Cognitive Behavior Therapy for Those Who Say They Can't

A Workbook for Overcoming Your Self-Defeating Thoughts

Elliot D. Cohen

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000529371
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Psicología
• Categoria: Salud mental en psicología

Cognitive-Behavior Therapy for Those Who Say They Can't is a comprehensive aid for people who stifle their personal freedom, creativity, and autonomy by telling themselves they "can't" do things such as: take risks; make commitments; control their anger or fear; avoid intrusive thoughts; tolerate disappointment; accept challenges, make decisions, and more. This accessible workbook concisely explains how to identify, refute, and replace "I can't" with uplifting and liberating virtues. Worksheets include systematic exercises on coping with shame, rational–emotive imagery, reframing, mindfulness, behavioral planning, and taking risks. Each chapter tackles a particular type of self-defeating "I can't" and is complete with an assessment inventory that helps users/clients identify which chapter/s they need to work on.

This workbook provides essential self-help for those struggling with disempowering thoughts and can also be used by mental health professionals in working with their clients.

1
Overcoming Risk-Aversion

DOI: 10.4324/9781003035282-2

As you have seen in the Introduction to this Workbook, risk-aversive can’tstipation is a behavioral type of can’tstipation that obstructs taking rational risks. This can prevent you from doing things that can bring greater personal and interpersonal happiness. Instead, you settle into the same old routine because it feels “safe” and do little or nothing to make constructive changes in your life.

1. Goals of the Chapter

Accordingly, the goals of this chapter are to:

1. Increase awareness of your risk-aversive thinking and the language you are using to obstruct taking reasonable risks.
2. Refute this thinking.
3. Identify guiding virtues that counteract your risk-aversive thinking.
4. Identify empowering wisdom from great sages on how to seek these virtues.
5. Use this learned counsel to construct a cognitive-behavioral plan for increasing your virtues.
6. Work on your plan, including taking some reasonable risks.

2. The Nature of Risk-Aversive Thinking

This type of can’tstipation is associated with anxiety about the possibility of bad things happening as a result of taking risks. Such risk-taking may include:

• Engaging in behavior that opens you up to being rejected or negatively judged by others;
• Doing something that carries the possibility of making a serious mistake (for instance, on an important work assignment);
• Making a life decision that carries the possibility of ending up alone (for instance, as a result of ending a relationship or getting a divorce);
• Engaging in behavior in which you can lose something of value (money, friendship, a job);
• Making commitments that may not work out (such as starting an intimate relationship);
• Doing things that have a relatively small risk of dying or being seriously injured (such as air travel,;
• Putting yourself in a situation where others could possibly betray you, or otherwise not do their part;
• Trying new things or unchartered territory (such as dining out at a new restaurant, changing jobs, learning to play a musical instrument, or taking dancing lessons).

So, instead of risking these consequences, you tell yourself you can’t take the risk. For example, consider the reasoning by which risk-aversive people like you might keep themselves from making constructive change:

• If I get up in front of all those people to speak, I might mess up and
  everyone might laugh at me.
  So, it could be a fiasco!
  So, I can’t do it.
• If I fly in a plane, it could crash and leave my children orphans.
  So, flying could be a horrible mistake.
  So, I just can’t take such risks.¹
• If I give her a (engagement) ring, what if the marriage doesn’t work!
  So, it could be a disaster!
  So, I can’t make this commitment.
• If I divorce my (physically and emotionally abusive) husband, I might never find someone else and be alone for the rest of my life.
  So, it could be a catastrophe!
  So, I can’t go through with it.
• If I ask her to have sex with me, what if I can’t have an erection!
  So, I could make an ass out of myself.
  So, I really can’t do it.
• If I ask her out, she might turn me down.
  So, it could be devastating for me!
  So, I can’t ask her out!
• If I tell her I have HIV, she will probably leave me.
  So, telling her could be the worst mistake I could ever make.
  So, I can’t tell her.
• If I eat out in restaurants, I could contract a disease from dirty dishes and die.
  So eating out is a terrible idea!
  So, I can’t eat out.

In cases like these you imagine bad things happening, which feels threatening to you, which leads you to catastrophize about them by using strong emotional language; this language, in turn, makes you feel disempowered, and leads you to conclude, “I can’t do it.”

Now, look at this disempowering language:

• “fiasco”
• “horrible mistake”
• “disaster”
• “catastrophe”
• “awful”
• “devastating”
• “the worst mistake I could ever make”
• “terrible idea.”

These words pack an emotional punch! In each of the above cases they are used to rate imagined, negative outcomes as 100% or nearly 100% bad. So, on a bad scale of 1 to 10, where 10 is 100% bad, you are maxing out at a 9 or 10 when you use such language to assess the consequences of your actions. And, in speaking in such absolutistic, negative terms, you set yourself up to declare, “I can’t do it!”

It’s the negative possibility that feels threatening!

Notice that in all of the examples provided above, there is a level of uncertainty about whether things will work out or not. You don’t know for certain that you won’t mess up if you make a speech before a class or other group of people; that the plane won’t crash if you book a flight; that your marriage won’t go south if you commit to it; that you will have an erection; that the person you ask out on a date won’t turn you down; and so on. So, there is possibility, not certainty in this mundane world of ours; no guarantees that things won’t take a turn for the worse. And it is this very fact that can make us feel uncomfortable, to a varying degree, about making decisions and acting on them.

Folks who feel threatened by risks, tend to demand certainty about the outcomes of their acts. A key point here is that none of us know for sure that bad things won’t actually happen. Unfortunately, those who are risk-aversive run these negative events in their imagination as if they were happening to them, catastrophize about them, and thereby chill themselves off from taking the risk. What they demand is certainty that they will reap the benefits of acting without incurring the risk. What feels threatening to them is this risk because it contradicts their demand for certainty.

Accordingly, your chain of reasoning, when more fully expanded, may take the following general form:

1. I must be certain my actions will not have bad outcomes.
2. But I am not certain doing this won’t have (such and such) bad outcomes.
3. So, doing this could be a catastrophe.
4. So, I can’t do it.

In Premise 1 you demand certainty, and in Premise 2 you perceive that you don’t have the certainty you demand. This leaves you in a conflicted state of suspended anxiety which you top off with language like “Oh my God, this is awful, horrible, and terrible. How can I really make this commitment and keep it!” You thereby trap yourself in a never-never-land of waiting for the ideal moment when reality and absolute certainty converge, and you can act with absolute assurance. So, you may put things off, procrastinate, and, in the end, make your decision by indecision; that is, wait too long, and f...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword for Therapists
• Preface for Users
• Introduction: Getting Started!
• 1 Overcoming Risk-Aversion
• 2 Overcoming Low Frustration Tolerance
• 3 Overcoming Low Anger Control
• 4 Overcoming Phobias
• 5 Overcoming Low Self-Reliance
• 6 Overcoming Your Obsessive Thinking
• Index