Episode Transcript
Speaker 1 00:00:07 Welcome to Village Church Mental Health. We're continuing our conversation on building a foundation for what it is to have an understanding of our cognitive processes and how they affect every aspect of our lives. We are gonna be digging into cognitive distortions. Cognitive distortions are different ways that our thoughts or our thinking gets off track, gets distorted, gets kinked up almost like a hose that isn't working and begins to lead us to places that we didn't wanna go. And you see these distortions, they fall into patterns. And over time we've observed in humanity that these patterns do nothing but lead us to dark and destructive places. For our next several times together, we are gonna be talking through just what do cognitive distortions do. We're gonna be naming them and we're hopefully gonna be building a framework so that you can walk away from each of these sessions that we have together empowered and equipped to be able to identify and understand the ways that sometimes your thoughts can get off and the big impact that it can have in many different areas of your life right now.
Speaker 1 00:01:17 And as you're maybe looking at the rundown of the many different sessions that we're gonna have on cognitive distortions, you might be thinking, Why in the world are we talking about this when there are so many different things we could be talking about when it comes to mental health? So I just wanna take a moment and I want to emphasize that so many times when I'm sitting and working with someone face to face, I begin to see that this is the place where their thoughts, where their patterns, where their anxiety, where their depression, where so many things that they are experiencing symptomatically. This is the place where it first went stray. And that our thoughts have so much power over them. And so many people, they want a much bigger, easier answer from me as to how to get rid of the symptoms that they're feeling.
Speaker 1 00:02:09 But many times the work actually comes back so much to the way that we think and our internal dialogue of how we run these thoughts through our mind again and again and again. So as we talk about cognitive distortions, we kind of called this a gospel opportunity because here's what's going on as we talk through the cognitive distortions. These are not simple solutions. They are not quick fixes, yet there is in each one that we will discuss an opportunity for you and for me to able, able to look at how this has gotten off path and to be able to align this back with the way that God created these thoughts to be thought. And so when we talk about cognitive distortions, the only thing we're referring to in this big phrase is the way that we're thinking our cognition, right? Our thoughts, and that they get off balance, they get distorted, they get benched, they get kind of like a kink and a hose, and then they end up not coming out right?
Speaker 1 00:03:09 And they end up not going down the right path. And these patterns we've talked before about ants, right? And how these shortcuts, these automated negative thoughts, they can make shortcuts in our mind that dig ruts. And there when we're triggered and we have an experience, boom, we just go in this automatic way. And what I wanna do in talking about cognitive distortions is that even if you are not currently experiencing any of the things that we're talking about, praise the Lord. In my opinion, that is the best time for you to be investing in your mental health. Because when you are thinking, it gets all hot and spicy and disconnected. Let me tell you, from personal experience and watching many people, it is hard to see how in the world our thoughts are related to what we are feeling in that moment. So our best investment in our mental health is pre-planning, how we are gonna deal with these things when we get to that moment.
Speaker 1 00:04:06 When I was in high school, I read so many different marriage books and you'd think that maybe my friends would make fun of me, but actually many of them were reading the same kind of books along with me because we had this desire that we knew this would be coming up in the next decade or so, Lord willing of our lives. And we wanted to invest in our understanding of that significant relationship. Then we wanted to preplan how we would deal with conflict. We wanted to preplan what our commitment to that would be. We wanted to preplan and invest in that before we were in that moment because we knew that our brains handle everything so much better when they're calm and they are connected and they're in a pre-planning mode. So whether that's you today, whether you're in the hot and spicy brain, or whether you're in the calm and collected brain, I invite either person just to join this conversation on cognitive distortions.
Speaker 1 00:05:00 So when we talk about this, as we mentioned before, we've said that Beck is really known as a father of cognitive behavioral therapy. He is kind of the first person to put down into words, although I personally think that the scriptures lay it out very clearly that our, the fuel for our feelings and behaviors comes from our thought life. And this is where so much of anxiety and depression comes from because you see cognitive distortions, they are felt as real, they are seen as patterns. And really ultimately what I perceive them as is a tool of deception from the forces of evil that are trying to take us down to steal, kill, and destroy us. And so for 14 years, as I've been a licensed therapist, I have begun to see that there are patterns everywhere because they work and there's no need for evil to reinvent the wheel if they have a pattern that works.
