Bob Rich’s Self-Therapy Guide: From Feeling to Thinking

Bob Rich’s book From Depression to Contentment: A self-therapy guide is therapy in your pocket. Depression, anxiety, and other forms of suffering are all too common in our crazy world. Bob teaches you how to rise from that to “normal,” which is the walking wounded, then far above that, to inner strength enabling you to cope in any situation.

Recovering the Self published two sections of Bob’s book in a series of posts – the first section ending with the quest for meaning and the second section concluding with The Development of Resilience. The third section of Bob’s work continues here with special attention to various techniques and practices that are helpful in controlling depression.

In this post, Bob shows a practical way to switch your state of mind from emotion to more of a thinking mode so as to respond more rationally to a triggering thought or situation.

From Feeling to Thinking

Only, that’s hard to do, isn’t it? When things go wrong, we all experience emotion: become angry or anxious. That means that we react exactly as if we were facing a physical danger, and switch to “flight or fight” mode. (Actually, this is flight, fight or freeze mode. If the threat is overwhelming, we cannot act at all.) This is so well known that people talk about feeling adrenaline in the blood, which is nonsense: you don’t feel adrenaline. You feel elevated heart rate, rapid, shallow upper-lung breathing, muscular tension such as hands forming fists or the jaw clenching, much quicker reaction times, enhanced vision and hearing, and very rapid, concrete thinking. All of these are admirably suited for instant physical action — and entirely unsuited to dealing with a conversation, or reading a disappointing letter, or “knowing” that you’ll fail that exam tomorrow. Such situations need rational, considered thought, which is impossible in emergency mode.

Of course, by now you have a first-aid tool: take a deep breath, and as you release it, think “Let go.” Only that’s unlikely to work if you’re already in the grip of strong emotion. So, here is a toolkit: activities that turn emotion down, and reasoning up.

How to fight a problem

1. If something works, do more of it. If it doesn’t work, do something else.

2. Everything occurs in a context:

• Where is the problem most likely to occur?
• When? (time of day, day of the week, an occasion such as an anniversary)
• Who else is there?
• What are you doing at the time?
• Are certain thoughts or feelings associated with the occurrence of the problem?
• Is it preventing you from doing something you’re relieved not to have to do?
• What are the benefits of suffering the problem? (e.g., do you get more attention, can put off a difficult decision, or what?)
• Is the occurrence of the problem predictable? Can you tell when (under what circumstances) it will strike (or get worse), when it will leave you alone (ease off)?
• Is it controllable? What can you do to influence it?

3. Problems feel “universal,” as if they were “always there.” Find exceptions: they are the clue to ways of fighting back.

4. Scaling questions

• What is the worst possible outcome of the current situation? On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely is that to happen?
• What is the best possible outcome? Rate it too.
• What is the most likely outcome? Rate it.
• How controllable is it? (1: random and unpredictable. 10: under your control).

5. Imagine you’re advising someone else — cousin, neighbor, colleague — who has this problem. What will you suggest?

6. Keep an ABC diary (see previous segment). You may be tracking an action (yelling at my kids), a thought (I hate being a loser), an emotion (fear, worry, depression). All of these are “behaviors,” even the ones other people can’t see. The behavior may be something specific, or one of a class of things, e.g., any thought that makes you crash back into grieving.

Set down:

• when, where, with whom you were
• what happened immediately before the target behavior occurred (the trigger)
• unless you are tracking one specific behavior instead a type of behavior, write down what the behavior was (e.g., the specific thought)
• what was the consequence of the behavior (e.g., how did you feel after, what effects you had on other people).

As I said, an ABC diary is in itself a behavior change agent. Sometimes, it is the only action necessary to eliminate a bad habit. It is a source of information allowing you to plan an attack on the distressing problem. And it makes you into an observer, so that you can distance yourself from unwanted emotions.

In fact, all these techniques make the problem less pressing and immediate. Once you have engaged in one or more of these activities, you will be able to think (relatively) calmly and rationally. Then, you can ask your clarifying questions, or whatever you judge to be constructive.

Homework

Memorize this toolkit, and apply it whenever the opportunity arises. This is not as overwhelming as it may seem. You can bookmark the link to this post, so you can easily return to it. Also, you can go to http://anxietyanddepression-help.com and find it as “How to fight a problem” in the navigation bar on the left of the page. Get one of the tools clear in your mind, practice it until you’re competent with it, then progress. There is no hurry, and you can read on meanwhile.

– Dr. Bob Rich

• emotional
• feeling
• rational
• thinking and feeling