so let Fabrice and me know if you'd like to hear about therapist errors in a future podcast. In addition, if you'd like to add to our list of therapist errors, let us know what your "favorite" (or most annoying) therapist error is!  

Your hosts dig into our Greatest Hits Albums of cognitive distortions: on heavy rotation are “All-or-Nothing Thinking,” “Emotional Reasoning,” and “Negative Filtering.” Sarah B. gives a couple examples of IRL painful thoughts she works through, with and then without distortions. Sarah R. hears the unfiltered truth about her talent (it’s true Sarah, and I write these iTunes descriptions so you can’t tell me otherwise). For more on this episode, please visit: http://drssarahcare.tumblr.com/post/176460795095/episode-26-cognitive-distortions-sarah-b-uses

This week we discussed cognitive distortions with Adam Borechy. Usually cognitive behavioral therapists deal with cognitive distortions by helping their clients identify habitual negative thoughts and and putting those thoughts on trial. We don’t have to accept every thought that passes through our brains as truth. When we have distressing thoughts, it can be helpful to consider if we might be telling ourselves the full truth about a situation. We refer to common cognitive distortions—depression, anxiety, feelings of failure, negative thoughts when interacting with people, social anxiety—and we see how they are applying to our thought process. For a PDF of the cognitive distortions and a 8 days journal task towards better identifying them in your life, please see my resource page. In this 8 day journey you will better identify your own troubling thoughts and move towards gratitude. Here are a list of the cognitive distortions: All or nothing thinking: things are black and white, completely without shades of gray.  For example you may think, “If I am not perfect, I should not try at all, because then I would fail completely.” Or you might think, “My significant other is completely evil.” And then the next day, “My significant other is perfect.”   Overgeneralization: generalizations are made without context, experience or evidence.  “I am always alone.”  Or “Everyone hates me.”  “I never win.” Always? Never?  Everyone? It happens absolutely all the time, without exceptions? In the moment, it can feel like that, but those statements are actually rarely true. Speaking truth to yourself in this case might look like: I am sometimes alone, several people are upset at me, I win sometimes, even if I didn’t this time. Mental Filter: focusing on the negative rather than the whole picture. After receiving multiple positive statements and one negative statement, all you focus on is the negative statement.   Disqualifying the positive: When you do something good like get a compliment or award, you instantly find ways to make less of it! For example, if someone says, “You are looking good today,” but instantly you assume that person is giving you a false compliment.   Jumping to conclusions (without evidence): reaching conclusions (usually negative) without little evidence. ind reading: assuming you know what the person is thinking about you.  Connection occurs from accurately knowing another, and with mindreading you blind yourself without evidence. Fortune telling: predicting negative things in the future.  For example you think “I am going to fail this test even if I study,” so you don’t try, don’t study, and don’t even show up. Magnification or Minimization: you make some weakness of yours much larger than it is or a strength much less than it really is. For example you see your friends as beautiful whereas you see your own beauty as very average. Emotional Reasoning: believe that your feelings reflect reality. For example, “I feel stupid, therefore I am.” or “I feel fearful of flying in planes therefore they must be dangerous,” or “I feel ugly therefore I am ugly despite what others tell me.”   Shoulding: a thing that you believe you should or should not do, often created to try to maintain an image of yourself which is more in line with social pressures. For example, “I should be perfect,” “I should never cry,” “I should always win,” “I should be able to do this on the first try.” Personalization: blaming oneself for a bad event without looking at external factors that contributed to the bad event. Attributing personal responsibility to things that you have no control over, or when you do not see all the things that caused something. For example, a friend is upset so you think it is something you caused or are responsible for.   Error Messages: thoughts that are like obsessive compulsive disorder due to having thoughts that are repetitive, intrusive and not meaningful.  Join David on Instagram: dr.davidpuder Twitter: @DavidPuder Facebook: DrDavidPuder Personal Website: www.DavidPuder.com IOS Emotion Connection App Co-host: Adam Borecky Editor: Trent Jones *This podcast is for informational purposes only and is the opinions of the people on this episode.  For full disclaimer go here.  

