Did you ever feel like you aren’t important? Did you ever feel like you don’t matter? These thoughts are extremely common and can be extremely painful. I know from my clinical experience over the years, with more than 40,000 hours of therapy with people struggling with mild to extreme depression and anxiety. I know from personal experience as well, because I’ve been there personally at times! And one of the reasons I love doing therapy is because of the joy of helping someone transform these feelings of inadequacy and tears into feelings of joy and exuberance, and even laughter.
Today, my highly esteemed colleague, Matthew May MD, and I, work with our highly esteemed and beloved colleague and podcast host, Rhonda Barovsky, on concerns that emerged when a scheduling difficulty made it difficult for Rhonda to join a podcast recording on “The Phobia Cure” which was going to feature Matt May MD doing live exposure with a colleague named Danielle who has an intense fear of leeches. I suggested that Matt, Danielle and I could do the podcast without Rhonda, to save her from having to commute from her office in Walnut Creek, California to the “Murietta studios” twice in one week. (It’s a 90-minute commute in both directions, and sometimes traffic makes it even worse.)
When Rhonda read this email, she was flooded with negative emotions, which you can see on pages 1 and 2 of her Daily Mood Log at the start of her session. As you can see she felt down, anxious, ashamed, inadequate, rejected, self-conscious, angry, jealous, and more, and these feeling were intense.
Have you ever been suddenly and unexpectedly triggered like that?
What triggered Rhonda’s feelings?
According to the TEAM-CBT treatment model, our negative feelings are not the result of what happens, but how we think about it.
So, what were the thoughts that triggered Rhonda’s angst?
Take a look at the negative thoughts on her Daily Mood Log. As you can see, she was telling herself that
She didn’t matter and wasn’t important.
David didn’t value her.
She shouldn’t have such strong negative feelings, like jealousy.
The people listening to the podcast (like you, for example) will think she looks like an idiot and will judge her.
She shouldn’t be taking up time and space on the podcast in the “patient” role again.
One of the things I like about the TEAM model is that it gives us a clear blueprint about how to proceed. One of the things I love about Rhonda is her openness, vulnerability, courage, and intense desire to teach and reach out to others, like yourself. And one of the things I admire so intensely about Matt is his tremendous kindness and compassion which are coupled with extraordinary technical skills. I feel very blessed to have Matt and Rhonda as colleagues and friends!
In the podcast, we go through the TEAM model, step by step, starting with T = Testing, E = Empathy, A = Assessment of Resistance, and M = Methods. We encountered some tears, some memories of childhood and tons of laughter as well.
During the Assessment of Resistance, we used the Straightforward Invitation, Miracle Cure Question, Positive Reframing, and Magic Dial. To me it is always surprising to see how many positives are embedded in our so-called “negative” feelings and “negative thoughts.” Positive Reframing nearly always eliminates resistance and opens the door to rapid change. You can look at Rhonda’s Positive Reframing list on page 5 of the attachment. You can also take a look at her Emotion’s table when she filled in the Goal column on page 3 of the attachment.
The first thought Rhonda wanted to challenge was “I don’t matter,” and we started with the Downward Arrow Technique to identify the Self-Defeating Beliefs that gave rise to this thought, as you can see on page 4 of the attachment. Rhonda also told a moving story about her father, and how her belief that she was not important may have gotten started. She also told a beautiful story about reconciling with her father eight years before he died.
We used several methods to challenge and crush the thought, “I don’t matter,” including Identify the Distortions, the Double Standard Technique, the Externalization of Voices, the Feared Fantasy, the Acceptance Paradox, and Examine the Evidence to crush this thought. Several role reversals were necessary before Rhonda knocked the ball out of the park.
The first negative thought is generally the most difficult to crush. Once Rhonda no longer believed this thought, she could easily challenge and defeat the rest of her negative thoughts as well, resulting in a dramatic transformation in how she was feeling, as you can see on page 3 of the attachment. It seems like when you crush one negative thought, there is a sudden change in the brain, as if the negative circuits get turned off and the positive circuits get turned on. You will have the chance to hear this first hand when you listen to the live session.
If you’d like to take a peak at Rhonda’s final Daily Mood Log, you’ll see how she challenged all the rest of her Negative Thoughts. (David, link to final DML when you get the final version from Rhonda.)
Although this podcast was long (roughly two hours), it seemed like very little time had passed because the experience was incredibly engaging and rewarding. Rhonda, Matt and I hope you enjoyed it as well, and hope it gave you some help as well, if you—like the rest of us—have ever struggled with the fear that maybe you don’t matter, or aren’t important, either.
