Self Disputation
Martin E. Seligman. Learned Optimism. Chapter 12: The Optimistic Life. First Vintage Books, 2006. pp. 207-234. Notes and Highlights
The ABCs
KATIE HAS BEEN on a strict diet for two weeks. Tonight after work she goes out for drinks with some friends and eats some of the nachos and chicken wings the others ordered. Immediately afterward she feels she has “ruined” her diet.
She thinks to herself, “Way to go, Katie. You sure blew your diet tonight. I am so unbelievably weak. I can’t even go to a bar with some friends without making a total glutton of myself. They must think I’m such a fool. Well, all my dieting over the last two weeks is blown now, so I might as well really make a pig of myself and eat the cake in the freezer.”
***
When we encounter adversity, we react by thinking about it. Our thoughts rapidly convert into beliefs. These beliefs may become so habitual we don’t even realize we have them unless we stop and focus on them. And they don’t just sit there idly; they have consequences.
The beliefs are the direct causes of what we feel and what we do next.
The first step is to see the connection between adversity, belief, and consequence.
The first section, “Adversity,” can be almost anything—a leaky faucet, a frown from a friend, a baby that won’t stop crying, a large bill, inattentiveness from your spouse. Be objective about the situation. Record your description of what happened, NOT your evaluation of it. So if you had an argument with your spouse, you might write down that he was unhappy with something you said or did. Record that. But do not record “She was unfair” under “Adversity.” That’s an inference, and you may want to record that in the second section: “Belief.”
Be sure to separate thoughts from feelings. (Feelings will go under “Consequences.”) “I just blew my diet” and “I feel incompetent” are beliefs. Their accuracy can be evaluated. “I feel sad,” however, expresses a feeling. It doesn’t make sense to check the accuracy of “I feel sad”.
“Consequences.” In this section, record your feelings and what you did. Did you feel sad, anxious, joyful, guilty, or whatever? Often you will feel more than one thing. What did you then do? “I had no energy,” “I made a plan to get her to apologize,” “I went back to bed” are all consequent actions.
- Adversity: I decided to join a gym, and when I walked into the place, I saw nothing but firm, toned bodies all around me.
- Belief: What am I doing here? I look like a beached whale compared to these people! I should get out of here while I still have my dignity.
- Consequences: I felt totally self-conscious and ended up leaving after fifteen minutes.
It’s your turn now. Over the next couple of days, record five ABC sequences from your life.
When you have recorded your five ABC episodes, read them over carefully. Look for the link between your belief and the consequences. What you will see is that pessimistic explanations set off passivity and dejection, whereas optimistic explanations energize.
The next step follows immediately: If you change the habitual beliefs that follow adversity for you, your reaction to adversity will change in lockstep.
Disputation and Distraction
THERE ARE TWO general ways for you to deal with your pessimistic beliefs once you are aware of them. The first is simply to distract yourself when they occur—try to think of something else. The second is to dispute them. Disputing is more effective in the long run, because successfully disputed beliefs are less likely to recur when the same situation presents itself again.
Distraction
I WANT YOU now NOT to think about a piece of apple pie with vanilla ice cream. The pie is heated, and the ice cream forms a delightful contrast in taste and temperature. You probably find that you have almost no capacity to refrain from thinking about the pie. But you do have the capacity to redeploy your attention.
Think about the pie again. Got it. Mouth-watering? Now stand up and slam the palm of your hand against the wall and shout, “STOP!” The image of the pie disappeared, didn’t it?
Some people ring a loud bell, others carry a three-by-five card with the word STOP in enormous red letters. Many people find it works well to wear a rubber band around their wrists and snap it hard to stop their ruminating.
If you combine one of these physical techniques with a technique called attention shifting, you will get longer-lasting results. To keep your thoughts from returning to a negative belief after interruption, now direct your attention elsewhere. Try this: Pick up a small object and study it intently for a few seconds.
Finally, you can undercut ruminations by taking advantage of their very nature. Their nature is to circle around in your mind, so that you will not forget them. When adversity strikes, schedule some time—later—for thinking things over … say, this evening at six P.M. Now, when something disturbing happens and you find the thoughts hard to stop, you can say to yourself, “Stop. I’ll think this over later, at … [such and such a time].”
Also, write the troublesome thoughts down the moment they occur. The combination of jotting them down—which acts to ventilate them and dispose of them—and setting a later time to think about them works well; it takes advantage of the reason ruminations exist—to remind you of themselves. If you write them down and set a time to think about them, they no longer have any purpose, and purposelessness lessens their strength.
Disputation
More lasting remedy is to dispute them: Give them an argument. Go on the attack. By effectively disputing the beliefs that follow adversity, you can change your customary reaction from dejection and giving up to activity and good cheer.
- Belief: What awful grades, Judy.
- Consequences: I felt totally dejected and useless.
- Disputation: I’m blowing things out of proportion. Those aren’t awful grades. I may not have done the best in the class, but I didn’t do the worst in the class either. I checked. The fact that I am forty doesn’t make me any less intelligent than anyone else in the class. I have a lot of other things going on in my life that take time away from my studies. I have a full-time job. I have a family. I think that, given my situation, I did a good job on my exams. Now that I have taken this set of exams, I know how much work I need to put into my studies in the future in order to do even better.
- Outcome: I felt much better about myself and my exams. I’m still concerned that my age may be a disadvantage, but I will cross that bridge if and when I come to it.
Distancing
IT IS ESSENTIAL to realize your beliefs are just that—beliefs. They may or may not be facts. If a jealous rival shrieked at you in a rage, “You are a terrible mother. You are selfish, inconsiderate, and stupid,” how would you react? You probably wouldn’t take the accusations much into account.
