The Gifts of Failure

Everyone is afraid of failure. Everyone, that is, who doesn’t understand the value that failing can bring to their lives.

Unfortunately, most of us grow up in an environment in which failure is not only not valued, it is often considered a punishable offense. The first failing grade I ever received—I was perhaps 13 and it was for PE (gym) class—left me petrified with fear. Already an anxiety-ridden child who bit her nails to the quick and suffered from stress-induced eczema, the thought of presenting to my brutally inflexible perfectionist of a mother a report card with an “F” on it frightened me so badly it made my bladder weak. In all truth, I cannot remember how she took it—which means either she took it in her stride because PE was not, in her estimation, an “important” class or she went off on me so badly I have completely blocked it from conscious mind. Either way, I approached the moment of handing it off to her with nausea-inducing trepidation, as failure was not an option.

I am quite sure that my mother’s reaction to failure was just as over-the-top as were most of her other reactions. She was volatile and explosive and unpredictable, so the only thing I could do was prepare for the worst and hope for the best when a failure of some kind was presented to her. In retrospect, however, it pains me even more to look at the hundreds upon hundreds of teachable moments that went by the wayside, moments in which I, by spring boarding off of a failure, could have improved my skill or knowledge or understanding, because failure was something to be avoided at all costs—and viewed with grave trepidation if you failed anyway.

A good example was when I was first tasked with mopping the kitchen floor. At ten I was a scrawny little thing with a bad frizzy home perm and matchstick arms and legs. I was also short. My mother’s mop was an old fashioned rag mop, the kind with a clamp over which was originally draped a replaceable string mop head, which was then secured to the mop handle by a lever that closed the clamp. My mother, however, never one to spend a dime when a nickel will allow you to scrape, by had draped a length of cloth—a piece of an old towel—over the clamp when the original string head wore out and that became the kitchen mop. It was truly a rag mop, as the odd bits of old clothing, towelling, and worn-to-rags sheets forever took the place of the original string head. This mop required wringing by hand, which was tough for a skinny little kid, even if the worn scraps of cloth in the makeshift mop head didn’t hold much water.

I had seen my mother mop the kitchen floor a few times so I thought I had a good idea as to what needed to be done and did as I remembered my mother doing. When I was finished, sweating and breathing hard, I recall being proud of myself for even getting under the kitchen table—it was not my mother’s habit to teach me how to do something because she seemed to expect me to come directly from the womb with the knowledge of household labour already imprinted in my brain.

My self-pride was short-lived. She swept into the kitchen to inspect and the scowl on her face gave me a moment to brace myself for the onslaught of criticism and belittling that inevitably followed such a face. In the space of a few minutes my hour of stoop labour was dissected and my pride severely lacerated. Through this failure (and subsequent ones, where she found even more things that I had overlooked in my ignorance) I learned how to mop a floor with crude tools, minimal product, and no instruction. And what could have been a learning exercise that played on my sense of accomplishment, giving me even more pride in my work, ended up being a drudgery, a chore approached with trepidation, knowing that at the end I would be subjected to a barrage of criticism for failing to do that which I did not know needed doing.

Imagine if she had taken me aside and said, “Wow! Not bad at all for a first attempt! I am proud of you. Now, next time, I want you to pull all of the chairs away from the table and put them on top [and demonstrates how to put a chair upside down on the table] and then sweep the floor first. That way, you won’t get those streaks in the middle of the floor.”

That would have made me look forward to the next time so I could do a better job. And if, after that second time, she had taken me aside and said “Wow! That looks even better than last time! Now, did you know that if you rinse the mop with clean water, in the sink, it will get even cleaner? And if you wring out one half of the mop, then the other half, you will get more dirty water out? Why don’t you try that the next time?”

From an abstract point of view, the necessity of this kind of talk would be an indicator of failure on my part—of not getting the floor clean. But to praise me for the successful parts or, barring those, praising my effort, would have made me eager to try again, especially with the “tips” passed on to me to help me to a better job. I would have been the happiest ten-year-old floor washer in Southern California, putting my little heart into the job just to hear the praise and hints for doing an even better job next time.

