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The Importance of Truth

 Hey everyone! 

I cannot even begin to express how much I’ve appreciated learning the things I have this week! I feel like I’ve had a total change in perspective. We talked about different types of stressors families experience and how each family seems to respond a little differently. We ended up talking a lot about individual stress and hardship which is what I want to focus on in my blog today! I feel like I am a pretty positive person naturally, so putting a positive spin on things to not let them get me down comes kind of easily to me. I have such a hard time knowing what to tell people when that’s really hard for them to do, because I don’t really know what it’s like to be in their shoes. Of course I don’t want to tell people to just think more positively and that it will solve all of their problems, that’s not very helpful at all! This has been a big reason I’ve doubted I could be a good therapist or counselor. I know how to be happy and think positively myself, but I feel so clueless and helpless when trying to help others. After this week, though, I feel like I could do it if I learned the right techniques to help people!

In class my professor showed us a model he used with a lot of clients when he was a marriage and family therapist. It listed all of the negative emotions a person might be experiencing and had them rate the percentage they felt that emotion. They would also write down the thoughts going through their mind associated with each emotion. After having his client fill it out, my professor would teach them about many of the thinking errors people often have when they are going through a hard time. I’ll explain a couple of them to you to give you an idea of what thinking errors are! Black and white/all or nothing thinking is when a person frequently uses the terms “always” and “never” in drastic ways. For example, a girl might complain that her boyfriend “never” wants to spend time with her, even though he does spend most of his time with her, but occasionally has other places to be. Another thinking error is mind reading. This happens when you interpret actions even though your assumptions may not be true at all. An example of this would be if a person’s friend didn’t answer their call and they assumed that it was because that friend was angry or didn’t want to talk to them, when it might have just been that they were taking a nap and didn’t hear the call. After teaching a person some thinking errors, my professor would have them go back to the sheet and identify the thinking errors they had written and then rewrite their emotions, thoughts, and percentages with a more clear perspective. It was amazing to hear a few stories of the changes he saw in people as they did this exercise.

One very profound thing my professor said is that we are not just trying to come up with thoughts that are positive, we are trying to come up with thoughts that are entirely true. A lot of the time when we are feeling very sad and depressed, it is because we are thinking thoughts like “no one cares about me” or “nothing is going to change for the better”. If we can recognize the errors in our thinking and see things as they truly are, we will feel much more empowered to make positive changes in our lives and hopeful that things won’t always be as bad as they seem in the moment. So I would encourage all of you to examine the way you think and seek the truth in your circumstances! I know it can completely change a person’s outlook on life!

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