Speaker 1 00:05:58 And so when we get in these patterns, when we come prey to them, particularly in these cognitive distortion patterns, we're going to flesh out together. They keep us there. And deception is a pattern's best friend for ever because that allows us to be able to say to other people, No, this is real. No, you don't understand what I'm going through. You must not be able to perceive all of the situation that I can perceive. But when we begin to know that there is a cognitive distortion at play, we see that there is so much negativity that this person is living in, that they are feeling the consequences because they are perceiving the situation as unchangeable. Oftentimes, when a person has lived in this pattern of a cognitive distortion for so long, they really feel like they are the victim to what is going on in this circumstance and that they have no say.
Speaker 1 00:06:55 And wherever cognitive distortions are there, we also see destruction because thoughts were created in the mind of God, I believe, to do a couple things. They were created to connect us. We've talked before about the connect home and how when our thoughts are all working properly, it's this beautiful system of highways and byways that are communicating and speaking to each other with our whole brain on working together. But what we see in cognitive distortions is that they disconnect us. They disconnect us often from reality. They disconnect us from being able to think of the whole picture and maybe possible other solutions. And they disconnect us many, many, many times socially and relationally from other people. Thoughts were made to speak truth to us, that we'd be able to identify and have these beautiful mind moments, right where we're able to connect things that are true and understand them that we could worship out of that.
Speaker 1 00:07:53 But cognitive distortions, they are centered around lying to us, giving us false and at the least in accurate information about ourselves and the world around us. I believe that thoughts were created to allow us to speak truth to others and to engage and to connect with them. But cognitive distortions, they often just bring shame and isolation thoughts were created so that we could have both forward movement and we can move our lives forwards in a growing pattern and that we could be creators, that we would be able to identify things that need to be fixed or things that could be made more beautiful and to bring things into the world. But something I see continually with cognitive distortions is that they've is that equip them to live the same moment of their life over and over again. And they make people, users of that created purpose and only consumers.
Speaker 1 00:08:51 That's where also created as we speak truth to us, to ground us and to allow us to live in peace, which is so many times the biblical equation we see in the New Testament between anxiety and peace. These thoughts, they're made to give us peace. But so many times cognitive distortions enter into the situation and they bring anxiety and they only seek stir things up. And to actually begin to almost like feel like we lift us off the ground and disconnect us from being grounded. So on our time together, I have a desire to give us a common language because sometimes these things are difficult to see in ourselves, and I cannot say that enough times, but this, this common language can allow us to connect and communicate to each other when we see these patterns of destruction showing up in our lives and in the people who we love's lives.
Speaker 1 00:09:43 So as we embark on a few sessions together talking about cognitive distortions, I wanna lay for you the framework that we're gonna be looking at each one of these in. I wanna begin by giving you a definition and understanding of each cognitive distortion. I'm hoping that you'll walk away knowing what this looks like, what this lives like, how, how does this play out in the life of this person around you and what it leads to if it is not intervened and changed in direction. We call that reframing when we have a cognitive distortion, you're building this whole framework for your life and how you're thinking. And what we're hoping is that by identifying the truth of the situation, we are coming in and we are helping you to reframe what that looked like. I'm gonna give you a scripture that I believe anchors and ties the gospel opportunity that we're gonna talk about.
Speaker 1 00:10:32 And hopefully with each one you will come away with a clear understanding of the gospel opportunity that is present that is actually meant to heal, that is actually meant to speak to this cognitive distortion in life. And then to give you an example of what that thought looks like, reframed, because you see cognitive behavioral therapy teaches us that this activating event leads to these beliefs and internal dialogues which result in these consequences and our emotions and in our feelings and in our behaviors, which we've talked about before. We call the A activating event vent, B belief and C consequences, the ABCs of cognitive behavioral therapy. And so many times in our culture, we are so tempted to see that that activating event is what made these consequences. And we take all of our responsibility out from the middle of the equation when really if we began to understand that we have this whole middle part in the equation for the way that we respond and the way that this activity triggered our core beliefs and actually led to this internal dialogue and understood these lies that we are in, we would actually begin to see that we have so much freedom and input in the equation of growth and change.
