Finding the Center Within: The Healing Way of Mindfulness Meditation. (25 page)

Look Deeply at Your Thoughts

Looking deeply in a Buddhist context means seeing the pattern of how we distress ourselves. We distress ourselves because we try to make the impermanent permanent. We live as though our jobs, relationships, health, and life itself were permanent. For this reason, we suffer when something happens that reminds us of life’s impermanence. Psychology can also help us to look deeply. Cognitive treatment of depression, for example, is based on the premise that depressive thinking is always in some way distorted. In general, depressive thinking tends to exaggerate negative aspects and minimize positive aspects. The psychiatrist David Burns, in his book
Feeling Good: The New
Mood Therapy,
enumerates the following types of depressive distortions in thinking:

1.
All-or-nothing thinking.
This involves seeing things in a black-andwhite manner. If your report card has an A in every subject but one, you feel like a failure.

2.
Overgeneralization.
You see one negative event as a never-ending pattern of failure and defeat. For example, you burn the dinner, then tell yourself, “I never do anything right.”

3.
Mental filter.
You dwell on one negative detail to the exclusion of any positive aspects. For example, you look at a lovely landscape, but what you think about the most is the single beer can lying on the ground.

4.
Disqualifying the positive.
You find some way to insist that positive aspects are not as real or as important as negative ones. Barbara did this by discounting her employer’s genuine appreciation, his offer to be a positive reference, and the four weeks’ pay he sent her. 5.
Jumping to conclusions.
You make negative assumptions about things you could not really know for sure. Especially mind reading (assuming someone else is thinking or feeling something negative with-out checking it out) and fortune-telling (predicting negative events as though you had an infallible crystal ball). Barbara engaged in fortune-telling by assuming that it would take her a long time to find a job (it could happen tomorrow) and that she would 07 BIEN.qxd 7/16/03 9:58 AM Page 158

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become homeless. Of course it might take a long time. But she also might find a job right away. Both traditional Buddhist teaching and cognitive psychology emphasize the uselessness of fortune-telling. 6.
Magnification (catastrophizing ) and minimization.
You see things out of proportion, enlarging the importance of negative aspects, shrinking the importance of positive aspects. Barbara’s labeling the whole situation as “horrible” is an example.

7.
Emotional reasoning.
Because you feel it, that must be the way things really are. Because you’re sad, everything must really be terrible. Because you’re angry, someone must have done something to cause it. 8.
“Should” statements.
You try to motivate yourself with self-punishing thoughts, especially statements involving shoulds and musts. The psychologist Albert Ellis says “don’t should on me” and avoid

“mental must-urbation.”

9.
Labeling and mislabeling.
This is a form of overgeneralization. If you make a mistake, you’re a “loser.” If someone cuts you off on the road, he’s a “jerk.” Both of these reactions ignore other aspects of the person in question. Barbara labeled herself as “no good at anything,” ignoring many positive abilities. (Notice that all you need for this statement to be wrong is just one area of ability.) It is better to see a mistake as just a mistake.

10.
Personalization.
You blame yourself for an event not primarily under your control. Barbara blamed her termination on herself, when in reality it was based on the company’s overall business situation.

Don’t Make It Worse

What all ten of these ways of thinking have in common is some element of distortion in the direction of a negative perception. Dr. Burns maintains that in his experience with depressed people, he has never encountered a case where some distortion in thinking was not involved. The Buddha said that where there is perception there is deception. It is always good to be aware that there can be some element of distortion in the way we see things.

People who are vulnerable to depression also have a stronger tendency than others to engage in upward comparison. Thus a person with 07 BIEN.qxd 7/16/03 9:58 AM Page 159

If you are feeling sad, well-meaning people may tell you to just “snap out of it.” Sometimes, you may even be able to do this. But if the sadness is deep, you will not be able to follow this advice. This is because we do not have direct control over our emotions. We cannot force ourselves to stop feeling sad, anxious, embarrassed, or ashamed any more than we can force ourselves to be happy, confident, peaceful, and at ease. Still, we are far from helpless in the face of such feelings. If we at least make the effort to calm them, that is already a miracle. Then if we can take the next step of looking into our thinking and see how we heap despair upon our sadness, we can go much further toward alleviating our pain.

Both Buddhism and psychology help us to be calm and to investigate our patterns dispassionately. So if we calm a sad feeling first, and then examine our thoughts, we can identify what we are telling ourselves about the situation that contributes to our distress. Cognitive psychology teaches that it is very helpful at this point to write it all down. Thoughts are fluid and elusive, and the act of writing gives us more of a handle on them. So write down what you are thinking. Go through the list above, and see how you are adding to your own pain unnecessarily. Then, as an additional step, cultivate more adaptive, constructive thinking. Mindfulness teaches us not to struggle with ourselves, so it is important that we do not do this in a way that creates internal warfare. 07 BIEN.qxd 7/16/03 9:58 AM Page 160

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However, it is helpful to insert more positive, constructive thoughts into the stream of awareness.

