Interpersonal Problems Workbook by Matthew McKay & Patrick Fanning & Avigail Lev & Michelle Skeen

Author:Matthew McKay & Patrick Fanning & Avigail Lev & Michelle Skeen
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781608828388
Publisher: New Harbinger Publications, Inc.
Published: 2013-06-13T00:00:00+00:00

How Your Mind Works

Thoughts occur spontaneously. You have little control over their content. You have little control over how often they come up. Schema thoughts are going to pop up from time to time, whatever you do. But if you are trying to act differently in your relationships, according to your newly clarified values, then schema thoughts are absolutely going to pop up—frequently and vividly. For example, if you are prone to schema thoughts about abandonment and your new friend cancels a date, this minor rejection will be sure to trigger all your old thoughts about people leaving you forever.

To become more aware of how your mind generates these schema thoughts, it helps to think of your mind metaphorically, in terms of real-world objects or experiences that it resembles:

A popcorn machine. Your mind functions like a popcorn machine, popping up thoughts one after another Hayes, Strosahl, and Wilson 1999). Sometimes a whole lot of thoughts pop in rapid succession. Sometimes the rate is slower, with isolated thoughts here and there, separated by brief moments of silence. But your mind never stops entirely. And you can’t turn off the popcorn machine of your mind. And you can’t speed it up or slow it down. Your mind just keeps popping up thoughts: pop, pop, kernel after kernel. That’s how it’s designed. That’s how it works.

A tug-of-war fanatic. Your mind loves to play tug-of-war (Hayes, et al. 1999). When schema thoughts come up, it’s as if your mind were handing you one end of a rope and challenging you to a tug-of-war. Trying to resist or argue with your schema thoughts is like grabbing the rope and starting to pull. The harder you pull, the harder your mind pulls back. As you continue to try to refute the schema thought or turn it off, you are digging in your heels and pulling harder and harder on the rope, making your mind also dig in and pull back harder, in the form of more negative judgments, more rotten memories, more dire predictions.

The way out is to let go of the rope. Stop pulling and just drop it. The way to “handle” painful schema thoughts is not to “handle” them at all; just let them go, even the most painful and disturbing ones. Every effort at control is just picking up the rope and returning to the tug-of-war. When a painful thought occurs, you have a real choice to make about how to respond. You can do one of three things: attempt to suppress or refute the thought, buy into the thought and agree with it, or notice it and let it go. The attempt to suppress or refute the thought is like picking up the rope, while noticing the thought and letting it go is like dropping the rope.

A pushy sales rep. Picture your thoughts as sales representatives (Vuille 2006). Mundane, everyday thoughts are like polite salespeople who offer you something you don’t care for very much and then go away quietly if you don’t express interest.

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