1727 || common thought distortions

Welcome to the Make Your Damn Bed Podcast, a daily motivation podcast designed to help

you get out of bed every morning with a little company from me, Julie America.

If you struggle with consistency, let's build a little momentum together, whether you

make your bed or not.

Good morning sunshine, welcome to another day of the Make Your Damn Bed Podcast.

Today's resource is Healing the Shame That Binds You by John Bradshaw.

In the book, he explains that being shame based can distort your thinking and lead to

either catastrophizing where you think the automatic worst from any given scenario, mind

reading, where you make assumptions without evidence about how people are thinking or

reacting to you or over generalizations, where you think in absolutes, you might slip

one stitch and say, I'll never get good at sewing where basically you equate a one-time

situation with all the time or one person or one interaction with everybody.

But Bradshaw highlights another form of over generalization, which he calls nominalization,

where you take a process and make it into a simple thing.

To say that this country is going up in flames, despite being pretty fucking real, is just

a nominalization, because the country itself involves countless dynamics, processes,

systems, people, and interactions, and some aspects of all of those dynamics will be

bothersome, are absolutely in flames, but the whole country is not just one entity.

When we over generalize or nominalize something, we restrict our response to it.

We see that as a closed case of the world being on fire, and we don't tap in.

Why interact with something if the whole of it is a failure?

But the whole of it is not a failure.

There are plenty of parts to still interact with, and that we can still have an influence

on if we interacted.

But there is a tendency to distort our thinking to such a degree that we think everything

is hopeless.

The same type of distorted thinking comes from either or thinking.

There are very few things in life that are dichotomous.

Just one or the other, either or.

But the more shame-based you are, the more you'll perceive things in extremes.

There is less middle ground when you root your decision-making in shameful experiences

from your past.

People and things are either good or bad.

They're either wonderful or terrible.

Everything is amazing or everything's on fire.

There is no peaceful contentment in the middle, but this is taxing not just on how you judge

everything around you, but on how you judge yourself.

If you're not brilliant or error-free, then you might think you are a complete failure.

This leaves no room for mistakes, which are crucial to becoming successful.

This is also why shame-based people tend to always need to be right.

As Bradshaw puts it, you must continually prove that your viewpoint and actions are correct.

You live in a completely defensive posture.

Since you can't make a mistake, you aren't interested in the truth of other opinions,

only in defending your own.

This thought distortion keeps you in the shame's world cage, because you rarely hear any

new information.

You're getting no new information or data that could help you change your belief system

about yourself.

Another common distorted thinking from shame-based people is should-thinking.

Bradshaw says, in this thought distortion, you operate from a list of inflexible rules

about how you and other people should be acting.

The rules are right and indisputable.

There's a tyranny of these shoulds.

But like all forms of perfectionism, it leads to disappointment and furthering our shame.

Another common cover-up for toxic shame pertains to the way you think about control.

Either you see yourself as this helpless and externally controlled person with no agency

and no real control over the outcomes, or you see yourself as this omnipotent, all-knowing

being that becomes responsible for everyone and everything around you.

If other people aren't having a good time, you carry that weight on your shoulders and

feel completely guilty when everything isn't working out perfectly.

Another common distortion is picking out one element of a situation to the exclusion

of everything else.

You pick out details to support your beliefs or your narrative about your personal defectiveness.

I've seen this in real time where people will completely miss all of the praise and

focus in on a feeling or a vibe or a look and think that that is someone making fun of

them or shaberg them because they've filtered out all of the good stuff and magnified

anything that could be perceived as bad.

Another common cover-up for people is blaming or passing the book onto others.

And I didn't think I did this until Bradshaw brought up the fact that global labeling

is a way to do this and I absolutely do blame everything on capitalism.

And apparently that is just another way to distract myself from my own pain and my

responsibility to do something about it because pain is what moves us to change if I can

offload some of that pain and blame the system, then I can distract myself from my own

responsibility.

Another common distortion is personalization, quote, shame-based people are egocentric.

And he compares it to having a chronic toothache.

If your tooth hurts all the time, all you can think about is that tooth.

You become tooth-centered.

Likewise if your self image is ruptured and it is painful to experience yourself, you

become self-centered, shame-based people relate everything back to themselves because

it's all they're constantly thinking of, even though they're trying to avoid that thought.

It, like a lot of these natural tendencies to cope, are paradoxical.

And so to remedy these things, Bradshaw says, we must externalize these thought distortions.

To begin dealing with it, you have to go back to a time when you were experiencing a painful

episode of shame, so that ideally you can restructure your thinking around it.

Now I will say, if you've done a lot of this work in the past, I don't think it's great

to keep rehashing your shameful states, just to keep working through them, but if you've

never done this work and you've never assessed where your shame comes from or how it manifests

or how you cope with it, it might be really valuable for you.

So take this case by case, remember I'm just a lady with very few qualifications in

my closet with a microphone.

So do what works for you, but don't overdo any of this type of shit if it's something

you've already done in the past.

You know, like, I don't know, use discretion, but also don't be hard on yourself because

that would defeat the whole purpose of working through this type of shame.

But in this assessment, he says to describe the shame-producing situation by writing it

out.

So identify the thought distortions that it caused and restructure or eliminate those

shame-based thoughts by rewriting them with a different outcome.

Now this third step is going to be really hard because these distortions become really

ingrained in what we think.

So if you've been responding this way for a long time, you might think this is the logical

response, but if you can start to identify where some of your defenses have come in and

where some of your perfectionistic strategies have come in, you might start to uncover some

other realistic responses to this situation.

Now Bradshaw does share some strategies for getting through each and every one of these

forms of thought distortions.

For example, to stop catastrophizing, he has you do an honest assessment in terms of realistic

aunts or percentage of probability.

In order to ensure you're not over dramatizing or overemphasizing the possibility.

Or for personalization, he says you must force yourself to get evidence to prove what

you think it means.

We should stop making conclusions unless we have reasonable evidence and proof, and we

must abandon the habit of comparison.

When you hear yourself saying words like all, every, never, always, nobody, or everybody,

if you catch yourself over exaggerating something, he suggests using words like maybe or sometimes

instead.

He also suggests stepping away from black and white judgment making.

The world is grey, and if you think of the world in percentages, it's easier to not

color your entire person with one bad mistake.

Sure, maybe 3% of the time I'm selfish, 2% of the time I'm a loof, but most of the other

time I'm really caring and considerate and generous.

Bradshaw also suggests to overcome the need to always be right by becoming an active listener,

listening for context and content, giving feedback instead of opinions, and becoming

conscious of when you start to think you should or must or ought to do something.

Instead, we should be working on flexibility, being free to consider all the options that

we haven't even imagined, and freeing ourselves from the minds of needing to respond perfectly

all the time.

If you've never practiced calling out your cognitive distortions before, you might find this

work to be difficult at first or even frustrating, but as you do it eventually, you will get

better at redirecting into more, I don't know, coherent and reasonable thoughts, instead

of the distorted ones that keep us in our shame spirals.

Tomorrow I'll share a few more techniques before wrapping up this book, and the meantime

just know I love you so much, I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day, and I will

talk to you then while you make your damn bet.

Goodbye, cutie.

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