It isn’t that failure is bad, it is how you view it and how others treat it—and you. My father once told me that no experience is a complete waste of time or effort if you just learned something from it. Sometimes it is difficult to find the lesson in a failure, but once you do, the experience transforms from a failure into a learning experience—certainly it can be a painful one—but a lesson learned through failure is seldom forgotten.

Unfortunately for us ACoNs, we didn’t grow up with emotionally sensitive parents—and I doubt many of them were particularly deep thinkers, regardless of IQ. It doesn’t occur to them that a failed effort is a ripe plum falling into their laps, the plum of opportunity to educate and actually ensure they ultimately get what they want.

Having been raised by a highly skilled malignant narcissist, I have an intimate knowledge of manipulation and I have been known to use it. Manipulation, in and of itself, is not a bad thing. It is bad when you use it to disadvantage others, but when you use it to help someone learn things that are useful to them, it is a useful tool. My maid came to work for me ten years ago with only three months of very sketchy experience. When I would assign her a task, I would demonstrate how to do it, then give her the cleaning cloth or mop or whatever and say “Let me know if you need any help.”

When I would come later to see how she was doing, I would find the areas where her work was substandard, but I would say “Can you see this here? Let me show you a way to get it clean…” then demonstrate…then have her do it in front of me. Then praise her “Exactly! If you do it that way, you’ll get it finished in no time!” and then leave the room. When I taught her to iron I took out two shirts: first I ironed a collar, then had her iron the collar on her shirt. Instead of scolding her for wrinkling the collar with the iron, I simply picked up a spray bottle and said “Let me show you how to get those wrinkles out…” and demonstrated. She made plenty of mistakes while learning to iron shirts but I did not raise my voice or treat those mistake like the end of the world: they were simply opportunities to show her how to do something—and how to come back from errors.

This approach teaches resilience. I learned this from my grandmother, a woman who patiently showed me how to separate eggs over and over again until I got it right. Each time I made an error, rather than blasting me for it, she simply said “If you do it that way you will break the yolk,” or “if you separate them one-at-a-time in a cup you won’t spoil the whole batch if one breaks.” Matter-of-fact advice in a matter-of-fact tone of voice delivered after each error. Mistakes around my grandmother were nothing to fear, just as my maid is not afraid to make a mistake around me…or even tell me she has broken something.

So, if a failure is, more than anything, a learning opportunity, why are we so afraid of it? How many babies get up from crawling and just walk confidently across the floor? How would that child learn to walk if she was afraid of failure? How many children try and fail repeatedly before they finally learn to roller skate or to ride a bike? How many championship surfers or drivers or equestrians or gymnasts reach their peaks without a single failure? The value of failure is that is offers you opportunity after opportunity to fine-tune yourself, to up your game. A dispassionate analysis of your failures is no less valuable than your successes: the former is what allows you to achieve the latter.

Unenlightened others have conditioned you to believe failure is bad and without value. Unfortunately a lot of people believe that, from your neighbour to your clergyman to your boss to your siblings, spouse, friends, and parents. The biggest problem with this viewpoint is not just that they fail to learn from their own failures by hiding from them, but they try to prevent you from learning from your own. They do this by communicating to you that errors are things to be ashamed of, to hide both from others and from yourself. But you cannot learn the lessons that failure has to teach you if you take on shame and then try to sweep it all under the rug. You also cannot learn what failure has to teach you if you refuse to address it and analyse it.

What is it failure can do for you? First of all, it can teach you about pride—too much pride: nobody is too good to fail and because it is a normal human misfortune, failing at anything simply means you are human. Are you ashamed of that?

Secondly, failure can lead you to new knowledge. At the very least it can teach you that what you are doing is not working and that you need to try something else—but if you hide from that, you may find yourself repeating the same unproductive behaviour over and over again because you have hidden from failure—repudiated it, hidden it away from your consciousness—and therefore could not learn from it. How many times have you tried, over and over, to win approbation from your Ns? How many times has it worked? Why are you still trying? (Because you feel shamed by your failures and therefore do not analyse them to see what is going wrong.)