We can more or less easily distance ourselves from the unfounded accusations of others. But we are much worse at distancing ourselves from the accusations that we launch—daily—at ourselves. After all, if we think them about ourselves, they must be true.
Wrong!
They are merely bad habits of thought produced by unpleasant experiences in the past—by childhood conflicts, by strict parents, by an overly critical Little League coach, by a big sister’s jealousy. But because they seem to issue from ourselves, we treat them as gospel.
They are merely beliefs, however. Checking out the accuracy of our reflexive beliefs is what disputation is all about.
Learning to Argue with Yourself
You already have a lifetime of experience in disputation. You use this skill whenever you argue with other people.
There are four important ways to make your disputations convincing.
• Evidence?
• Alternatives?
• Implications?
• Usefulness?
Evidence
THE MOST CONVINCING way of disputing a negative belief is to show that it is factually incorrect. You adopt the role of a detective and ask, “What is the evidence for this belief?”
Judy did this. She believed that her “awful” grades were the “worst in the class.” She checked the evidence. The person sitting next to her had much lower grades.
It is important to see the difference between this approach and the so-called “power of positive thinking.” Positive thinking often involves trying to believe upbeat statements such as “Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better” in the absence of evidence, or even in the face of contrary evidence. Learned optimism, in contrast, is about accuracy.
It is how you cope with negative statements that has an effect. Usually, the negative beliefs that follow adversity are inaccurate. Most people catastrophize: From all the potential causes, they select the one with the direst implications. One of your most effective techniques in disputation will be to search for evidence pointing to the distortions in your catastrophic explanations. Most of the time, you will have reality on your side.
Alternatives
ALMOST NOTHING that happens to you has just one cause; you did poorly on a test, all of the following might have contributed: how hard the test was, how much you studied, how smart you are, how fair the professor is, how the other students did, how tired you were.
Here again, disputation usually has reality on its side. There are multiple causes, so why latch onto the most insidious one?
To dispute your own beliefs, scan for all possible contributing causes. Focus on the changeable (not enough time spent studying), the specific (this particular exam was uncharacteristically hard) and the nonpersonal (the professor graded unfairly) causes. You may have to push hard at generating alternative beliefs, latching onto possibilities you are not fully convinced are true.
Implications
BUT THE WAY things go in this world, the facts won’t always be on your side. The negative belief you hold about yourself may be correct. In this situation, the technique to use is decatastrophizing.
Even if my belief is correct, you say to yourself, what are its implications? Judy was older than the rest of the students. But what does that imply? It doesn’t mean that Judy is any less intelligent than they are, and it doesn’t mean that nobody would want to hire her.
How likely, you should ask yourself, are those awful implications? How likely is it that three Bs mean no one will ever hire Judy? Once you ask if the implications are really that awful, repeat the search for evidence. Judy remembered that almost everyone who got a master’s degree from her program got a decent job.
Usefulness
SOMETIMES the consequences of holding a belief matter more than the truth of the belief. Is the belief destructive? Katie’s belief in her gluttony, even if true, is destructive. It is a recipe for letting go of her diet completely.
Some people get very upset when the world shows itself not to be fair. We can sympathize with that sentiment, but the belief that the world should be fair may cause more grief than it’s worth. A technician doing bomb demolition might find himself thinking, “This could go off, and I might be killed”—with the result that his hands start to shake. In this case I would recommend distraction over disputation. Whenever you simply have to perform now, you will find distraction the tool of choice. Use the distraction techniques. (Stop! Assign a later worry time. Make a written note of the thought.)
Another tactic is to detail all the ways you can change the situation in the future. Even if the belief is true now, is the situation changeable? How can you go about changing it?
Your Disputation Record
Now I want you to practice the ABCDE model.
D is for disputation; E is for energization. During the next five adverse events you face, listen closely for your beliefs, observe the consequences, and dispute your beliefs vigorously. Then observe the energization that occurs as you succeed in dealing with the negative beliefs,
Example below:
- Adversity: I borrowed a pair of really expensive earrings from my friend, and I lost one of them while I was out dancing.
- Belief: I am so irresponsible. They were Kay’s favorite earrings, and of course I go and lose one. She is going to be so absolutely furious at me. Not that she doesn’t have every reason. If I were her, I’d hate me too. I just can’t believe how much of a klutz I am. I wouldn’t be surprised if she told me she didn’t want to have anything to do with me anymore.
- Consequences: I felt totally sick. I was ashamed and embarrassed, and I didn’t want to call and tell her what happened. Basically, I just sat around feeling stupid for a while, trying to muster up the guts to call her.
- Disputation: Well, it is really unfortunate that I lost the earring. They were Kay’s favorites [evidence] and she probably will be very disappointed [implication]. However, she will realize it was an accident [alternative], and I seriously doubt she will hate me because of this [implication]. I don’t think it’s accurate to label myself as totally irresponsible just because I lost an earring [implication].
- Energization: I still felt bad about losing her earring, but I didn’t feel nearly as ashamed, and I wasn’t worried that she would end the friendship over it. I was able to relax and call her to explain.
The Externalization of Voices
IN ORDER to practice disputation, you don’t have to wait for adversity to strike. You can have a friend provide the negative beliefs for you out loud, and then you dispute his accusations, also out loud. Your friend’s job is to criticize you. Choose your friend carefully.
Help your friend choose the right kinds of criticisms by going over your ABC record with him, pointing out the negative beliefs that afflict you repeatedly. With these understandings reached, you’ll find that you don’t, in fact, take the criticisms personally when your friend makes them. Your job is to dispute the criticisms out loud, with all the armaments you have. Marshal all the contrary evidence you can find, spell out all the alternative explanations, decatastrophize by arguing that the implications are not nearly as dire as your friend charges. If you believe the accusation is true now, detail all the things you can do to change the situation. Your friend can interrupt to dispute your disputing.