Hey guys, it’s Aime Lynn with Flipswitch’s Erasing Negative Thoughts segment. On each edition of Erasing Negative Thoughts, we identify one way of “stinkin thinkin” and show how it’s more often than not, either completely untrue or extremely exaggerated.
On this edition of Erasing Negative Thoughts, we’ll cover the thinking pattern known as “Disqualifying the Positive.”
We’ve all done this one, right?:
“Sure I get A’s on all my tests, but I made a C on this one. I’m just a C student.”
“This person said he didn’t like me. I don’t have any friends. Sure, lots of people hang out with me, but they don’t count.”
“I’ve just not ever been happy. Sure there were times when I thought I was happy, but I don’t really think I was now.”
And on and on.
Disqualifying the positive is a particularly insidious distorted way of thinking because it allows you to gloss over literally mountains of evidence to the contrary of your other distorted ways of thinking. Why? Because, regardless of all that evidence, none of it counts. No no no. Only the negative beliefs are right because “insert excuse X here.”
And if all the positive things in life no longer get to count, the bad things aren’t just bad, they’re REALLY since there are no longer any positives in your world. It would be funny if it weren’t so detrimental to you. On the one hand you’re already unhappy for various reasons. And on top of that, that already bad feeling is made worse by this false belief that positives either don’t count or, even worse, don’t exist at all.
But if you stop and think for a moment, positive evidence does exist all around you. In fact, positive evidence is kind of the reason most of the other distorted ways of thinking we talk about here aren’t really true either.
You’re always a failing? What about that B you got on a test 3 months ago. You say it doesn’t count because it was 3 months ago, but believe me…..it counts. If nothing else, you could at least change your thoughts to the more accurate description, I haven’t made the grades I’ve wanted for the last 3 months. I would doubt that even that would be universally true though.
All those friends you have don’t count because, they’re not that close, they’re not real friends, whatever whatever what..ever.
Not disqualifying the positive means basically looking around you for all that you do right, even when you’ve made a few mistakes. By not disqualifying the positive, your real problems become much more manageable because suddenly you have a mountain of successes with which to short circuit absurd claims of your universal awfulness as well as a good amount of evidence that you can learn and succeed even when your screw ups are quite real.
So, the next time you say, “It’s all so bad, I always screw up” stop and think for a moment; what about that time I didn’t screw up.” Yep, it’s that easy.
That’s it for this round of Erasing Negative Thinking. I’m Aime Lynn, catch you next time.
