Yesterday I met with a couple of new clients, each of whom struggles with nervousness and worry despite years of experience in therapy.
Within half an hour it was evident that in all those years they hadn’t been taught a basic fact about their feelings:
There’s a big difference between a feeling in response to reality and a feeling in response to thoughts.
One is adaptive, allowing you to take effective action in the situation.
The other is a doom spiral.
And unfortunately it seems that many therapist aren’t trained to recognize the distinction – meanwhile many coaches simply aren’t trained, but that’s a whole other story.
Here’s an example…
The first client, a trained therapist herself, described in the first couple of moments of our session that she was worried that her family would interrupt her.
That may seem like a trivial detail and perhaps not a big deal.
But this isn’t just idle chatter.
This is an opportunity to rip out ineffective ways of thinking and establish better contact with reality, so as she continued talking, I was the one who interrupted her, saying:
“Let me pause you there. You say that you’re nervous and that you’re worried that your family will interrupt you…
That is a negative prediction.
(Ok, what’s that?)
It’s a thought about the future that says things are going to go badly…
Do you see that that thought about the future is giving you your worry right now?
(Yes)
And do you have a crystal ball handy that lets you predict the future with total certainty?”
Of course she didn’t have one.
And at this point she realized with blinding clarity that a great deal of her worry in life was in response to thoughts she was having about the future.
She had spent years looking backwards in her history trying to find “the cause” of her anxiety, but there it was in the present moment.
Now, obviously events of her past have led to this kind of thinking.
However, the thinking occurs moment to moment in the present, as does the anxiety produced by her thinking habits.
And when we modify our negative thinking by checking it out against reality, we start learning how to think differently, which often has a significant influence on how we feel.
Again, whereas a feeling in response to reality has adaptive value, giving us information about the situation and energy to respond…
A feeling in response to a thought is of little use, often spiraling out of control.
After all there’s no end to the doomsday scenarios we can imagine, let alone all the terrible things we can’t imagine!
So it’s important to nip in the bud this kind of thinking right away.
However, this is only half the work.
I say that because you’re probably very familiar with cognitive therapies — and their derivatives in the coaching world — that focus on “thinking better thoughts.”
And that does make a difference.
But what these approaches fail to consider is that these thoughts are ways of avoiding something else in the present.
And until that thing is explored…
It’s just a matter of time before new thoughts arise in a smokescreen.
That’s a story for another day.
For now, keep in mind…
Thoughts aren’t facts.
And the feelings that arise in response to thoughts (especially those negative predictions about the future) will always lead you astray.
After all, what good does it do you to explore how you feel about something that isn’t real?
You could waste a lot of time and energy putting out imaginary fires in the future, but doing so robs you of that time and energy to deal with real problems in the present.
Photo by Spencer Bergen on Unsplash