Читать книгу DBT For Dummies - Gillian Galen - Страница 74

Many people who come for DBT treatment struggle with negative thinking. Some have a judgmental inner critic or repeat loops of worry thoughts, low self-worth, or even self-hatred. Negative, or unhelpful, thinking patterns can have a strong and often adverse impact on work, family, and relational life.

There are ineffective ways to deal with negative thoughts. If you struggle with these thoughts, you might try distracting yourself from them or avoiding them altogether. Some people use drugs and alcohol or other short-term self-destructive behaviors to try to prevent the negative thinking from repeating over and over, and it makes sense that they would, given how painful the negative thoughts can be.

Negative thought patterns are repetitive, unhelpful, unwanted thoughts. These thought patterns typically leave a person feeling worse off about themselves and their situation. Through analyzing the pattern of thinking, DBT teaches people to recognize and then fully identify the pattern as it occurs. This process of stepping back from thoughts is called cognitive defusion. It’s the act of noticing thoughts rather than being caught up in them as if they were something other than thoughts. When people get caught up in acting as if their thoughts were real, this is known as cognitive fusion.

Cognitive defusion includes the practice of letting thoughts come and go rather than holding onto them. In cognitive defusion, you learn to recognize that thoughts in your head are simply thoughts. If you instead fuse with your thoughts, your tendency will be to take them seriously as if they were true. You believe them, particularly when there is no, or little, factual basis to the substance of the thoughts.

When you are not fused with your thoughts, you can step back into cognitive defusion. You then hold the thoughts lightly, and this makes it easier to let them go. This is the first step in letting go of negative thoughts. Simply turning them into positive thoughts is not the goal, if the positive thoughts also have no basis. The positive thought is recognizing that you don’t have to live believing that your negative thoughts are real and that you can recognize them simply as thoughts that you don’t like, and thus don’t have to spend too much time dwelling upon them. We look further into how to deal with difficult thoughts in Chapter 7.