Barbara’s Story Continued

The day after Barbara was laid off, she was able to respond more constructively. She sat for a few minutes, breathing in and out, and was able to identify what she was telling herself that was increasing her pain. In particular, she found out that she was minimizing positive aspects and magnifying negative ones. She realized that she felt some relief about leaving this job. From the first, she had had misgivings about it being the right position for her. She also had exaggerated the financial consequences and the difficulty of finding work. She reminded herself of her strengths and that she always had been able to interview well and to find work, even if sometimes it took longer than she would have liked. She also discovered that by telling herself it was horrible, she was engaging in black-and-white thinking and magnifying the negative. Not everything about this was horrible. The break from work was welcome, even though she would have preferred to have a break without the threat to her financial security. It certainly was unrealistic to imagine herself on the street just yet!

Barbara wrote down what she was telling herself and identified the distortions in her thinking (minimizing positives and exaggerating negatives, all-or-nothing thinking, and so on). Then she went on to write some thoughts that were more constructive, without denying the reality. She wrote: “While this will be a financial setback for me, it is very unlikely that I will end up on the street. I may have to face the discomfort of calling my creditors and working with them on some late payments. And while that is no fun, it is not awful or terrible.”

Barbara also noted that while her emotions did not shift dramatically in any immediate way, she already felt a little better. As part of her looking deeply, Barbara also worked with her dreams and identified a destructive pattern. She came to see that she had an unhealthy dependence that she did not like to admit, as though someone would somehow always rescue her. This prevented her from saving money so that she could take better care of herself in such emergencies. She vowed, as a practical step, that she would begin a regular practice of saving—even small amounts—as soon as she was employed again.

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Challenge Depressive Thinking

Take out a blank sheet of paper. Close your eyes, letting your body and your mind relax, and take a few conscious breaths. Turn the paper to a horizontal position, so it is wider than it is long, and draw three columns. Label them
Situation, Thinking,
and
Rebuttal
. Now remember an occasion when you felt very sad, but that you at least suspect contained some element of exaggeration or distortion. In your mind’s eye, allow yourself to reexperience the event. Bring it all back in detail. Recall what you saw, heard, touched, and if relevant, tasted and smelled. Recall what you were thinking or telling yourself internally. Notice how your body feels as you remember these details.

In the first column, describe the event that made you sad
objectively
. That is, write it in such a way that a person watching it from the outside who had no emotional investment in what was happening would agree with your description.

In the second column, record your thoughts. Now rest again for a few moments, breathing in and out consciously.

As you reconsider what you have written, can you see that there is no necessity between what you wrote in the first column and how you interpreted these events in the second column? Remember, where there is perception, there is deception. See if you can create a little space, a little wriggle room, between the event and your thoughts about it. Now go through the list of ten distortions on pages 157 and 158, and try to identify those that apply. If you need help or get stuck, ask a trusted friend to give some input. Write the label of that type of thinking next to your thought. Finally, in the third column, write a rational rebuttal. This should be a thought that simply makes sense, not something overly optimistic. Again, ask someone for help if you need it.

For example, Barbara wrote in her first column that she was laid off because of a downturn in the company business. Notice that this description is objective and does not include emotional language. In the second column, one of her thoughts was that she would become a homeless person. She labeled this appropriately as “fortune-telling,”

and then wrote in her third column: “I really don’t know how this will turn out. While it is possible I could become homeless, that doesn’t 07 BIEN.qxd 7/16/03 9:58 AM Page 162

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really seem very likely. For all I know, I could find an even better job, and quite quickly.”

Understand Schemas and Complexes

As we become aware of our thoughts and how they function to increase suffering, we detect patterns. Certain areas of our mental functioning are riddled with land mines and difficulties. We may discover that we are especially prone to particular kinds of distortions in thinking, such as fortune-telling or overgeneralization. Over time, we can cultivate new, more constructive mental habits.

There are other kinds of patterns we may see that exist at a deeper level than the errors in thinking noted above. Jung called these deep patterns
complexes
. Whenever one of these areas is triggered, we need mindfulness more than ever. A complex is a constellation of thoughts and feelings that represent a difficult area of functioning. A thirty-fiveyear-old man who lives at home with his mother and cannot entertain the idea of leaving her because “she would be all alone” may quite likely have a mother complex involving an unacknowledged dependency on her. A Buddhist term for this is
mental formation
. A more recent term for a related idea is
schema
. This term comes from cognitive psychological research, in which it means a configuration or pattern of information. We have schemas about all kinds of things. For example, we have restaurant schemas, which tell us what to expect when we go to a restaurant. This schema is a distillation of our various experiences with restaurants. We know, for example, that the general pattern will be something like: Ask for a table, wait to be seated by the hostess, look over the menu, give our order to a server, eat, ask for the check, pay it, and leave a tip. All of this information is represented in the schema, a kind of neuronal pathway that connects this information as it is encoded in the brain. Schemas are often helpful. They give us an idea of what to expect. They provide a sense of comforting predictability. Imagine if every time you went into a restaurant, you had to figure out what to do from scratch! Life would be very confusing and chaotic without schemas to organize our information about the world.

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