Teaching The Voice In My Head To Be Kinder
/I was really getting back into a groove of taking the “me” time to post to this little slice of the internet. But unfortunately the past 2+ weeks have been 100% driven by my Dutch intensive course. I didn’t really see or do anything during that time that didn’t have to do with that class.
But I am happy to report the work was worth it… and I passed!
Now on to starting the 5 exams needed to apply for permanent residency/citizenship in NL. You can apply for permanent residency or citizenship once you have lived in the Netherlands for at least 5 years (and making sure you didn’t leave the country for X - can’t remember offhand - amount of consecutive days during that time) and have passed the 5 inburgering exams. I have the first done (we have been here 5,5 years) and now I am feeling more ready to try the exams.
The wife shared on her blog how she has already submitted her permanent residency application since she passed all the exams this year!
In my last therapy session, we were discussing how quickly my brain finds the negative in a situation, about myself or even in the future at this point.
Working to flip the script on my negative thinking has been a lifetime of trial and error with limited success. Now with the help of my therapist, I am actively tracking the trends of these thoughts: when are they happening, are there any common triggers, etc.
Note: Therapy is helping feed into my love of a Google Doc/sheet
and tracking all of these tasks that she wants me to do!
Constantly taking the time to pause & recap my day (or couple of days since I am not at the point now where I do it at the end of each day) is forcing me to face these mind tricks head on. Seeing these situations, my reactions and the feeling or thinking error associated with each scenario is eye opening.
The anxiety truly feels like an unwanted tenant in my head who is constantly twisting my thoughts/feelings/reactions into the absolute worst case scenario. I recap the situation with my therapist and when I share about it verbally, it seems laughable at how my mind/body felt in that situation. But I know it happened because I was there.
It is a thin line, however, on how I categorise the situations after the fact because if I immediately say “Oh I should’ve reacted XXX” then I am already feeding into the thinking errors we are trying to combat.
Do you know what thinking errors are? Here are the 12 I am working on with my therapist:
All-or-Nothing Thinking (Black-and-White Thinking): This is the tendency to see things in extreme terms, categorizing situations as all good or all bad, with no middle ground. It involves disregarding the nuances and complexities of a situation.
Overgeneralization: This involves drawing broad conclusions based on limited evidence or a single negative event. For example, if one thing goes wrong, a person may believe that everything in their life is going wrong.
Mental Filtering: Focusing exclusively on negative aspects of a situation while ignoring or downplaying the positive aspects.
Discounting the Positive: Rejecting positive experiences or achievements as insignificant, believing that they "don't count" for some reason.
Mind Reading: Assuming that others are thinking negatively about you or that you know what they are thinking, without any concrete evidence.
Fortune Telling: Predicting that negative events will inevitably happen in the future, often without any rational basis.
Magnification and Minimization (Catastrophizing): Blowing things out of proportion (magnification) or shrinking their importance (minimization). This can involve making a small mistake into a major catastrophe or dismissing significant accomplishments.
Personalization: Taking responsibility for events or situations that are beyond one's control, assuming that one is to blame for everything that goes wrong.
Emotional Reasoning: Believing that feelings are facts and using emotions as evidence for the truth of a situation. For example, "I feel like a failure, so I must be a failure."
Should Statements: Using critical "should," "must," or "ought" statements about oneself or others. This can lead to self-blame or unrealistic expectations.
Labeling: Applying negative labels to oneself or others based on specific behaviors or mistakes. For example, defining oneself as "a loser" because of a single failure.
Control Fallacies: Believing that one has either total control (everything is your fault) or no control (everything happens to you and there's nothing you can do).
Anyone else have experience with them?
I have a couple of days where I can tick off half of them. I typed guilty of them and immediately retracted that. It is not something that I should feel bad about or feel a stigma around. It is my brain working against me and not something I am doing proactively.
So what’s happening when I catch a thinking error?
I am immediately acknowledging the situation and initiating a set of questions I’ve worked out with my therapist depending on the situation. For example, “Why do you think because your coffee spilled all over your bag and yourself that you deserve to sabotage the rest of your day?,” “Why ‘should’ you already be an expert at X just because someone you know who has relative same background as you is,?” etc.
I might think if I was reading this and have never experienced something like this, you’d think this seems so trivial. But really trying to stop an anxiety spiral is TOUGH. Retraining your brain to not immediately go to a negative place feels like a never-ending battle.
My therapist is encouraging me to be kinder to myself during this process and that is hard. Again I’ve been mainly negative to myself for as long as I can remember. Every previous time I have tried this activity, I have not been successful. I wanted to say failed, but I haven’t failed because I haven’t stopped trying.
That I have to celebrate and not trivialise. Since triviliasing positive advancement is also a thinking error. I mean really I feel like in some instances I can’t win. You know?
Even right now as I read this post, my negative thoughts are kicking off:
Why are you posting?
No one cares about your little problems compared to what is going on in the world.
What gives you the right?
I know in my heart that this is good for me. That is the entire reason I started this blog. Was a space for me to remove the thoughts weighing me down (on those shoulders) and freeing up that space. It’s also given me the confirmation that I am not alone and I am not the only one struggling.
To my fellow strugglers - I see you, I am here for you if you need anything.