Failure, above all, is a learning opportunity. Nothing you have in your life today, from your cell phone to your tablet to your car to your kitchen stove came about without multiple failures—and analysis of those failures—happening first. DNA testing, laparoscopic surgery, rockets to the moon and even such mundane things as frozen food and microwave ovens went through a developmental stage in which error after error after error was made, analysed, fine-tuned, and improved upon until finally, a success was made to let the developers know they were on the right track. Success almost never comes out of one’s head fully fleshed and perfectly functional, it take failures, analysis of the failures, and then trying—and failing—again until the failures are eradicated (or it becomes apparent that the endeavour simply cannot succeed).

So why are we afraid of failure? I would wager ACoNs are afraid of it for primarily one of two reasons (and maybe both). First, we have assumed a kind of all-encompassing fear of retaliation, punishment, reprisal that is no longer rational. As kids many of us were actually looking at real retribution in the form of beatings or verbal abuse or deprivation of something. Fail to get the bathroom suitably clean, no movie for you this Saturday; a “C” in math? No dessert until the next report card comes out and you have a “B” or better. Didn’t get all of the ironing done? Grounded for the weekend. But we are adults now and the only people who can really punish us is ourselves. We have the power to refuse to allow our Ns to punish us any longer by simply turning our backs on them. Their threats of punishment are, for the most part, toothless attempts to fool you into thinking they still have the same rights and power over you as when you were ten years old and that they can and will exercise them. The only way they truly have that power today is if you give it to them, and you always—always—have the power to take it back. Only when you have taken it back can that fear of retribution go away—and your fear of failure can’t go away unless that fear of retribution goes first.

Second, we continue to expect perfection of ourselves and failure is undeniable proof that we have failed to be perfect. Overcoming this requires a fundamental shift in your own basic view of the world because if you expect yourself to be perfect, you expect others to be perfect as well, and that is one of the most damaging things you can do to a person because it strips them of their humanity because you only legitimately expect perfection from machines. And that means you have stripped yourself of your humanity by expecting perfection of yourself.

This is one of the most corrosive expectations you can have of yourself, of others, and most especially, of children. And the worst part of this is that often, beneath our consciousness—a consciousness in which we believe we do not expect perfection of others, like our children—this expectation remains alive. We cannot eradicate our expectation of perfection of others, including children, unless we stop expecting it of ourselves. That is because as long as we expect it of ourselves, deep down in our heart-of-hearts, we believe that it is possible, even when our conscious minds recognize its impossibility.

When we embrace failures as learning experiences we can begin to short-circuit this belief. When we do or think something repeatedly, we assimilate it. Over time, this can become automatic and it can displace contrary or conflicting beliefs. Consciously embrace your failures and then analyse them. Consciously say “Well, that didn’t work—why not?” and then begin to replay it in your head…replay each step, looking for things you could have done or said or thought differently, then project that forward to try to see what the outcome of that might be. If you find a place or two that you could have done differently, you have changed your failure into a learning experience and the next time this comes your way, try one of the changes. If that doesn’t work, then you can re-analyse and see what else you could have done differently. If you do this multiple times and then still have no success—well, actually you have succeeded—you have succeeded in learning that 1) you need outside help to tackle this or 2) this is one of those things in life you cannot fix/control/manage, and then you can work on learning ways to avoid/live with it.

A perfect example of this for us, is in dealing with our NParents. If your NM has just given you That Look and you suddenly feel guilty, instead of going into an anxiety state, start thinking. Yes, it will be work at first because your body has reacted with adrenaline and cortisol and you are feeling panicky and like you have to run or yell or something. So breathe deeply, let the air out slowly and begin to think. What is the problem? The problem is your NM is obviously unhappy and most likely it is something you said just before That Look came over her face. What did you say? Can’t remember? Reach back further to what was being said/done immediately before she took on That Look. Your sister made mention of your father, NM’s ex-husband. Your sister said it, so why is That Look being directed at you? Because NM always thinks you put your sister up to stuff, that Sister is a sweet innocent and anything that comes out of her mouth that NM doesn’t like was put there by you. Is that true? If yes, did you tell Sister not to say this to or in front of NM? If no, then you’re busted. What could you have done differently? 1) not say things to Sister that will pop out her mouth around NM and make her mad at you; 2) warn Sister not to repeat this in front of NM or anybody who might tell NM; 3) keep your mouth shut around Sister; or 4) be prepared for NM’s wrath when Sister speaks up in front of you. Now, your punishable act, your “error in judgment,” has become a learning experience. You know that your sister is going to indiscriminately blab things you tell her; you know you must either warn her not to say this stuff in front of NM or you simply must not say these things to her yourself.

