Cognitive Behavior Interventions for Self-Defeating Thoughts

Helping Clients to Overcome the Tyranny of “I Can’t”

Elliot Cohen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Topic: Psychology
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000426472
• Subtopic: Abnormal Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Integrating Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) with a logic-based restructuring of Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy (REBT), this book provides therapists with a guide for addressing self-defeating thoughts and behaviors.

Cohen explores how the tyrannical use of the words "I can't" creates and sustains many commonplace behavioral and emotional problems. It shows how cognition and affect are intimately connected, demonstrating how cognitive-behavioral interventions help clients to address both their feelings and irrational ideas. Each chapter explores a specific problem, including low frustration tolerance, obsessiveness, risk avoidance, phobias, intolerance to criticism, dependent personalities, and much more. The theories developed throughout are integrated with practice sections and session transcripts that focus on the application of these theories for the treatment of clients who have self-destructive linguistic habits. Cohen also provides resource materials including reflection activities, bibliotherapy, meditation, and step-by-step guidance.

This book is essential reading for mental health professionals looking for novel techniques of using CBT, life coaches, positive psychology coaches, counselors, and academic and clinical researchers who work with CBT.

Part I

Overcoming “I Can’t” in Self-Defeating Reasoning: A Logic-Based Cognitive-Behavioral Approach

1 Logic and Language

In 1955, philosopher J. L. Austin delivered a set of lectures at Harvard later published under the title, “How to Do Things with Words” (Austin, 1975). These lectures pointed out a different way to perceive the use of natural language. Instead of seeing the primary use of language as making true or false statements, Austin focused on how it could be used to do things—to perform various speech acts, from marrying a couple, bequeathing one’s property to one’s heirs, naming a ship, and casting a bet, to making a promise. Thus, in saying “I promise,” under certain conditions (for example, being in a position to keep it), one does not simply make a statement that is either true or false. Rather, one actually does something with words, namely make a promise, which can, in turn, have various practical consequences, including legal ones in some cases. This emphasis on the performative use of language has been key to the development of the first cognitive-behavior therapy (CBT).

Self-Disturbing Speech Acts

At about the same time Austin was delivering his lectures at Harvard (in Cambridge, MA), psychologist Albert Ellis (in New York City) was working out the details of his “Rational Therapy,” which was to provide the first ever version of CBT. In discussing the origins of his psychotherapeutic approach in his 1962 classic, Reason and Emotion in Psychotherapy, Ellis summed up what has become a cornerstone of his version of CBT, which he later called, Rational-Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT):

I had finally … at least to my own satisfaction, solved the great mystery of why so many millions of human beings not only originally became emotionally disturbed, but why they persistently, in the face of so much self-handicapping, remained so. The very facility with language which enabled them to be essentially human—to talk to others and to talk to themselves—also enabled them to abuse this facility by talking utter nonsense to themselves: to define things as terrible when, at worst, these things were inconvenient and annoying. (p. 21; emphasis in original)

Importantly, Ellis italicized the word “define” to suggest that people do something linguistically to upset themselves, namely define things as terrible rather than as inconvenient or annoying. In 1961, in Ellis and Harper’s A New Guide to Rational Living, the authors state, “[P]recisely because we tell ourselves … catastrophizing sentences, we almost immediately begin to feel anxious” (p. 10). Further, they go on to state:

Misery … consists of two fairly distinct parts: (1) desiring, wishing, or preferring that you achieve some goal or purpose and feeling disappointed and irritated when you do not achieve it; and (2) demanding, insisting, commanding, and urgently necessitating that you achieve this goal or purpose and feeling bitter, enraged, anxious, despairing, and self-downing when you do not. (p. 77)

In “part 2” (which the authors indicate accounts for the self-defeating negative emotions), we find a list of speech acts—“demanding, insisting, commanding, and urgently necessitating,” which, along with “catastrophizing” and “damning,” provide insight into some key speech acts that human beings perform to emotionally disturb themselves.

More specifically, the above-mentioned speech acts each comprise classes of speech act with different types. Table 1.1 identifies, describes, and illustrates some common types of demanding perfection examined in this book.¹

Table 1.1 Speech Acts of Demanding Perfection (Cohen, 2019a)

Type of Demanding Perfection	Definition	Example
Outcome Certainty	Demanding certainty about the outcomes of one’s actions.	“I must be certain I won’t fail.”
Existential Certainty	Demanding certainty that bad things won’t happen to oneself or one’s loved ones.	“I must always be certain that bad things won’t happen.”
Moral Certainty	Demanding certainty that one won’t do (morally) bad things.	“I must be certain I won’t do something wrong.”
Treatment	Demanding that others always treat one fairly.	“Others should never deceive me.”
Existential	Demanding that the world not contain bad things.	“Bad things like pandemics should never happen.”
Performance	Demanding that one not make mistakes that could reflect badly on what others may think.^a	“I must not fail to do what is expected of me.”
Hedonic	Demanding immediate (or fast) gratification.	“I must get what I want immediately.”
Epistemic	Demanding that reality be just what one says it is.	“I must always be right.”
Approval	Demanding the affection, confidence, or approval of others as a condition of one’s own self-worth.	“I must always get the approval of others.”

Note

a This type of perfectionism is usually deduced from approval perfectionism. For details, see Chapter 12 on dependent capacity disavowals.

The term “must” is used in Table 1.1 to illustrate most (but not all) the respective types of demanding perfection. Within the category of motivational language (Cromwell et al., 2020; Siddharthan, 2018), the latter term appears to be rooted in a feeling of necessity: an interoceptive (somatic) feeling of need. For instance, phenomenologically, the client who demands that he must always be right feels a need to always be right.

As illustrated in the cases of existential and treatment perfectionism in Table 1.1, other terms, such as “should” (or “ought”) may also be used to demand perfection (“Bad things should never happen”; “Others should never deceive me”). The latter should-demands differ from must-demands, however. For example, while the “must” in must-demands expresses a felt need, the “should never” expressed in “Bad things should never happen” and “Others should never deceive me” appears to express an automatic, gut feeling of wrongfulness or unfairness, or, following one tradition in moral philosophy, what may be called a “deontological feeling” (Cropanzano et al., 2017; Manfrinati et al., 2013; Greene et al., 2001).

Such a feeling appears to present as an “intuition” about the inherent wrongfulness or unfairness of something, that is, a nondiscursive (non-inferential), interoceptive, deontological feeling about the thing in question (Cushman et al., 2006; Manfrinati et al., 2013). Thus, a demand that bad things should never happen appears to express such an intuition.

Importantly, the latter demand resembles a must-demand by virtue of making an absolutistic (exceptionless or unconditional) demand. Words such as “never” or “always” are intended to linguistically express this dimension of deontological feelings: like felt needs, they feel absolute. Of course, it makes no sense to demand that bad things never happen because one has no control over this, and there is no practically significant chance of such things not ever (or almost ever) happening. Thus, both must-demands and should-demands appear to feel equally compelling (phenomenologically) to the person making the demand. For, in either case, what is being demanded feels equally non-negotiable.

Table 1.2 identifies, describes, and illustrates some common damning speech acts.

Table 1.2...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I: Overcoming “I Can’t” in Self-Defeating Reasoning: A Logic-Based Cognitive-Behavioral Approach
• PART II: Neurological Correlates
• PART III: Overcoming Common Types of Capacity Disavowal
• Index