Above all, what we as Americans prize are magic elixirs: simple solutions, closed and totalizing systems of explanation, grand schemes at once easy to understand, applicable to everything and everyone, and which thereby reduce the heart-stopping complexity of the world to a set of nostrums or dicta that we can recite like mantras, when things go bad, to quiet the soul.
Peter Marin, "An American Yearning"
My experience has taught me that self help is an ongoing struggle. It's not an easy to follow recipe that transforms oneself into a happy successful person. This has been important to understand because it is easy to get discouraged and self critical when one makes the effort to improve one's situation and one fails. The self help writers who promise too much can hurt people in two ways. When people expect to much from self help and are disappointed they may conclude that something is wrong with themselves and feel low self esteem as a result. They may also conclude that self help is a waste of time.
If self help is a struggle then who is the opponent? As in all struggles it is important to know the enemy in order to defeat him. The primary enemy in the case of self help is usually incorrect thinking. This incorrect thinking can be painful thinking such as "I'm no good" or "They're out to get me" or "I will fail" or incorrect
positive thinking such as "one more chocolate bar won't make me gain a significant amount of weight" or "no one will catch me if I do this".
The word incorrect is a very important one. The enemy is not painful thinking or
positive thinking it's incorrect thinking. Painful thinking if true can be a very positive thing. The painful belief that one may get in trouble if one steals from the bakery section of the supermarket is a good and positive belief. Painful emotions such as anxiety can be a valuable warning. The first step of self help is not to attempt to eliminate a painful emotion but rather to attempt to evaluate whether it is warning about something we should be conce
ed about. If one concludes that it is, the next step is to develop a plan to deal with the threat that one faces. Sometimes we feel a painful emotion such as anxiety because we feel we must be anxious in order to motivate ourselves to deal with a threat. If this is the case, we can reduce our anxiety by telling ourselves that once we develop a plan of action and follow it, further anxiety is not to our advantage.
Core Painful Thoughtsnn Three core categories that most painful thoughts fall under are
Low Self Concept
Paranoia
Pessimismnn Painful thoughts such as these often take the form of painful self talk in which we tell ourselves things that hurt our self concept or that make us feel not loved (paranoia) or that lead us to feel pessimism. These core thoughts can form a self feeding cycle.
We can use these core problems as an aid to self diagnosis and self therapy.
There is both a fast and a slow approach to self therapy.
The fast approach:
One fast approach is simply to take some time to concentrate one's efforts on not feeling the painful emotions that one is feeling. For one example if one is feeling angry one can simply try and feel less angry. Another fast approach is to respond with some pre-thought out positive self talk. We can do this by identifying which of the core categories our painful self talk falls under and then saying a positive statement relating to that category. Since our core thoughts may be part of a vicious cycle themselves it may be necessary to deal with more than one core thought.
It might seem that the best approach is to try and think the opposite. If one feels low self concept and thinks "I'm no good" it might seem reasonable that the appropriate positive statement is "I'm terrific". If one feels paranoia and believes that "so and so hates me" it might seem reasonable that the way to counter this painful self talk would be with the positive statement "so and so loves me". If one feels pessimism it might seem reasonable that the way to counter the pessimism is to tell oneself "everything is going to be great". I call this approach reversal. I used to use it and in the beginning it helped me a great deal.
There are several problems with reversal. One is it's often very hard to believe the opposite of one's painful thoughts. The other is that often the opposite isn't true. This was correctly pointed out to me by Albert Ellis.
Can we come up with quick positive thoughts to counter our negative thoughts that are more accurate than reversal? One problem with trying to do so is that negative thoughts may be true. If we feel anxiety about our future there may be a good reason for that anxiety. If we feel low self concept, that may be because we are doing something unethical that we should feel low self concept about. Painful emotions can be a valuable warning and instead of trying to stop feeling them we may be better off listening to what they are telling us.
Sometimes however, painful thoughts become exaggerated and result in painful emotions that bother us continuously and make us depressed. In this case we can use, positive counter statements. I give a table below with general negative thoughts in one column, the reversal of those thoughts in the second column and positive counter statements in the third column. n