But you are still anxious from getting That Look. Now what? Think and analyse some more. Obviously, she is displeased. What can she do about it? She can’t ground you or take away your car keys or dock your allowance—but she can yell at you, get nasty to you, pull a guilt trip on you. OK—you know what she can do—if she does any of them, what are your choices? 1) sit there and allow her to vent, and feel guilty for being bad; 2) sit there and let her vent and realize that she is blaming you for your sister’s loose tongue, she’s out of line and none of the guilt she is throwing at you is yours; 3) JADE—justify, argue, defend, excuse yourself to her and get a fight going; 4) interrupt her and say “If you cannot speak respectfully to me, I can leave,” and then if she continues with her verbal assault (or sulk or whatever passive aggressive behaviour she has chosen to punish you with), leave. Or, 5) you can get up without a single word and walk away.

By the time you get to this part in your thinking and have chosen how to respond, your adrenaline rush should have dissipated a bit. Engaging her will get you another one—so will walking away. But walking away will take you out of the fray where engaging here will only escalate it.

This is how a failure on your part (failed to make NM happy, failed to warn Sister to keep something you said between just you two, failure to recognize Sister would likely blab it in front of NM) can be turned into a learning experience for you. It doesn’t matter if anybody else sees it as a failure just as long as you can learn and grow from the experience. A baby learning to walk overbalances and falls numerous times before he finally gets it right—what if he was not allowed to fail? What if there was a limit on how many failures were permissible before he wouldn’t try anymore? There is a child in Brazil who was born with no feet and yet he not only learned to walk (with no prostheses), he is a soccer prodigy¹. What if he had listened to the parent who was convinced he would never be able to walk? He tried and he failed many more times than you or I did when learning to walk, but he learned from each failure until he had learned to fine tune his balance to the point that he could not only walk, but he could excel at soccer.

How can we justify doing anything less? Because failure hurts or is humiliating? Well, if you stop thinking of it as failure and start thinking of it as the first step in a learning process, the pain is blunted, the humiliation loses its sting. The more you do it, the less of the negatives you feel. The first time I wore a bikini I stayed wrapped in a towel, embarrassed by sheer abundance of naked never-seen-the-sun white flesh. By the end of the summer I had no trouble at all dropping the towel and heading for the water: the more I did it, the less uncomfortable I was with it. Learning to embrace failure works exactly the same way and if you are going to reap the rewards it has to give you, it is something you need to start working on sooner, rather than later.

¹ http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2644088/Brazilian-boy-13-born-no-FEET-shows-football-skills-ahead-World-Cup.html

Triggering—good for you?

If someone approached you on the street, someone you did not know but whom you had seen numerous times, and asked you for money, would you give it to him? If he tried to guilt-trip you into giving him money or acted like he was entitled to some of your cash, would you feel guilty for not handing it over? If you knew, from observation, that the person had a substance abuse problem and anything you gave him would probably end up buying more substance to abuse, would you give him the money anyway?

Some of us just automatically hand a bill out the window to street corner beggars or toss coins into their proffered cups. We don’t really give much thought to the fact that we might be enabling a substance abuser with our mindless contributions. And we may be put off by the demanding, guilt-tripping, or entitled beggar, but many times we give anyway, perhaps because we wish to ward off the possibility of ending up that destitute ourselves.

Even those of us who refuse to enable another person’s addictions and don’t guilt-trip easily may find ourselves mindlessly giving to someone who seems to be more needy than we are. It is easier than stopping and hearing the person’s story and then giving suggestions that probably have been heard before and summarily dismissed.

