Do A Fourth Step With Holocaust Survivor Viktor Frankl To Remove Resentments by Langohr Glenn

Author:Langohr, Glenn [Langohr, Glenn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Mindfulness Publishing House
Published: 2018-09-05T16:00:00+00:00

Worksheets for Step Four

I want you to examine your thought process so you can learn what leads to your behaviors. When we can change our thought process, we can then change our behaviors. To begin this journey of gaining awareness and more control over our thoughts, lets look at Cognitive Behavior Therapy. Aaron Beck, a psychiatrist, invented CBT in the 1960’s to help his clients understand how to change their automatic thoughts that were negative and possibly based on dysfunctional assumptions .

CBT has been used to treat relationship problems, drug and alcohol abuse, anxiety and depression. This is very helpful to understand to gain control of your thoughts. Early on in my recovery my sponsor told me to write a “thought record” anytime I got angry. While this helps you examine your thoughts it doesn’t go as deep as CBT which gives you a list of negative thought cycles you can see if you are getting stuck in.

Here are some common cognitive distortions to look out for:

1) All-or-nothing thinking. This is also known as “Polarized Thinking/ Or Black and White Thinking”. It really means that you are getting stuck in a mentality that doesn’t have room for a middle ground where life usually is. Life has complexities, nuances and shades of grey.

2) Jumping to conclusions. This is similar to All-or-nothing thinking. You know you are getting stuck in this one when you assume an outcome without all of the evidence. If you are becoming sure how things will turn out without the evidence you are becoming irrational. If you think you know what others are thinking of you for certain it is also irrational thinking.

3) Minimizing or Magnifying. This mindset can remove all the good from your perceptions and focus on all the bad. Or it can minimize all the problems. To get out of this mindset you have to focus on the solution not the problem. Or focus on all the other good things in your life and magnify them.

4) Fallacy of fairness. We are often concerned about fairness. “That it isn’t fair that it happened to me!” We can go through life “keeping score” and that sets us up for “resentment”.

5) Emotional reasoning. This is another “feeling” deal that can weigh us down. Just because you “feel” something DOES NOT MAKE IT TRUE. Clearly, our emotions are not always right when it comes to what is true and what isn’t true. Stay out of “I feel it, therefore it must be true.”

6) Blaming. When things don’t go our way, there are many ways we want to explain or assign responsibility for the outcome. Sometimes we blame others for what went wrong. It becomes a cognitive distortion when we blame another person for making us “feel” or act out in a certain way because we are the only ones responsible for the way we act and feel.

7) Shoulds. We can make up rules about how we and others should behave that are to black and white. When others break our rules, we get upset.

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