Speaker 1 00:11:50 And we are not victims.
Speaker 1 00:11:53 And it takes longer to understand this because that takes a higher amount of work and a higher, honestly emotional intelligence for us engage in this process of this middle step, this middle step of this be belief step. And I also wanna say just overall for cognitive distortions, as we look at our first one together in a moment, many of them are developmentally appropriate at different age groups. But as adults particularly, and even as growing teens and children, we are called to grow out of them as our mind and our brain develops capacity to be able to do that. And so I'll try to give a nod to when each of these is really seen in the developmental spectrum. But I hope that as you are as an adult listening to this, that you begin to see that yes, once that was a part of the way my brain actually functioned, but now I have an opportunity to paint a bigger picture around that and grow from that many cognitive distortions they develop over time.
Speaker 1 00:12:50 They can be a reaction to trauma. Many, many, many times they have been modeled for us in our environment around us. And so we learn this is how we respond. We learn to believe lies. And these things are passed on oftentimes from generation to generation. And oftentimes we choose cognitive distortions that align with a lie that is growing inside of our hearts, that we believe about ourselves or the others. And this alignment aids and deception, it only fuels the fire that these misconceptions in the way that we're seeing the world, it can oftentimes feel so good and it feels so right because it's aligning with this lie inside of us. And so I encourage you that no matter what you are feeling, this lie, these thoughts, these cognitive distortions are no matter how real you are convinced these things are, that you take this as your opportunity to be able to say, no, I will test these things and I will see if they are true.
Speaker 1 00:13:56 My last thought for you is that it's a very easy oftentimes to look at the cognitive distortions that the other people in your life struggle with and to be able to hold those as worse. So my encouragement for you is you can absolutely a hundred percent go through this list and say, Oh, that sounds exactly like so and so, but will you please give yourself space to process what it looks like and what your greatest struggles are to not write it off as less than one to the other, but to own in full compassion for yourself, but also in full ownership. What it is in the way that your thought patterns have been distorted and your thought patterns have missed the mark for what they were created for. So let's dig into what we're actually talking about. The first cognitive distortion we are going to kind of unpack is called polarized thinking, or sometimes this is called all or nothing thinking or black and white, which is probably my favorite term for it.
Speaker 1 00:14:57 But the concept is, and this falls underneath this category of cognitive distortions that are extreme thinking, cognitive distortions. The concept is is oh my goodness, everything is going amazing. It's all perfect. I can't imagine anything better or this is all a total disaster. You never let me speak first ever. You always forget to feed the dog. And what this is, is this is a distortion that polarizes all of our thoughts. It makes thoughts either black or white, they are all or they're nothing. And we don't live in the middle of this world, in this gray area, which is honestly we're so much of our work and our thoughts have to live. It's in this middle area between the all or nothing, between the two extremes, between the two poles, between the black and the white. And this is what this lives like based a constant and consistent use of extreme words.
Speaker 1 00:16:01 Ever, always, never. Things are overstated. They are exaggerated. There is a certain level of drama in the statements. It inflames a situation because it doesn't just talk about what is actually going on. It brings a whole new level into talking about what is going on relationally. This makes it very hard to own something. When someone is telling you, you always forget to feed the dog and immediately you're thinking, I literally fed him yesterday, right? It makes this relational tension very difficult because it's hard to own something when things are being communicated not to resolve, but to feel. And we see that these things are very hard to bring resolution to in relationships because their elements are grossly exaggerated and they're misleading for what is actually going on. And what this leads to is that the brain is being tossed to and fro in such extremes from the brain, chemicals that are being called from the emotions that are being felt.