For as long as I can remember, we have been warned about “triggers.” I suppose it began with such things as allergies where avoiding a triggering substance could mean the difference between life and death…some allergies, after all, can provoke a swift and even fatal reaction. Those of us with less lethal allergies know that avoiding certain triggers, like cat hair or certain pollens, makes our lives more comfortable. Over time the whole idea that avoiding triggers is good for us has grown to encompass not only physiological triggers but psychological triggers as well. And here is where I part company with the commonly-held belief that avoiding psychological and emotional triggers is a good thing.

A few weeks ago I got sharply faulted on line for using the word “inappropriate.” It seems that the word was a “trigger word” for my critic, although I was unaware of it. Up to that point, like most people who simply and mindlessly accept the notion, I had never given much real thought to emotional trigger words. I just went with the flow, trying to warn people when my writing contained something I thought might trigger them. Even in on line discussions, I had made a point of avoiding or warning about things I thought might be a trigger. But this time it was different.

I did not use an emotionally-laden word like “hit” or “beating,” nor did I describe a harrowing episode in evocative terms. I simply stated that something “seemed inappropriate to me” and Bang! the sh!t hit the fan.

In a discussion a person had revealed something he was doing that I felt very uncomfortable about because it felt inappropriate…a betrayal, actually. I asked him a specific question at least three times for the purpose of clarification and none was forthcoming. Thinking that if I explained why I needed that specific bit of information, I said that what he was doing seemed inappropriate to me (owning my feelings and not putting them on him), and could he please clarify so I could lay the issue to rest. I did not say that he or his behaviour was inappropriate, and was careful to use language that put the onus on me: I wasn’t quite clear on exactly what he was doing and could he please elaborate.

Instead of the anticipated explanation, however, I got “‘Inappropriate’ is my trigger word!” I don’t recall exactly what else was said, but I do know this took me aback, as his reaction to an ordinarily innocuous word used to describe my confusion was very strong and defensive.

This set me to thinking about trigger words and how we all act around them. It seems to be perceived as being insensitive to not “respect” triggers and refrain from speaking them in the presence of those vulnerable to them and yet, how sensitive was this person to my feelings when he jumped all over me for saying a word that I could not possibly have known might be a trigger word for him? I felt assaulted…for an instant I was that little girl again, backed into corner, NM blistering my ears with a verbal assault for doing something I had no idea was wrong. It was only momentary but it was, in the very least, insensitive and at worst, abusive. All I did was ask for clarification and then give the reason I needed clarification, using ordinary words that described my feelings on the subject, projecting nothing onto him. The response felt wrong, too much for the circumstances, too vehement. And so I started doing some research.

The first thing I found was a Wikipediaentry that cited some bona fide researchers on the topic. “The efficacy of ‘trigger warnings’ has not been methodically addressed by scientific study, however in an interview about Trigger Warnings…Professor Metin Basoglu, a psychologist internationally recognised for his trauma research, said that ‘…Instead of encouraging a culture of avoidance, [the media] should be encouraging exposure. Most trauma survivors avoid situations that remind them of the experience. Avoidance means helplessness and helplessness means depression. That’s not good’. Another expert, Richard J. McNally, a Professor of Psychology at Harvard…discussed the scientific merit of trigger warnings noting that ‘Trigger warnings are designed to help survivors avoid reminders of their trauma, thereby preventing emotional discomfort. Yet avoidance reinforces PTSD. Conversely, systematic exposure to triggers and the memories they provoke is the most effective means of overcoming the disorder.’ [W]hile citing several academic studies conducted on PTSD sufferers. Frank Furedi, a former Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent described trigger warnings as a form of ‘narcissism’, with the concerns not really being about the content of a book or work of art but about individual students asserting their own importance.”

That last sentence really clicked with me. A torrent of images and half-formed thoughts cascaded through my mind, images of people walking on egg shells and tiptoeing around a sleeping dragon. And I realized what it was about my experience and the whole concept of trigger word avoidance and warnings that was bothering me: it put onto others the responsibility for something inside one’s own self. You do not have to learn to cope with and deal with those things that distress you, I have to watch my words around you. I even have to figure out what words might distress you and if I guess wrong, you get to sharply rebuke me for it…and in a public forum, no less. No wonder I felt flung back in time, recoiling under the verbal barrage that was my mother’s prelude and run up to a beating.

