“Summing it all up,
friends, I’d say you’ll do best by filling your minds and meditating on things
true, noble, reputable, authentic, compelling, gracious- the best; not the
worst, the beautiful, not the ugly; things to praise, not to curse…do that, and
God, who makes everything work together, will wreck you into his most excellent
harmonies.” Philippians 4:8-9
It IS possible to change your life by changing your
thoughts. I see so many individuals in counseling who struggle with depression
and anxiety due to have what Cognitive Behavioral Therapy calls, “cognitive
distortions”. These are exaggerated
thoughts about yourself and how others interact with you. I like to use
different ways to think of it.
Using animals, like in fables, it is clearer with which one
can identify more when you have the animals exemplify a certain characteristic.
Catastrophe Cat is always concerned about something- and it’s usually the end
of the world. Brain-reading Bear thinks he knows what others are thinking, and
it’s usually bad. Predicting Penguin Dividing Dog.
There is also an acronym, called BLUE. B stands for “blaming
yourself”, L is for “looking for bad news”, U is for “unhappy guessing”, and E
is for “exaggerating the facts”. These are easy to do, especially if you’ve experienced
a trauma or suffer from low self esteem. The way to overcome unhelpful thoughts
is to first identify it, look at it under the light of reality, understand the
genesis of the thought, make sense of why it still gets to be there, and
exterminate it by changing your thought to a more positive one. I created my
own acronym: ILLUME: Identify, Look in Light, Understand, Make sense, and
Exterminate. I will show you how in the following example.
A young lady has been involved in an abusive relationship, so
she gathered a thought in that time with the man who did not honor her thoughts
or body. This thought is “I am worthless”. She is blaming herself because she
feels she got herself into the relationship (forgetting she got herself out of
it). So, we identified the thought through a situation that occurred where she
was constantly getting angry at co workers in her job because everything they
did she saw it from the lens of “I am worthless”. A co worker’s suggestion to
improve an area of need caused this young lady to resent it and blame herself. Then
we looked at it in the light by asking herself a few questions: How true is
this thought? Can everyone really agree that I am worthless? If that is true,
then I need to make myself worthy. Wait, that’s impossible, we are infallible
human beings. So, what choices do I have now? Accept I am worthless? This is
absurd because it is bringing strife in relationships. This thought started
because of her abusive relationship, which
took away time and focus from self growth onto what his needs were because she
did not want to be caught in a tense moment where he would put her down or hit
her. So, we made sense of this thought and changed it to what God says. God
says she is “fearfully and wonderfully made”, and “I am made perfect in his
sight”, so she can hold onto that truth whenever she tries to think “I am
worthless”.
