Episode 255: Developing Healthy Thinking Patterns for Emotional Resilience – Part 2

Episode 255: Developing Healthy Thinking Patterns for Emotional Resilience - Part 2

Marcus Aurelius said, “You have power over your mind, not outside events. Realize this and you will find strength.” Today’s episode is #2 in a 5-part series of creating emotional resilience.

Today’s episode is titled: "Empowering Your Mind: Developing Healthy Thinking Patterns for Emotional Resilience”

A couple years ago I joined an emotional resilience group a few years back. The class focused on learning and practicing spiritual and practical skills to better care for the body, mind, emotions and relationships. Pretty important stuff. I want to share some of my take-aways and I’ll bring some experts in to comment as well.

As I mentioned, this is the second in a 5-part series on emotional resilience. I hope these episodes will support you in your own quest for choosing emotional resilience skills - because these are skills we all need . Stay tuned for this important step in emotional resilience - developing healthy thinking patterns. I want you to find one ah-ha today that will serve you.

My first marriage was in 1995, my second was 2007 and my third was in 2011. All three ended in divorce. When I finally came to love and accept my own personal story and the disappointment I felt, the failure I felt, the embarrassment I felt, the progress was all about learning to reframe the negative aspects of my story that I was focusing on. IT WAS ALL ABOUT INTERPRETATION AND MINDSET. It wasn’t until I learned how to step out of victim mode and focus on what I had gained from my experiences, like understanding what it felt like to feel unloved, to be cheated on, to be abandoned, to be emotionally abused; I gained empathy for women in abusive situations, I gained empathy for being a single mom, for lonely people, for times of brokenness, for needing forgiveness; for the struggle to forgive. I gained strength as I survived, and kept trying. Instead of my perceived stack of failures - the overall crap in the relationships and the ultimate dissolution of the marriages, I could find peace in my own messy journey by focusing on the things I’d learned and understood now that I did not before. It IS ALL ABOUT WHERE WE PUT THE FOCUS - IN OTHER WORDS - MINDSET. 

My point is, our thoughts are everything. They create our reality. They make all the difference in how we see ourselves and how we interpret our world. How we talk about ourselves and how we think about things impacts how we feel because thoughts influence emotions. 

I’ve brought Kathryn Reynolds back for this episode. She is a licensed marriage and family therapist. We met her in Part 1. She practices solution-focused therapy and is passionate about helping women with anxiety or depression regain their sense of identity, expression, and purpose. Here is a clip of our conversation on Healthy Thinking Patterns:

Tune into the podcast to listen to Dr. Reynolds.

In Proverbs 23:7 it says, “For as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he…”

I know that none of these ideas are new - but they are vitally important to understand and to work on. I’d like each of you listening to take stock of your own thoughts about your own life right now. What stories are you creating? Are they negative? Are they positive? The ones that are negative - how can you hop over the fence and reframe them?

Let’s peak into an example:

I was speaking to a friend the other day and she shared a story with me that I thought really captured the clear concept of how the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves really define us. So it’s important to look at what we are thinking.

Hear Jackie on the podcast...

As we discuss healthy thinking patterns we need to first accept this important piece of the puzzle, that knowing how much power our thoughts have over our emotions and how much power our emotions have over our actions and how our actions will then build our character and determine who we become….well, both the Savior and adversary seek to influence our thoughts because of this obvious domino effect.

Doctrine and Covenants says, “Look unto me in every thought, with faith, without doubt or fear.” God calls us to keep our thoughts on him because of this cause and effect of this universal law.

So…lets talk about actual healthy thinking patterns, and identify unhealthy thinking patterns so we can become aware of them and check in with ourselves about which ones may be our favorites. 

What is an inaccurate thinking pattern?

Well, there are so many things that we could list here, but I don’t want to overwhelm. So let’s talk about 4. 

Inaccurate thinking patterns often look like 1. focusing on the negative, 2. seeing something as all or nothing, 3. jumping to conclusions, and 4. magnification.

Let’s take these one at a time:

First - Focusing on the negative can create distorted thoughts that cause us to feel badly about ourselves and about others, about life in general because we’re stuck in our hurt and complaint. When we focus on a negative detail, or on only what went wrong, that thing becomes bigger in our life and in our mind. It’s what we always talk about here - what you focus on expands. We don’t want the negative to expand, so be aware of this thinking error and shift out of it when it happens. 

Example:

“Everything went wrong today…one mess after another.” Despite hard days, it is unlikely that your day had no positive moments - no smiles, no progress on a project, no positive interactions with a loved one or friend, nothing????

“This struggle my son/daughter is having is horrendous.” As a parent, it is horrible to watch a child suffer. Can I find in his struggle something positive to focus on? Is he learning something? Am I learning something? Is there opportunity to build relationship here? 

Second - inaccurate/harmful thinking pattern: Seeing something as all or nothing.

Things are very seldom all or nothing. I remember a therapist calling us out during a marriage therapy session on this. “You always do….” “He/She never does…” The therapist would stop us and make us dig deeper to realize that no, the person did not ALWAYS do the thing being claimed. He did not always come home late and I did not always nag. You do not “always do the wrong thing.” And, everything does not “always” go badly for you.

Something is seldom all good or all bad. Look for phrases where you are saying “always” and “never.”

Let’s do this little exercise in challenging this thinking error. So, Let’s say you catch your child lying to you. This happens and you get to evaluate and choose. You can choose “My child always lies to me,” or you can create the more accurate thought that he or she is often honest. You can foster the thought that this lie shows a real lack of integrity in the child and he’ll never learn to be trust worthy, or you can choose to believe he is full of potential and this can be a teaching opportunity. 