Let us know what you think, and thanks for listening today!
Rhonda, Matt, and David
PS Following the podcast, Matt and I received this beautiful email from Rhonda:
Dear David and Matt:
My thanks to you both for an incredibly powerful experience. I am not enough of a poet to describe my experience and gratitude to you both. But you helped me tackle something that has been painful for me for such a long time!
I am grateful and humbled by your brilliance and your commitment to me
Rhonda
Matt May, MD practices in Menlo Park California and specializes in the treatment of depression and anxiety disorders. (https://matthewmaymd.com/)
You can reach Dr. Burns at david@feelinggood.com. Dr. Rhonda Barovsky practices in Walnut Creek, California, and specializes in TEAM-CBT for depression, anxiety, and relationship problems. She can be reached at rbarovsky@aol.com.
If you like our jingle music and would like to support the composer Brett Van Donsel, you may download it here.
* * *
This is the cover of my new book, Feeling Great. It will be released in September of 2020, but you will soon be able to pre-order it on Amazon, possibly by the time you read this!
Need Training or CE Credits?
Check Out these Awesome Upcoming Workshops!
The Cognitive Distortion Starter Kit: How to Crush Negative Thoughts
With Drs. David Burns and Jill Levitt
May 17, 2020 | 7 CE hours. $135 (online only)
TEAM-CBT includes more than 100 powerful techniques to change the distorted thoughts that trigger negative emotions. But what techniques should I select for my patient who feels depressed, anxious, or angry?
As you know, in my book, Feeling Good, I listed the ten most common cognitive distortions, like All-or-Nothing Thinking, Should Statements, Emotional Reasoning, and more, and you probably use that list all the time in your clinical work. But do you know which techniques work the best for each distortion?
Come to this workshop and find out! You’ll learn with tons of cool techniques you can use every day to boost your clinical effectiveness.
This workshop will be live-streamed (and in person in Palo Alto, CA) so you can join from anywhere in the world! There will be many expert online helpers to assist you with the small-group exercises.
Move rapidly if you want to come. We are already SOLD OUT in person, but there are still slots available online.
There will be many helpers from the Feeling Good Institute to assist and guide you in the small group exercises in person and online as well. Our last workshop on resistance in February was our most highly rated ever! We hope to make this a terrific and fun learning experience for you, too!
During this four-day intensive workshop you will learn:
How to develop deeper and more meaningful relationships with challenging, difficult clients.
How to deal skillfully with people who refuse to open up and talk to you; won’t listen; are relentlessly critical, narcissistic or controlling; always have to be right; use, abuse, or exploit you; complain endlessly; are hostile, threatening or violent; as well as clients who are overwhelmed, hopeless and suicidal.
How to develop more loving relationships with the people you care about—as well as the ones you don’t.
Powerful new techniques to help clients who are struggling with conflicts with loved ones, friends, or colleagues.
How to deal with the inner chatter and powerful feelings that make it so difficult to deal with conflict when you feel angry or hurt.
How to identify and modify the self-defeating beliefs that make us vulnerable to conflicts with others.
How to identify and melt away the intense outcome and process resistance that make the treatment of relationship problems so challenging.
This is the fourth in our podcasts series on the best techniques to crush each of the ten cognitive distortions from my book, Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy. Today, we focus on Mental Filtering and Discounting the Positive. (This will be the last Episode recorded remotely with poor sound quality. We thank you for your perseverance listening to it, and guarantee better sound quality in the future with our new recording equipment.)
Mental Filtering, You focus on something(s) negative, like a mistake you made, and ignore or overlook the positives. This is like the drop of ink that discolors the beaker of water.
Discounting the Positive(s). this is an even more spectacular mental error. You insist that the positives about yourself or others don’t count. In this way, you can maintain a uniformly and totally negative view of yourself, the world, or other people.
David and Rhonda discuss the fact that humans can be very biased in our perceptions of things that are emotionally charged. For example, if you are firmly committed to some belief, you might look for evidence that supports your belief, and discount evidence that contradicts your belief.
Similarly, if there is someone you strongly admire, you may selectively focus on the positive things they do or say, and discount or dismiss things they do or say that might be quite offensive. And when you’re ticked off at somebody, you probably focus on all the things they do or say that turn you off (mental filtering) and discount the positive things that they do or say. For example, when they say something kind or supportive, you might think, “S/he doesn’t mean it,” or “isn’t being genuine. They’re just acting fake.” In this way, you convince yourself that he or she really is “bad.”