I can see what that professor said about it being more about an individual asserting her own importance than the actual issue. How much more control can you have, how much more important can you be, than to be able to control how other people speak? And if you control how they speak, it’s a very short step to controlling how they think. And the big taboo that surrounds “triggering” someone is proof of that: somewhere we went from the courtesy and compassion of not wanting to wantonly elicit painful memories in another person to the tyranny of another person’s sore subjects being cause to dictate how we speak, lest we be thought insensitive boors.

Before you tag me with that label, let’s give this a little thought. Contemporary psychologists think that tiptoeing around those trigger words do more harm than good. When we refrain from using trigger words around a person, we actually help entrench their problem by helping them commit an avoidance behaviour. And trigger warnings, apparently, are even worse…not only do they help commit the avoidance behaviour, they key it to a conscious awareness of the issue the trigger warning is about. In other words, we give them an additional episode of thinking about the trigger and then avoiding it, further entrenching the avoidance.

Now I am not advocating dumping the basics of polite interaction by intentionally using trigger words to affect those who are avoiding them. But I do advocate not being suddenly guilt stricken or feeling ashamed when the word comes up in conversation and someone jumps on you with “That’s my trigger word!” or something similar. How is this different, at its most essential level, from that panhandler who is attempting to guilt you into enabling his addiction rather than find a better coping strategy? In both cases, the person relies on others joining into the process to keep it going and avoids taking the steps necessary to resolve their issues. Enabling an avoidance behaviour, regardless of the compassion and empathy behind it, is still enabling an unhealthy act and therefore becoming a part of it.

What is most tragic about this blind adherence to the avoidance of trigger words is that they, and the unpleasant feelings they evoke, can be defused…like defusing a bomb…so that they have less power, whereas avoidance give them more and more power over time. So each time we blindly obey the social imperative to not utter that trigger word or we post that trigger warning, we are actually doing exactly the opposite of what we intended to accomplish. Instead of sparing the person emotional pain, we are simply entrenching it more deeply…and denying that person the opportunity and impetus to learn new coping strategies such as defusion.

The online dictionary, Wiktionary, defines “defusion: as “the separation of an emotion-provoking stimulus from the unwanted emotional response as part of a therapeutic process…” This unwanted emotional response is generally a form of anxiety, which can be expressed in an infinite number of ways. The problem is that we are unwilling to tolerate those feelings of anxiety, so we do something to distract ourselves from them and that distracting behaviour is, in and of itself, a contributor to further anxiety because it is a kind of avoidance. Like all of our other issues, the way to deal with them it to face them because until we do, they simply cannot go away.

This requires coping strategies. If your only coping strategy is avoidance, invoking the sanctity of trigger words and expecting everyone to tiptoe around you verbally so as to avoid provoking your anxiety, is behaving like a narcissist. I did not say you are one, I said you are behaving like one. You are failing to deal with your issue and you are requiring other people to take care of you…and not just take care of you but to alter their speaking and even their thinking to accommodate you, while you do nothing to deal with your issue save demand that others tiptoe around it. As long as other people don’t trigger you, then you are fine and why should you do anything? Isn’t this how our narcissists think? To make their little lives comfy by requiring other people to walk on eggshells around them and not say something to provoke them? How is this fundamentally any different?

Dr. Alice Boyes, writing for Psychology Today, lists three ways to stop avoidance coping:

1. Recognize that it doesn't work.

What have you been trying to avoid? Feeling awkward? Feeling anxious? Thoughts of not being good enough? Do you still have those feelings or thoughts? So…has avoiding them helped any?

2. Recognize the costs of avoidance coping.

What has avoidance coping cost you? How much time and mental energy has avoidance coping sucked up? How has it impacted your health? How has it affected relationships? How has it affected your sense of yourself as a competent person?

3. Learn to tolerate uncomfortable thoughts and feelings.

You need to learn how to tolerate experiencing thoughts and feelings you'd prefer not to experience until they naturally pass (thoughts and feelings are by their nature temporary). If you can do this you won't need to use avoidance coping. Being prepared to experience anxiety will overall lead to less anxiety. 