So challenge the Always and Never statements as they show up in your life. This creates a much more accurate perspective of things, and keeps us from despair. I’ve also learned if you praise the time sthe person does the right thing, you will see more of it.

The third thinking error is: Jumping to Conclusions.

I love this one because I specifically remember when this one clicked in my head as a young adult. When we jump to conclusions we interpret others thoughts, often assuming negative outcomes. For instance, someone I expected to be friendly with me is being dismissive. They must be angry with me. This is jumping to a conclusion - the healthiest internal response when you catch yourself doing this is to stop and to mentally remind yourself that you have no idea, really, why they seem dismissive. You have the opportunity to communicate with them rather than creating a story in your head about what’s going on in their head. Perhaps they have a family member that is in poor health and they are worried about it. Perhaps they had a rough day at work. Perhaps they are puzzling out something they are working on. The bigger picture is that it’s not always about you. Thoughts like: “I bet everyone is laughing at me.” “Everyone probably thinks I’m a big baby.” “He must be seeing someone else.” These are assumptions. Challenge them.

Let me share an example from this week. I got to my yoga class a little bit late and there were not very many places to put my mat down. I snuck onto the back row, chose the spot with the largest space and room for others to shift, and then asked the woman next to me if she could move her mat over a little bit? She did but I started creating a story in my mind that she was irritated with me. Instead of breathing and letting my mind move with my body, I was breathing and building a story about how this stuffy woman next to me was put out because someone had dared to ask her to move. Once I realized I was doing it, I acknowledged the story to myself and discontinued it. Problem solved. 

Brene Brown tells a story in Daring Greatly about she and her husband going out for an early morning swim in a lake on a family vacation at a cabin in the mountains. They both used to swim competitively and so this fun morning swim was right up their alley. Brene was feeling a little insecure in her Speedo, since it had ben 20 years and 2 kids since she’d worn it, and as they swam she felt so wonderful and close to her husband. As she tried telling him how bonding this felt to her he responded flippantly and kept swimming. In her mind she jumped to the conclusion that he must not think she still rocked the Speedo, or that he was wondering where his wife of 25 years ago went. She was caught up in her head about her own insecurities. As he continued to dismiss her she decided that rather than going into the usual mode of hurt and silent treatment that she would address it straight on. She said, “What is going on here? The story I’m creating is that you don’t think I look very good in my Speedo or that you’re wondering where your young, fit wife of 25 years ago went.” He had no idea what she was talking about. It turned out that he’d had a bad dream the night before that his children had drown and as they were swimming he was just trying to deal with a panic attack by counting strokes. He hadn’t even really heard her try to connect with him. 

We NEVER now what is going on in another’s mind. I could share a hundred examples of jumping to conclusions because it happens everyday. But let me be clear. Jumping to conclusions is the quintessential example of creating stories with no facts, only assumptions. This is what Kathryn and I were talking about earlier in the episode. This can bedevastatingly destructive to us and our relationships. When you can learn to check yourself - be aware when you do it and manage it, you relieve yourself of tremendous emotional stress and strain. Let me repeat that - When you can learn to check yourself - be aware when you do it and manage it, you relieve yourself of tremendous emotional stress and strain. So, notice, remind yourself it’s a story you are creating, check in with the person about what’s really going on. 9 times out of 10 the story we’ve concocted are not on point.

The Fourth thinking error is Magnification

Magnification is basically comparison. We magnify what others are good at and compare our own weaknesses. “I barely cook dinner for my family, and when I do it’s nothing like Ms. X cooks.” “He drives a better car than me, he’s so successful and I’m just a loser.” “She always looks so put together and I can’t stand to wear anything but jeans and a t-shirt.”

We’ve had numerous episodes on the podcast about how what you focus on expands. Episode 59, 186, 208, 223, and I know it comes up in even more conversations. You can see how dangerous this thinking error is because it allows us to create negative judgmental stories about ourselves that are not based on apples to apples. We all have different talents and abilities. We all have different places where we shine - and this is actually very important for a healthy community. We can’t all be good at the same thing or the tapestry of life does not have the color it needs to be beautiful. Comparison creates crushing self stories and it’s such a meaningless endeavor. Sometimes I catch myself comparing my work to the big uber successful influencers and I feel very small, and sometimes like a failure. So I remind myself of the rule of magnification - don’t. lol and I practice.

These inaccurate thinking patterns are used by the adversary to keep us small, to keep us in conflict with ourselves and others. These are the tools darkness excels at. 

The beauty of becoming aware of them is that line upon line we learn the weapons that keep us small, and one story at a time we practice taking control of our own thought patterns. But practice is THE key. This takes awareness, time and patience. But most good, worthwhile things do. It’s part of that growth we talked about in the first episode from last week. So don’t gt discouraged. Start with awareness.

While thinking errors bind us and limit our happiness and ability to grow, challenging those thinking errors and replacing them with more accurate thoughts will free us, create confidence, and we’ll have healthier relationship with ourselves and with other people. 

Thank you for being here today. Join me in two weeks for Part-3 of the series - From Chaos to Calm - managing stress and anxiety. 

A big shout out to by BP Writer from United States for leaving us a very kind review:

Fabulous Podcast! Fantastic content, great guests, gems galore!

Came across the Love Your Story podcast and am loving it! Especially the episode with Samantha Hawkins. This conversation was just so amazing! The candid discussion about standing up for what you believe in had so many great takeaways! Can’t wait to listen to more episodes! Thank you!

Please share this episode today with someone you love. We’ll see you in two weeks.