When you’re depressed or anxious, you’ll do this to yourself as well, thus intensifying your negative thoughts and feelings. For example, a teenager with extremely intense depression, strong suicidal urges, and anger told me that human beings were inherently selfish, insensitive, and bad. When I asked her how she’d come to this conclusion, she described seeing some kids in her dormitory who were joking in a cruel, insensitive way about girl with depression, and said that if you’re looking for her, you can probably find her sitting on the edge of her dormitory window, meaning that she’s probably about to jump.
She also described seeing a homeless man on her way her therapy session, and said that no one really cared about him. Of course, these observations were at least partially valid, since human beings certainly DO have the capacity for great self-contentedness, insensitivity, and cruelty. But was she involved in Mental Filtering, and focusing only on the negatives?
I asked her if she could think of any times in the past several weeks when someone had been cruel or insensitive to her. She couldn’t think of a single instance.
David and Rhonda provide additional examples, some personal, of Mental Filtering and Discounting the Positive, and suggest techniques that can be helpful when combating these distortions, including Positive Reframing, Examine the Evidence, the Straightforward Technique, and Double Standard Technique.
David tells a moving story that he also told on his Tedx talk in Reno, about an elderly Latvian immigrant who made a suicide attempt because she thought she’d never accomplished anything worthwhile or meaningful.
In the next podcast in this series, David and Rhonda will discuss the TEAM-CBT techniques that can especially helpful for the next distortion, Jumping to Conclusions.
David D. Burns, MD / Rhonda Barovsky, PsyD
You can reach Dr. Burns at david@feelinggood.com. Dr. Rhonda Barovsky practices in Walnut Creek, California, and specializes in TEAM-CBT for depression, anxiety, and relationship problems. She can be reached at rbarovsky@aol.com.
If you like our jingle music and would like to support the composer Brett Van Donsel, you may download it here.
* * *
This is the cover of my new book, Feeling Great. It will be released in September of 2020, but you will soon be able to pre-order it on Amazon, possibly by the time you read this!
Need Training or CE Credits?
Check Out these Awesome Upcoming Workshops!
The Cognitive Distortion Starter Kit: How to Crush Negative Thoughts
With Drs. David Burns and Jill Levitt
May 17, 2020 | 7 CE hours. $135 (online only)
TEAM-CBT includes more than 100 powerful techniques to change the distorted thoughts that trigger negative emotions. But what techniques should I select for my patient who feels depressed, anxious, or angry?
As you know, in my book, Feeling Good, I listed the ten most common cognitive distortions, like All-or-Nothing Thinking, Should Statements, Emotional Reasoning, and more, and you probably use that list all the time in your clinical work. But do you know which techniques work the best for each distortion?
Come to this workshop and find out! You’ll learn with tons of cool techniques you can use every day to boost your clinical effectiveness.
This workshop will be taught entirely live-streamed so you can join from anywhere in the world! There will be many expert online helpers to assist and guide you with the small-group exercises. Our last workshop on resistance in February was our most highly rated ever! We hope to make this a terrific and fun learning experience for you, too!
During this four-day intensive workshop you will learn:
How to develop deeper and more meaningful relationships with challenging, difficult clients.
How to deal skillfully with people who refuse to open up and talk to you; won’t listen; are relentlessly critical, narcissistic or controlling; always have to be right; use, abuse, or exploit you; complain endlessly; are hostile, threatening or violent; as well as clients who are overwhelmed, hopeless and suicidal.
How to develop more loving relationships with the people you care about—as well as the ones you don’t.
Powerful new techniques to help clients who are struggling with conflicts with loved ones, friends, or colleagues.
How to deal with the inner chatter and powerful feelings that make it so difficult to deal with conflict when you feel angry or hurt.
How to identify and modify the self-defeating beliefs that make us vulnerable to conflicts with others.
How to identify and melt away the intense outcome and process resistance that make the treatment of relationship problems so challenging.
This is the third in our podcasts series on the best techniques to crush each of the ten cognitive distortions from my book, Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy. Today, we focus on Overgeneralization. There are two common forms of Overgeneralization:
You generalize from some specific flaw or failure to your “Self.” So, instead of telling yourself that you failed at this or that, you tell yourself that you are “a failure” or “a loser.”
You generalize from right now to the future, using words like “always” or “never.” For example, you may tell yourself, “Trisha (or Jack) rejected me. This always happens! I must be unlovable. I’ll be alone forever.”
Overgeneralization is also one of the most common cognitive distortions, and it causes depression as well as anxiety. I believe it is impossible to feel depressed or hopeless without Overgeneralization.