Speaker 1 00:17:05 And so I oftentimes think of the poor brain in this situation because it's literally swoosh swoosh, everyone's against me, everyone is for me. And the brain is having to live in such extreme chemical elements from one side to the other that it is nothing but a breeding ground for anxiety and depression. It is almost like we are chemical warfare in our own minds leading it and setting it up for complete distress and failure because it, that person really forget to feed the dog every time, always they did not most likely. But our brain can only receive the information that we are giving it itself. So that's what it has to go off of. It has to go off the fact fact that they are never feeding the dog. I'm always doing it. And so it brings a certain allow amount of distress and alarm that really do not help the situation in any way, shape or form.
Speaker 1 00:18:02 And really this cognitive distortion exists because it is easier to go to one extreme or the other than to do the hard work of balance. And what I would refer to as reasonableness, it goes along with the passions inside of us wherever they take us. And anger and drama feels sometimes very cathartic to be able to be let out. But really it is an exaggerated position that is bringing destruction relationally and physically and emotionally in our minds. So where do we see this in scripture? Philippians four, five. And one of my favorite passages, and this is one of my favorite scriptures, probably for all the cognitive distortions, but I've given it to this first one. It says, Let your reasonableness be known to everyone. The Lord is at hand. And in this whole time of anxiety that he's talking about in Philippians four, this is what he's saying to us.
Speaker 1 00:19:01 Let your reasonableness. Another word for that can be let your moderation, let your equity, let your gentleness let this be what is seen by everyone. That this is a characteristic, it's something that's stable and coming from your character, it's visible to the people outside of you. And this word, this whole entire way that he's speaking in this passage is he's using words that are used of restraining something that is a force restraining our passions, restraining and free from excess, that we are even emotionally being ex full of access to go from one side to the other, to have this passion fewless this all or to this nothing, to this black and white space. And he says, and he looks at that church and he says, Let your reasonableness be known to everyone. Why or how? I love this next little nugget in scripture.
Speaker 1 00:20:03 He says, The Lord is at hand. And so the very reason we can be full and exude reasonableness, even when our mind and our passions and our frustrations and our anger take us from one side to the other is because the Lord is right there near our hand. Psalms talks about the Lord is at my right hand, therefore I will not be shaken. And so when these frustrations, when these cognitive distortions are seeking to shake us all up and to come out as one side or the other, we can land in the middle. We can land in that gray space coming up and doing the hard work of what it looks like to be reasonable and weighing both of the sides that is spoken in truth and in the middle space. So reasonableness comes from the nearness of the Lord, knowing that he is with us, that he's able to equip us, that when we take this moment in the middle of this excess of passion, right, to go from one side to the other, you can say, Oh Lord, how do you perceive this situation? How do you want me to perceive this situation and feel it and communicate it to another person?
Speaker 1 00:21:15 So that is our gospel opportunity. Our gospel opportunity is reasonableness that we land in this middle space, that we look for the gray version of what we're feeling and what we're thinking, that we are committed to avoiding thinking in extreme situations and in rigid ways. And we are listening to be able to hear and to be able to see how can I look for the gray? And when I find that version of what's in the middle, I write it down and I inch my emotions and my thoughts towards the center to be landing in the middle. And I anchor into that. I anchor into that. I ask for feedback. If I can't find that middle, I ask people who are trusted in my life help me find what I'm supposed to be thinking about this situation. So that original thought looks something like this as we reframe it. Oh my goodness, I'm so thankful for this time where I feel so light and free because so much is going well. This is very hard, and there's a lot of elements here that are not working well. It hurts my feelings. It makes me feel like you don't value my voice in the times when you speak first.
Speaker 1 00:22:34 I think you forgot to feed the dog. So I hope as we begin to dissect what more of these cognitive distortions look like, what they live like, what they lead to, and what the opportunity is, that you will continue to do the hard work of really examining yourself to be able to see how it is that your thoughts can more reflect the glory of God and his creative purpose for how they are to run. So until next time, press on.