David reminds us about the differences between healthy fear and unhealthy, neurotic anxiety, or an anxiety “disorder” like a phobia, or OCD, and so forth. He explains that negative thoughts, and not events, trigger all our emotions, healthy or unhealthy. However, healthy fear results from negative thoughts that are valid and undistorted, and does not need treatment. For example, if you are walking around Chicago in an area dominated by gangs, you may have the thought, “I could get shot. I better be careful because it’s dangerous here!” Your fear is healthy and can keep you vigilant and alive in a genuinely dangerous situation. In contrast, neurotic, unhealthy anxiety results from thoughts that contain the same ten cognitive distortions that cause depression, such as All-or-Nothing Thinking, Jumping to Conclusions (e.g. Mind-Reading and Fortune-Telling), Emotional Reasoning, Magnification, Should Statements, and more. David explains that the Hidden Emotion Model is radically different from CBT, exposure therapy, and most other current treatments for anxiety. The theory behind Hidden Emotion Technique is that “niceness” is the cause of (almost) all anxiety in the United States at this time. In other words, people who are prone to anxiety typically think they have to be nice all the time, and please other people, and not have certain kinds of forbidden feelings, such as anger, or loneliness, or even wanting something you are not supposed to want. David brings this powerful treatment technique to life with a vignette involving Terry, the woman with ten years of terrifying panic attacks described in previous podcast. When David asked about her very first panic attack, ten years earlier some amazing and illuminating information emerged. David gives tips on how therapists can use the Hidden Emotion Model, The hidden emotion or conflict is buried in the present, and not in the past. It is something very ordinary, such as not liking your job, or your major in college, or a conflict with a friend, family member or colleague. The anxiety is nearly always a symbolic expression of the feeling or problem the patient is not bringing to conscious awareness. David gives listeners an exercise to see if they can pinpoint the symbolic meaning of Terry’s panic attacks. Fabrice asks the important question—what do you do when the anxious patient insists that there aren’t any hidden feelings? David explains that most anxious individuals will say that, and describes how to bring the hidden feeling or problem to conscious awareness. He emphasizes the three things he really likes about the Hidden Emotion Model: It explains the timing of anxiety attacks, so it has tremendous explanatory power. Freud said that anxiety is the mysterious emotion, that comes out of the blue, and strikes like lightning, without rhyme or reason. David disagrees, and emphasizes that anxiety rarely or never comes from out of the blue. The Hidden Emotion Model can have powerful and rapid healing effects for patients with every type of anxiety, as well as individuals struggling with hypochondriasis and those who go to medical doctors with complaints of pain, fatigue, or dizziness that does not appear to have a valid medical cause. The Hidden Emotion Model teaches us that the ultimate cause of most anxiety is the fear of the self, of our emotions and how we genuinely feel as human beings. The Hidden Emotion Model teaches us that recovery from anxiety does not involve recovery from some “defect” or “mental disorder,” but rather the discovery of what it is like to be human being, with all of our feelings, and that it is okay to have an express those feelings. Finally, David explains that while this technique traces to the teachings of Freud, Freud might turn over in his grave and find it superficial or silly, since David simply tells anxious patients that they are suppressing or repressing something that’s bothering them, and insists they bring it to conscious awareness right away. David accepts this criticism, but also adds that the Hidden Emotion Technique works and frequently triggers complete recovery with patients who are only partially helped by the skillful use of cognitive techniques and exposure techniques. However, the “niceness” phenomenon only seems to affect about 75% of anxious patients; sometimes, a phobia is just a phobia, with no hidden feeling or conflict. Those individuals will not be helped by this technique. Fortunately, we have dozens of other powerful techniques that will be curative!  

Three common distortions: Jumping to Conclusions (including Mind-Reading and Fortune-Telling), Magnification and Minimization (also called the Binocular Trick), and Emotional Reasoning.