The antidote to Overgeneralization is called “Let’s Be Specific.” Instead of thinking of your self as a “bad mother” or “bad father,” you can focus on the specific thing you did that regret, like shouting at your kids when you were upset. Then you can think of a specific plan to correct this problem, like talking things over with your kids and letting them know that you love them and feel badly that you snapped at them.
David and Rhonda also talk about the idea that abstract concepts like “worthless” or “bad” or “worthwhile” or “good” human beings are meaningless. Good and bad thoughts, feelings and behaviors certainly exist, but there is no way to measure or judge the value of a human being.
In the next podcast in this series, David and Rhonda will discuss the TEAM-CBT techniques that can especially helpful for the next distortion, Mental Filter and Discounting the Positive.
David D. Burns, MD / Rhonda Barovsky, PsyD
You can reach Dr. Burns at david@feelinggood.com. Dr. Rhonda Barovsky practices in Walnut Creek, California, and specializes in TEAM-CBT for depression, anxiety, and relationship problems. She can be reached at rbarovsky@aol.com.
If you like our jingle music and would like to support the composer Brett Van Donsel, you may download it here.
* * *
This is the cover of my new book, Feeling Great. It will be released in September of 2020, but you will soon be able to pre-order it on Amazon, possibly by the time you read this!
Need Training or CE Credits?
Check Out these Awesome Upcoming Workshops!
The Cognitive Distortion Starter Kit: How to Crush Negative Thoughts
With Drs. David Burns and Jill Levitt
May 17, 2020 | 7 CE hours. $135 (online only)
TEAM-CBT includes more than 100 powerful techniques to change the distorted thoughts that trigger negative emotions. But what techniques should I select for my patient who feels depressed, anxious, or angry?
As you know, in my book, Feeling Good, I listed the ten most common cognitive distortions, like All-or-Nothing Thinking, Should Statements, Emotional Reasoning, and more, and you probably use that list all the time in your clinical work. But do you know which techniques work the best for each distortion?
Come to this workshop and find out! You’ll learn with tons of cool techniques you can use every day to boost your clinical effectiveness.
This workshop will be taught entirely live-streamed so you can join from anywhere in the world! There will be many expert online helpers to assist and guide you with the small-group exercises online. Our last workshop on resistance in February was our most highly rated ever! We hope to make this a terrific and fun learning experience for you, too!
During this four-day intensive workshop you will learn:
How to develop deeper and more meaningful relationships with challenging, difficult clients.
How to deal skillfully with people who refuse to open up and talk to you; won’t listen; are relentlessly critical, narcissistic or controlling; always have to be right; use, abuse, or exploit you; complain endlessly; are hostile, threatening or violent; as well as clients who are overwhelmed, hopeless and suicidal.
How to develop more loving relationships with the people you care about—as well as the ones you don’t.
Powerful new techniques to help clients who are struggling with conflicts with loved ones, friends, or colleagues.
How to deal with the inner chatter and powerful feelings that make it so difficult to deal with conflict when you feel angry or hurt.
How to identify and modify the self-defeating beliefs that make us vulnerable to conflicts with others.
How to identify and melt away the intense outcome and process resistance that make the treatment of relationship problems so challenging.
The Cognitive Distortion Starter Kit: How to Crush Negative Thoughts
With Drs. David Burns and Jill Levitt
May 17, 2020 | 7 CE hours. $135 (online only)
TEAM-CBT includes more than 100 powerful techniques to change the distorted thoughts that trigger negative emotions. But what techniques should I select for my patient who feels depressed, anxious, or angry?
Come to this workshop and find out! You’ll learn with tons of cool techniques you can use every day to boost your clinical effectiveness.
This workshop will be live-streamed so you can join from anywhere in the world! There will be many helpers from the Feeling Good Institute to assist and guide you in the small group exercises. Our last workshop on resistance in February was our most highly rated ever! We hope to make this a terrific and fun learning experience for you, too!
Watch this short video by my colleague, Dr. Jill Levitt!
This is the second in a series of podcasts by David and Rhonda focusing on the best techniques to crush each of the ten cognitive distortions I first published in my book, Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy. Today, we focus on All-or-Nothing Thinking. that’s where you look at the world in black-or-white categories, as if shades of gray do not exist. For example, if you’re not a complete success you may tell yourself that you’re a complete failure.
