In one popular understanding of events and our emotional reactions, something bad will happen and as a direct result, we react. For example, someone cuts us off in traffic, calls us a bad name, and we can’t help but feel angry or upset, and our day is ruined.
In cognitive behavioral therapy, we learn there’s an extra step in this process. Our beliefs, assumptions and interpretations about the event lead us to the emotional reaction and our subsequent actions. We probably have some belief with the words “should” or “must”, for example “People must be polite to me.”
In a sense, this type of belief is making a demand on reality, and often reality is very resistant to our demands.
We might ask ourselves, what information are we lacking? Perhaps the man in traffic is under a lot of pressure at work; perhaps he has recently lost his wife; perhaps he’s just not a nice person. If any of these are the case, it’s quite clear that the event is quite impersonal.
Then we can think of a new way to see the event. For example, “People express themselves in different ways.” “We can view the way people express themselves as information. This man is feeling frustrated.” “Life is more interesting when something unexpected happens.” “An angry person might have something to teach us about ourselves.”
For the transcript Your Interpretation A Beautiful Thought
