February 22, 2019--Coddling of the American Mind

Greg Lukianoff's and Jon Haidt's, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up A Generation For Failure, offers a convincing analysis of how the rise of "fearful parenting"; the decline of unsupervised, child-directed play; and the new world of social media that have engulfed teenagers have led to major changes in childhood itself. Much of it not for the better.

As a sidebar, there is an excellent summary of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, and how the issues it was developed to address are among the developmental consequences of this new childhood.

CBT focuses on a cognitive feedback loop in which irrational negative beliefs can produce powerful negative feelings, which in turn drive clients' reasoning, motivating them to find evidence to support their negative, emotion-based beliefs. This produces a cognitive triad that can cause depression and a negative pattern of self-regard: "I'm no good," "My world is bleak," and "My future is hopeless."

CBT therapists work with clients to help them break the disempowering feedback cycle (which they call schemas). If people work to examine these beliefs and consider counterevidence, it frequently gives them some relief from negative emotions so that they can hopefully be released from them and become more open to questioning their negative feelings, thereby rising from their depression and becoming more positively oriented and activated.

I have found this approach to be helpful in my own life and thought it might be for yours as well.

To become less theoretical and more specific, the list below shows nine of the most common cognitive distortions that people learn to recognize while undergoing Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.  

EMOTIONAL REASONING:  Letting your feelings guide your interpretation of reality.  "I feel depressed; therefore, my marriage is not working out."  

CATASTROPHIZING:  Focussing on the worst possible outcome and seeing it as most likely.  "It would be terrible if I failed."  

OVERGENERALIZING:  Perceiving a global pattern of negatives on the basis of a single incident.  "This generally happens to me.  I seem to fail at a lot of things."

DICHOTOMOUS THINKING (also known variously as "black-and-white thinking, ""all-or-nothing thinking," and "binary thinking"):  Viewing events or people in all-or-nothing terms.  "I get rejected by everyone," or "It was a complete waste of time."

MIND READING:  Assuming that you know what people think without having sufficient evidence of their thoughts.  "He thinks I'm a loser."

LABELLING:  Assigning global negative traits to yourself or others (often in the service of dichotomous thinking).  "I'm undesirable," or "He's a rotten person."

NEGATIVE FILTERING:  You focus almost exclusively on the negatives and seldom notice the positives.  "Look at all the people who don't like me."

DISCOUNTING POSITIVES:  Claiming that the positive things you or others do are trivial, so that you can maintain a negative judgement.  "That's what wives are supposed to do-so it doesn't count when she's nice to me," or "Those successes were easy, so they don't matter."

BLAMING:  Focussing on the other person as the source of your negative feelings; you refuse to take responsibility for changing yourself.  "She's to blame for the way I feel now," or "My parents caused all my problems."