Thinking Traps

After the Magic Dial step, I finally get to work directly on my painful thoughts! Notice how much effort I had to put in ahead of time to get ready for this step. This is why it is so understandable that humans get stuck in emotion – the process of cleaning it up isn’t straightforward. It’s like painting a room in your home. You think “wow, my bedroom would look great with deep blue walls – I’m going to do it!” And you think “this will be easy – just move stuff out of the way and slap some paint on the walls!”. But when you start, you realize you have to get stuff of the walls, wipe the dust off, fill holes, sand the filled holes, vacuum the room, tape off areas you don’t want blue, and on and on. Only then are you finally ready to “slap the paint on the walls”.

Changing the brain is similar. We have to do the prep work: validate the pain, identify the thoughts that are locking in the pain, understand and acknowledge how the brain is helping us with the pain, and decide whether we want to keep the pain or dial it down. Only then can we move on to “slapping the paint on” and changing the room that is our brain.

Now that we’ve done the prep on my pain around a world in chaos, I pick one of my upsetting thoughts and work on it with method after method until my brain starts to shift. So lets do that with my thought “People should stop feeding hate – it is SO horrible and a waste of the precious little time we have on this planet”. The first method I use is called Get Rid of Thinking Traps. A Thinking Trap is a way of wording our pain that keeps us stuck. Some common thinking traps are All or Nothing Thinking, as in “I hurt her feelings – I’m a horrible person”. Can you see the “all” in this? I define myself as completely horrible because I did this one thing. Another Thinking Trap is Emotional Reasoning - “I feel like a loser [therefore I must be a loser]”.

There’s a really important Thinking Trap in my upsetting thought that “People should stop feeding hate …” – it is a Should Statement. The word should is poison for the emotional brain; it traps shame when it is directed at ourselves and anger when it is directed at others. My theory is that the brain struggles with shoulds because it believes them to be facts when they are really attacks. To have emotional peace, it is important to eliminate the word should from your vocabulary. There are other ways to express yourself that seem to be better for the emotional brain.

For example, instead of “They should have asked before eating all my birthday cake”, say something more factual like “I expected them to ask before eating all my birthday cake”, or “I wish they had asked before eating all my birthday cake.” If you try saying these to yourself, you can actually feel the difference inside versus the should.

So for my upsetting thought about the world in chaos, I can get rid of the should by saying “I wish people would stop feeding hate …” When I do this, my brain takes me to sadness instead of anger. Sadness is not aggression; it will pass and let me decide what I want to do with this “I wish” fact. I can still be unhappy about people being caught in hate, but I don’t need to hang onto the aggression about it.

To complete the “Get Rid of the Thinking Traps” method, I come up with a response to my brain’s upsetting thought, and I make sure it is free of Thinking Traps, something like

I wish people would stop feeding hate but I get why they do it – only people who are afraid, hurt, or feel inadequate act this way. I’m sad for what life has done to them. I don’t need to hate them back but I do have the right to put boundaries in place so I don’t have to be around their hate. I also have the right to work in many ways to prevent hate, including joining groups, using my purchasing power, using my voting power, acting with kindness so I’m not the one who creates emotionally damaged people who hate, and so on.

David Burns just did a podcast on getting rid of should statements - how cool is that timing?!! Just to be clear, removing Thinking Traps usually isn’t enough to completely release the upsetting thought but it is important to start your brain on a new path. The other methods, some of which I’ll talk about next time, then use that starting point to fully shift the brain. Until next time, Karin