7 Steps to Emotional Fitness, Emotional Mastery and Creating What You Want | Dr. Cristy Lopez & Dan Kuschell How often are you in a peak state of joy and fulfillment? On the other hand, how often do you find yourself dealing with stress, anxiety, and worry? Emotional Mastery can provide you greater freedom, peace, confidence, significance, growth, contribution, adventure, and love if you learn how to put its power to use for you. Today’s guest expert is Dr. Cristy Lopez, a psychologist, Coach, and has been an expert on TV shows like Dr. Phil, Downsized, and more. She helps people in transition create the life they want - in their career, business, life, and relationships. She is uniquely qualified to help you achieve greater Emotionally Mastery starting today:   Here’s a glimpse of the strategies you’ll receive today: The childhood experience and simple verse from Luke (12:25-27) that Dan learned in his teens from an article in Sports Illustrated that was a catalyst for his journey into personal development (and how it can apply to you if you find yourself in a state of worry, anxiety, or stress); How to be more controlling and directing of your emotions for greater freedom and peace; Why the traits of ADD, ADHD, Addiction, and more are showing up more often today than just a decade ago; The first step towards Emotional Mastery: Awareness; Check in questions to be asking daily: How am I feeling today? What are the positive emotions/feelings I feel regularly? What are the negative emotions/feelings I feel regularly? (most people can’t express 10 feelings – so if you want to improve your emotional fitness, expand the language around your emotions); The Framework for Maximum Performance: (W.A.A.A) Identify what do I want? Take Action. Assess the results from my actions. Adapt and adjust based on the results and outcome. “Your Emotional State is really a Physiological State. Feeling is the cognitive word you’re putting on it. You need language for your emotional states. Become aware of what’s going on with you, your body and physical states”; If you want greater emotional mastery, learn to master how you use your body better (Hint: you can make a simple adjustment in your body posture or even a move with your face and immediately adjust your body chemistry to create a better emotional state); Dr. Cristy Lopez’s method for greater emotional mastery: Increase your awareness around the language you use (related to emotions). “It’s like a box of crayons. If you have 8 crayons versus 152 crayons, you’ll be limited in the amount of colors (emotion and feeling) you can use.” Transform from negative emotions to positive emotions with a simple adjustment in your body language (The Wonder Woman and Superman Pose can set you free); “Lift your tail feathers for greater emotional fitness”: (Example: when a dog is sad, its tail is tucked between its legs. Lift its tail up. The physiological move adjusts the emotions. The same applies to you); Body Language and Facial Shifts like smiling can transform your feelings and emotions – “…it’s hard to be in a state of sadness and depression when your muscles are physically doing something else. You have control.” Dan’s simple strategy to create an immediate state shift towards happiness: “If you’re happy, it’s simple, tell your face”; The simple technique you can use right now for greater joy and happiness: Look up. (HINT: Try it now. In fact, look up and try not to smile. Reports show it’s almost impossible. Let us know the result); Checking in for greater emotional fitness: “Do a Gut check to get in check”; Triggers- what sets you off? Internal cues, external cues, environmental cues, and/or smells have an impact. “Triggers come from the inside out”; What to do if you (or your partner) have a hard time expressing your emotion(s) and feelings (HINT: identify the underlying core need); “If our core needs are unmet, we act out”; Core Needs: Certainty, Uncertainty, Purpose, Love, Connection, Growth, Contribution (adapted from Tony Robbins 6 Core Human Needs); The power of language: How are you perceiving it and labeling it (cognitively)? You have the physiological state, then cognitively, what are you calling it (the feeling)? And what language are you using around it”? An immediate method to transform your emotions: Shift your posture & language; Why our biggest breakthroughs can come from a time of discomfort and unhappiness (HINT: there is a way for you to control your emotions so you don’t have to be in a state of unhappiness to get your breakthroughs); Emotional Reasoning: labeling what it seems to be – doesn’t make it so (absolutely true). “Just because I feel something, doesn’t make it so. Just because I feel like I’m a bad person (at that moment), doesn’t mean I AM a bad person”; The power of meaning and more accurate language; Learn how to be with your feelings - “Negative feelings can be a healthy place to visit, not a great place to live or stay. You have a choice”; Positive Rituals you can model today for greater peace and freedom: taking a walk, exercise, meditation, sleep, reading, writing, and more… “Your Quality of Life is determined by Your Ability to Navigate Your Emotions”; And much much more…   Dr. Cristy Lopez can help you transform your life, career, marriage, and relationships. Whether you’re a busy executive or in a career transition, she will show you how to build your success from the inside out. Contact Dr. Cristy Lopez by going to http://www.cristylopezphd.com or contact her office at 602-323-7824. Get access to the full show here at: http://www.growthtofreedom.com/21 Get more clarity, capabilities, and confidence and join us for a new show at http://www.growthtofreedom.com   =================== ABOUT DAN KUSCHELL: =================== Dan Kuschell is a success driven business growth strategist, a media contributor, and thought leader. He helps entrepreneurs, leaders, and business owners grow and scale their companies 10x by driving the flow of elegant ideas, execution, and team-culture for greater clarity, confidence, and direction. Dan has been recognized worldwide for creating results with his resources, books, and strategies. Meet Dan at http://www.DanKuschell.com Get more access to Dan's wisdom here: http://www.youtube.com/ChampionVision Watch/Listen to the show: http://www.growthtofreedom.com Tweet us at: https://twitter.com/dan_kuschell Follow us on Facebook: https://facebook.com/dankuschellpage LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/dankuschell Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/dankuschell Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/dankuschell  