All-or-Nothing Thinking is one of the most common cognitive distortions, and it causes or contributes to many common forms of emotional distress, including:
perfectionism
depression
Social anxiety–
performance anxiety
public speaking anxiety
shyness
hopelessness and suicidal urges
anger, relationship conflicts, and violent urges
habits and addictions
and more
However, this distortion can be also be helpful to you, and may reflect some of your core values. For example, your perfectionism
shows that you have high standards, and won’t settle for second-best
may motivate you to work hard and do excellent work
prevents you from glossing over your failures and mistakes
intensifies your emotional life, which may feel like a glorious roller coaster ride, with intense ups (when you do well) and equally intense downs (when you fall short.)
So, before you can challenge a negative thought with this, or any distortion, you’ll have to decide why in the world you’d want to do that, given all the benefits of your negative thoughts and feelings.
One of the possible down sides of All-or-Nothing Thinking is that it simply does not map onto reality. There is little in the universe that is 100% or 0%. Most of the time, or even all of the time, we’re somewhere between 0% and !00%. For example, this podcast is not incredibly fantastic, or absolutely horrible. It is somewhere in-between, and will hopefully be of some value to you. While it clearly won’t solve ALL of your problems, it may be a useful step forward.
We describe a number of example of All-or-Nothing Thinking, including a physician who was trying to diet and ended up binging on a half gallon of ice cream, and a suicidal young woman with incredibly severe depression who was involved in self-mutilation.
There are many ways of crushing the negative thoughts that contain All-or-Nothing Thinking, including Thinking in Shades of Gray. Although that might sound rather drab in comparison to the drama of All-or-Nothing Thinking, you may discover that the world becomes far more colorful when you learn to think in shades of gray!
In the next podcast in this series, David and Rhonda will discuss the TEAM-CBT techniques that can especially helpful for the next distortion, Overgeneralization. David argues that Overgeneralization is arguably the cause of all depression and much anxiety, and that the first person to recognize and solve this dilemma was the Buddha, 2500 years ago. More on that topic next week!
David D. Burns, MD / Rhonda Barovsky, PsyD
You can reach Dr. Burns at david@feelinggood.com. Dr. Rhonda Barovsky practices in Walnut Creek, California, and specializes in TEAM-CBT for depression, anxiety, and relationship problems. She can be reached at rbarovsky@aol.com.
If you like our jingle music and would like to support the composer Brett Van Donsel, you may download it here.
* * *
This is the cover of my new book, Feeling Great. It will be released in September of 2020, but you will soon be able to pre-order it on Amazon, possibly by the time you read this!
Need Training or CE Credits?
Check Out these Awesome Upcoming Workshops!
The Cognitive Distortion Starter Kit: How to Crush Negative Thoughts
With Drs. David Burns and Jill Levitt
May 17, 2020 | 7 CE hours. $135 (online only)
TEAM-CBT includes more than 100 powerful techniques to change the distorted thoughts that trigger negative emotions. But what techniques should I select for my patient who feels depressed, anxious, or angry?
As you know, in my book, Feeling Good, I listed the ten most common cognitive distortions, like All-or-Nothing Thinking, Should Statements, Emotional Reasoning, and more, and you probably use that list all the time in your clinical work. But do you know which techniques work the best for each distortion?
Come to this workshop and find out! You’ll learn with tons of cool techniques you can use every day to boost your clinical effectiveness.
This workshop will be live-streamed (and in person in Palo Alto, CA) so you can join from anywhere in the world! There will be many expert online helpers to assist you with the small-group exercises.
Move rapidly if you want to come. We are already SOLD OUT in person, but there are still slots available online.
There will be many helpers from the Feeling Good Institute to assist and guide you in the small group exercises in person and online as well. Our last workshop on resistance in February was our most highly rated ever! We hope to make this a terrific and fun learning experience for you, too!
During this four-day intensive workshop you will learn:
How to develop deeper and more meaningful relationships with challenging, difficult clients.
How to deal skillfully with people who refuse to open up and talk to you; won’t listen; are relentlessly critical, narcissistic or controlling; always have to be right; use, abuse, or exploit you; complain endlessly; are hostile, threatening or violent; as well as clients who are overwhelmed, hopeless and suicidal.
How to develop more loving relationships with the people you care about—as well as the ones you don’t.
Powerful new techniques to help clients who are struggling with conflicts with loved ones, friends, or colleagues.
How to deal with the inner chatter and powerful feelings that make it so difficult to deal with conflict when you feel angry or hurt.
How to identify and modify the self-defeating beliefs that make us vulnerable to conflicts with others.
How to identify and melt away the intense outcome and process resistance that make the treatment of relationship problems so challenging.
