Therapists, like people more generally, tend to possess a strong urge to soothe their patients. This is true across all therapeutic modalities, from psychoanalysis to cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). So, just as patients tend to skew negative, we, in our reactions, tend to skew positive. Unfortunately, however, when unmanaged, this is an unhelpful way of addressing distorted thinking. Sometimes, we just don’t know.
Often, patients struggle to reframe negative thoughts because they erroneously believe the reframes are meant to be positive and only positive. They’ll tell us they “couldn’t” finish the exercise or did but didn’t agree with the new perspective. Being acquainted with our positive spin, they may come to believe that we expect that of them, and sometimes we do. Yet, while it’s challenging to continue to see our clients struggle, we have to accept that real aid entails us being honest with them and ourselves, which means seeing what we don’t want to see. So, while friends can continue to only think positively for them, therapists, on the other hand, should help patients sit with their fear of uncertainty.
Many of our patients can be described as, to use the popular term, overthinkers, especially the perfectionists. They spend much of their time planning, correcting, ruminating, regretting, and problem-solving. Often, when they seek out a CBT therapist, they’re searching for more tools to predict and control. Some believe they’re smarter than they have to be, while others believe that they can be with enough work. Ultimately, therapy becomes a mere means to preclude future heartache, rather than a way of learning to cope with it.
Therapists often feed into the yearning for expertise, desperately searching for concrete answers to soothe. We want to tell them that their attraction is reciprocated, that they’re qualified for some dream job, or that someone they love isn’t really taking advantage of them. Deep down, we want to blame their problems solely on their thinking, yet their thinking is only part of the problem.
The truth is, when someone is utilizing critical thinking, engaged in the CBT thought exercise, for example, they should, more often than not, expect a neutral or uncertain outcome. This can easily feel unbearable to both parties, so each may remain locked in their respective cognitive bubble, the therapist certain of the patient’s flawed thinking and the patient certain of the therapist’s dread of anything real. However, if therapy teaches one fundamental lesson, it should be this: Your mistakes, in thought and action, are, for the most part, acceptable because you are not and never were that special. This means that your overthinking merely fuels your sense of self-importance, doing little, in reality, to aid your ability to protect yourself. It makes you feel smarter than you are and your life more predictable than it is.
Through CBT, we sometimes discover that, even with thorough explorations, our reframed interpretations are wrong. We often misread the data, sometimes based on our own biases and, at others, because others hide what they really feel. And we learn to live with the possibility of having to start from scratch, looking at the same thoughts anew because of new evidence.
This messiness of thought is a significant part of the messiness of life. I’ve been wrong many times with my patients. I told them to be patient, and thus wasted their time. I told them that they were too negative and they got their hearts broken. And I told them how unlikely it was that their paranoia was accurate, only to watch them get fired soon after.
To be fair, much of the time, negative biases are off, but the probability of being right isn’t as low as we tend to think. So, I argue for a dose of humility for all involved. It may help to remember:
1. Everything involves some degree of risk. This means that no matter how much data we have, we have to accept the possibility that we can still be wrong and often are.
2. Being wrong says little about who we are. This means that we should decouple being right or wrong from feeling smart or stupid. Lots of smart people are frequently wrong and don’t invest too much of their time into preventing mistakes, even ones that feel “obvious” after the fact. This also means that feeling stupid isn’t the same as being stupid. Most people feel stupid for some mistake, but it’s emotional reasoning, a cognitive distortion, to believe that one is stupid because one feels that way. Here, the feeling isn’t necessarily indicative of a fact.
3. You couldn’t predict many catastrophes. This means that even when you doubled down and tried harder, some bad thing happened regardless. Here, it may help to ask yourself how personal this was. Was this something that only you couldn’t predict, or were others unlikely to either?
4. You prefer to be human. Most of us can’t carry the burden of living a mistake-free life. This means that you should remind yourself that overthinking implies a degree of responsibility that you don’t actually want. Having to be right all of the time, whether you’re a therapist or patient, implies the need to live with chronic anxiety, which is prevalent among overthinkers. Acknowledging the error of feeling self-important can allow you to begin to enjoy parts of your life that you may have missed out on while trying to prevent a catastrophe.