Okay, I agree…all of this is easier said than done. But there are ways to make it easier. Dr. Boyes recommends:

1. learning to soften rather than tense in response to triggering thoughts and feelings or when you catch yourself doing a self-defeating behaviour;
2. learning physiological self-soothing skills (teaching yourself how to activate your parasympathetic nervous system by doing things like slow breathing, which in turn slows down your heart rate and makes it easier to think more clearly).
3. learning to recognize that thoughts are often distorted so you can't actually trust any negative thoughts you have.
4. building up your capacity to self-regulate e.g., if you're prone to overeating then setting a schedule for eating that meets your energy needs. Then, only eating at these times - not eating outside these times or skipping scheduled eating times.
5. using ‘defusion’ skills to reduce the psychological grip of intrusive thoughts. For many people defusion skills are highly effective but at first glance they seem quite odd. For example, singing your intrusive thought to the tune of a familiar song.

 Dr. Barb Markaway, a clinical psychologist, published an excellent article in Psychology Today entitled Stop Fighting your NegativeThoughts. In it she outlines numerous ways to defuse those thoughts rather than repress or avoid them. She first recommends asking yourself “Is this thought true? Is this thought important? Is this thought helpful?”

Additionally, Dr. Markaway recommends the following tips to help defuse negative thoughts:

Label your thoughts. Instead of saying “I'm a loser,” say, “I'm having the thought that I'm a loser.” Instead of saying, “I'm going to blow this test,” say “I'm having the thought that I'm going to blow this test.” The difference may seem subtle, but it can help you gain the perspective that you are not your thoughts.

Thank your mind. If you're having anxious thoughts such as, “I hope this plane doesn't crash…I hope the pilot knows what he’s doing…” say, “Thank you, mind. Thank you for trying to keep me safe. But there's nothing that you really need to do right now. I’ve got it covered.” I’m big on notes to myself, so sometimes I write my mind a letter of appreciation for its efforts, but also let it know it can take a break.

Let them float away. This one involves imagery. You put each negative thought on a leaf and imagine it floating down a stream. When you have another thought, as you will, you put it on another leaf and watch it float by.

Sing your thoughts. Try singing your thoughts to the alphabet song or to Row, Row, Row Your Boat. Your thoughts will certainty sound absurd this way, which is the whole point.

Say them in a funny voice. Try saying your thoughts in a funny voice. Maybe do an imitation of a cartoon character. 

Name your stories. Many times our thoughts are repetitive and involve the same stories. My story frequently is, “I don't really know what I'm doing.” When thoughts come up along that storyline, I can say, “Oh, here’s my I’m Incompetent story, and just let it go.

Do it anyway. Perhaps the most important tip is to remember that you can have a thought and perform any kind of behavior at the same time. If it’s something you care about, it’s worth it to let the thoughts simply be. You don’t have to do anything about them. When I work with clients on their anxiety using exposure therapy (face-your-fear therapy) the most important thing they report learning is, “I can function even when I’m anxious.”

Dr. Markaway says it “takes a little practice to get the hang of ‘defusion’ techniques, so don’t give up. Many of my clients use them, and each person develops their personal favorites. I’ve tried all of the above except for saying my thoughts in a funny voice. I’m pretty sure it would be helpful, if I could only get my mind to stop telling me how silly I’d sound.”

There are more ways to deal with anxiety and negative feelings and thoughts than by expecting other people to tiptoe around you verbally and censor themselves in order to spare you discomfort. That kind of an expectation is narcissistic in nature in that it expects others to sacrifice their “normal” in order to accommodate your “dysfunctional.” This is a really big flea because of the way it impacts others around you: it requires them to censor themselves beyond the level of normal conversational courtesy and demands they adapt their speech…even their thoughts…to oblige you. It’s not a healthy way to deal with anxiety either for you or for those who pander to you.

So the next time you are tempted to publish a “trigger warning” or admonish someone with “That is a trigger word for me!”, give it a think first…will you be hurting someone by helping her to continue her avoidance game? Are you expecting that others alter their language or thoughts in order to accommodate you? What would happen if you left off the warning or if you took responsibility for your negative thoughts and implemented some of the techniques above?

The choice, as always, is yours to make.