Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

Perception is Everything

By  | 

That catchy, albeit depressing, song was playing today before yoga that goes “Bye bye love, bye bye happiness, hello loneliness, I think I’m gonna cry.”  It made me think about just how much perception has to do with how we think and feel. You could make the case, and cognitive behavioral therapists do make it, that perception is everything.

If we think about the narrator’s point of view, we see two huge errors in perception, called faulty thinking patterns, holding him back from liberation and a quick rebound. His girl has left him for someone new. This being the case, how do we know his happiness wasn’t based on a fiction all along, that he wasn’t wearing rose colored glasses, where he saw things as really good and she saw them as pretty bad? Ask yourself, from your own point of view, would you rather live in ignorant bliss or in objective reality, even if this reality carries some uncomfortable truths with it?

If his happiness was indeed based upon a fiction, it’s not to say this emotional state wasn’t real for him, just that full recognition of the false circumstances that created it would probably be hugely beneficial in helping him to him move on. If he can see that his happiness was a sham he’ll be more likely to refocus on creating a relationship where both are committed to being part of it and both really are happy.

This moves us into the second and more serious cognitive distortion, called fortune telling by CBT therapists. He is in effect predicting the future, seeing it as a lonely, sad, empty place. His belief that it will be that way will be a huge factor in making it that way. He’ll probably stay mired in self-pity, refuse to leave the house much, and be closed off to meeting new people, making his self-fulfilling prophecy come to pass. By shining the light of awareness on his two faulty thinking patterns, he would most likely, after a necessary period of grieving, feel motivated to go out there and create the conditions for his happiness instead of simply resigning himself to his fate.

Related posts:

  1. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Explained Cognitive behavioral therapy doesn’t discount the power or importance of the emotional apparatus in human life but it does choose to put the emphasis on cognition, on challenging and correcting faulty thinking patterns, in order to effect therapeutic change. In this sense from the CBT point of view the way you feel is a direct […]...
  2. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy For Depression Depression as a syndrome includes ways of seeing Self, others, and the future that could be categorized as faulty thinking patterns. By challenging these cognitive distortions and replacing them with more adaptive responses you give depression less of a chance to take root. You don’t necessarily need to be depressed to be guilty of invoking […]...
  3. Faulty Thinking And Distress Your conscious thoughts are not what cause you distress. It’s the conclusions you come to about yourself, others, and the world based on these thoughts that cause you distress. It’s an endless feedback loop actually where you have beliefs, then some activating event, then a thought, and then a value judgment on that thought, all […]...
  4. Changing Automatic Negative Thinking Automatic negative thinking could be said to occur unconsciously if we were working within in a psychoanalytic framework but this article channels CBT so we’ll just say that it happens so fast and seems so natural as it’s occurring that it doesn’t feel like thinking at all, it just feels like the way things are. […]...
  5. Catastrophizing Cognitive Behavioral theory holds that many of our struggles are caused by faulty perception, by maladaptive thinking patterns that hold us back from living happy, connected lives. The spin we put on a situation has a huge impact on our sense of Self, and our sense of Self determines the way we act in a […]...
  6. Depression And Feelings Of Worthlessness One of the symptoms of depression is feelings of worthlessness. There are various ways to approach the problem with clients, most of them centering around challenging the validity of these feelings by exposing the underlying faulty thinking patterns responsible for them. But in this article we will approach the problem from more of a meta […]...
  7. Make A Gratitude List To Combat Depression If you’ve been struggling with depression some symptoms you’ve probably experienced include low self-worth, negativity about your life situation, and hopelessness about your future. These symptoms occur together so often that Beck and his colleagues termed them the cognitive triad of depression. The thing to realize is that your beliefs about yourself, the world, and […]...
  8. Faulty Thinking Patterns A Prison of Our Own Making We get stuck in our lives and relationships because, with various entrenched patterns of thought taken to be objective truth in place, there really aren’t any good options for movement available. We get trapped in prisons of our own making without realizing it. We can’t or won’t see the […]...
  9. Mind Reading Faulty Thinking Pattern Mind Reading is a faulty thinking pattern that we are all guilty of engaging in sometimes. It’s when we are sure of the thoughts of those around us without any concrete evidence. Mind reading is turning speculation, an educated guess, into an ironclad truth. Trying to put ourselves in the shoes of others, to guess […]...
  10. Automatic Negative Thinking And Depression Arguing about the cause of depression is a little bit like arguing about what came first between the chicken and the egg. On one hand you have psychologists who believe that changes in mood cause negative thoughts about the self, world, and future while on the other hand you have psychologists who believe that negative […]...
  11. Combating Low Self-Esteem The challenge in combating low self-esteem is that self-esteem is itself ephemeral. It’s a feeling, a state of mind, an orientation towards people and the world that might be very real but remains difficult to pin down, difficult to define. But what is not difficult to pin down or define is the automatic negative thinking, […]...
  12. Testing Faulty Thinking We have talked about how maladaptive thinking leads to psychological and emotional distress. Faulty thinking is devious because it usually occurs on a subconscious level. You feel ruled in your life based on a set of objective realities that seem like they do not even need to be brought out into the light because they […]...
  13. Infatuation And Disillusionment In Romantic Relationships Infatuation, which usually occurs at the very beginning of romantic relationships, and disillusionment, which often takes its place as time goes by, might seem like polar opposites but from the cognitive behavioral point of view they’re quite similar in that objectivity gives way to bias, positive bias in the case of infatuation and negative bias […]...
  14. Replacing Negative Self-Talk With Positive Self-Talk The antidote for negative self-talk is positive self-talk. Simple, right? Objectively speaking it is simple, but the problem is that people mistake their subjective biases for objective reality. In the context of this article they mistake their negative self-talk for fact. They think of it like an incontrovertible report from an outside authority rather than […]...
  15. Fortune Telling Fortune telling is a cognitive distortion where you believe you can predict the future. You look into your imaginary crystal ball and see things going badly, taking this vivid imagery as indisputable fact. This attitude can cause a lot of needless distress and despair, and more importantly it often plays a huge role in your […]...
  16. Improving a Distressed Relationship Actively Questioning Taken For Granted Biases Improving a distressed relationship starts with actively questioning the taken for granted underlying biases towards the person with whom you’re upset. Longstanding conflict and bad experiences have probably led you to paint this person in a globally negative light where their intentions and motivations are always malicious, where they […]...
  17. Happiness is Based on Perception No matter what your situation is right now, it could be made better and it could be made worse. There are people out there who would trade places with you in an instant, and there are probably people out there you would trade places with in an instant. Setting up happiness as a goal to […]...
  18. Making Connections And Perception An open, friendly attitude is usually pretty easy to cultivate for people when they’re within their comfort zone. A big part of this comfort zone is already having good friends and acquaintances when they meet new people. There’s a certain sense of power, of feeling bigger, that comes from knowing in the back of your […]...
  19. Changes In Perception During Counseling I had a friend recently ask me if there were any commonalities in how clients perceive counseling sessions as they progress, and I didn’t have to think too hard about it because most go through the same basic sequence of stages. If you are currently in counseling or considering going it will be useful for […]...
  20. Perception Determines Reality A very common scenario for those with generally negative self-appraisals is that they project their feelings onto the people in their surrounding environments, quite assured in the knowledge that those who know them well hold similarly negative images of them. With this perceptive apparatus in place, they behave as if their negatively biased perceptions were […]...
Related Items