Hey there. This is Aime Lynn with Flipswitch’s Erasing Negative Thoughts. On each edition of Erasing Negative Thoughts, we identify one way of stinkin thinkin and show how it’s more often than not, either completely untrue or extremely exaggerated. All too often hand in hand with depression, don’t fall prey to these outright false ways of thinking. On this edition of Erasing Negative Thoughts, we’ll cover the distorted way of thinking pattern known as “Emotional Reasoning”. “I’m so overwhelmed with work. I know I’m doing a bad job.” “I’ll feel awful. I am awful.” “I don’t feel like going out and being around people, so I shouldn’t go out and be around people.” These are just a smattering of examples of emotional reasoning. Emotional reasoning occurs when you simply think that reality matches the way you feel instead of anything to do with evidence or physics or anything else in the world. Nope. You feel it, therefore it’s true. Except, that’s not how the world really works does it? I mean, you don’t say, “How much gas do I have in my tank? The gauge says empty, but I feel it’s full, so it must be full.” You don’t say, “I don’t feel hot, therefore I know I won’t get sunburned on a sunny day.” No, of course, not. That’s just silly. Yet, these are exactly the types of warped thoughts people all too often employ in the depths of a dark depression. They become certain that they are so worthless simply because they feel they are, even going so far as to argue as good as any lawyer against those people that try to dispute this “truth”. They wall themselves off from opportunities to feel better because they’ve let their feelings overcome reality. But the good news is it doesn’t have to be that way. Stop and think: I feel this way. So what? What’s the actual evidence for my belief. Maybe more importantly, what’s the evidence against my negative belief. Live a life based on reality, not just what you feel. This has been Aime Lynn with Erasing Negative Thoughts here on Flipswitch.

Please join us Monday, April 9, 2012 at 8pm EST when Paul Elam of AVoiceforMen and Dr Tara Palmatier of Shrink4Men will discuss the merits of thinking with your big head instead your "little head" and your lower brain. Too many otherwise intelligent men get themselves into trouble by choosing romantic partners based solely upon physical attraction and sabotage potentially good relationships or stay in bad ones out of fear. Physical attraction is important, but if what lies beneath the surface is ugly and incredibly damaged, you're not using your big head. If you sacrifice your self-respect and integrity to please a woman, you're using your little head. If you sacrifice your self-respect and integrity because you believe you can't live without some woman, you're using your lower or “reptilian” brain because you're allowing fear to guide your behavior. We'll also discuss how to engage both your reason and emotion in your relationships with women. Reason and emotion do not have to be antagonists and making proper use of both is one path toward having more satisfying relationships. As always, the phone lines will be open, so if you have a story about allowing your little head or lower brain to do the thinking for you or how you've been able to get your self-respect in alignment with what you will and will not tolerate in a partner, give us a call at +1 310 388 9709.