Criticism - is it them or you?

[Lucycat]

I don't think I am confusing conditioning with control. I am suggesting that one's response can have a conditioned element to it. ( and conditioning can be created by another)

I see criticism as having a basic survival function as in "you should not have run out across that road" to a child. However there also exists the toxic criticism that serves no purpose than a put down to make the critic feel good.

Now off at a tangent - bear with me. I cannot control my core body temperature. It has to exist then I notice a 'problem' - too hot, too cold and I take external action to change - a nice cup of tea, a fan or a warm coat. My body - as in the case of infection- can seriously disrupt my temperature to severe discomfort. Again my body does this automatically, and I have to become aware before I can do anything about it.

Is it not the same concept for criticism? My body/mind 'does' the automatic thought in response to the criticism and I have to have an awareness of that thought through how I feel about it in order to challenge and change it.

Of course this does not make an outsider responsible for my thoughts, but I am not in control of them either in the first instance.

 

[anthony]

Of course this does not make an outsider responsible for my thoughts, but I am not in control of them either in the first instance.

Contradictory... it is one, or the other, and possibly this is where you are confused in your own healing adventure. You cannot claim an outsider not responsible for your thoughts, to then contradict that very rationalism with "I am not in control of them either."

Nobody can make you believe what is fact, but you have to come to terms with fact in your own time and through your own understanding of the logic behind it.

IMO, your tangents of thought are what is causing you issue in understanding just how much control you have over your thoughts. You're using automatic, unconscious, acts of the brain and body to try and convince yourself about your conscious thoughts. Conditioning, for example, whilst they may be automatic actions, and instinctive thoughts due to conditioning, they can be changed into conscious, controlled thoughts and actions.

Nothing is automatic and outside of your control in the realm of what you think resulting in a behaviour (conditioning). Behaviour is 100% proven adaptable, also fact. No behaviour is out of bounds to be changed. Every behaviour comes from a resulting thought.

This may be difficult for some to comprehend, but it doesn't make it any less true and factual. This is the exact problem with cognitive distortions. You literally believe you are different, you are the one who cannot be changed, cannot change, are set this way for life, and even find every reason possible to try and quantify the issue with yourself, instead of simply try and work towards seeing just how untrue and damaging cognitive distortions are.

We all have automatic responses, we all just want to be angry, sad, pissed off, upset, happy, so forth, at times. No worries. Cognitive distortions though, are when these negatives take over your thinking, your life, your ability to see rational situations for what they are. That is when human emotion and thoughts become cognitive distortions.

 

[Lucycat]

Contradictory... it is one, or the other,

Why? This is almost black and white thinking. If it is not X it must be y. Just because it is not controlled by another person does not therefore mean that it must be under my control - going back to my analogy of body temperature ( or any other basic body function). It is not under my conscious control.

 

[Lucycat]

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/can-we-control-our-thoughts/

Hardly a scientific text, but interesting nonetheless. It is followed by some comment and references.

 

[anthony]

Still only talking about cognitive distortions. Unconscious and conscious thoughts are another tangent, but again, you discard the fact that you can change unconscious thoughts that result in an action, into conscious thoughts to change that action. It is scientific fact that you control your brain, regardless whether unconscious or conscious, you and only you are in control of it. Philosophers may debate this until the cows come home... but philosophy is a theoretical construct, nothing more.

I think... and correct me if I'm wrong here... you're still trying to argue that you don't have control over conditioning that happened to you, individually! Whilst conditioning happens on an automatic level, instinctively without any real processing from you, you are in control to change that conditioning at any time you choose, through a process of recognition, change and action. This is factually proven and behavioural modification data substantiates this.

Tangent again -- The article you reference is quite correct about our brains unconscious acts. Our brain does most of our daily tasks on auto-pilot. None of that means that we don't control it overall, because we can change most of our decisions (thoughts) if we focus upon them, exactly as the article did cover in relation to a batter swinging to hit a ball, but the conscious mind is preoccupied with the ball coming through the air, thus the act of running to first base and the complexities involved in the brain moving our body to do that task, are relegated to the subconscious at an automatic level. If at any time the batter chose not to run, he brought that action from the subconscious to the conscious to control the resulting action, the same as if he then decided not to hit the ball mid travel and step back. These are exact examples of taking automatic thoughts and instantly bringing them to the conscious level.

That article is an exact example of how we flip our thoughts and control our brain between what happens unconsciously or consciously. There is a lot that happens unconsciously, such as our heart beating, lungs breathing, senses engaging, but when focused upon you can even control those, such as slowing your heart beat right down (snipers are trained to do this) by nothing other than thought, speeding it up, the same with breathing, the same with specific senses when we focus the act from unconscious to our conscious.

@Lucycat, if you believe you don't control conditioning that has happened to you, then that is fine. That is your right. The very substance of this discussion is to try and help people who are stuck within such confines, get out of their head and change cognitive distortions, but it is a choice. You get to believe whatever you want to believe and do whatever you want to do. If you feel your conditioning is special, is now part of you and cannot be changed, then that is fine. It is only you who lives with your decisions. There are lots of people who think as you think, and think they're unique, can't be changed, are fixed in some mental aspect that they're stuck with for life. It is just a choice, nothing more.

 

[anthony]

Why? This is almost black and white thinking.

Oh... and that is not a cognitive distortion, some things are as they are, there is no grey. Black is not white, it is factually black. It is what it is, and is not a cognitive distortion. The same applies to a contradiction, it either is, or is not. There is no grey in a contradiction, otherwise it would not be a contradiction to begin with.

 

[Lucycat]

Clearly we will never agree on this. However I would like to add my interpretation of your theory ( yes not your personal theory but that of CB Theory)

• Person A criticises person B
• Person B feels bad about it so seeks professional help - Therapist C.
• Therapist C teaches person B about CBT and tells him to change his thinking.
• Person B may or may not have success here. If it works great. He concludes therapy and has a happy life believing in the powers of CBT forever.
• If it does not work, Person B feels bad about his failure and consults Therapist C again.
• Therapist C tells Person B that he was simply not trying hard enough and it is his own fault the CBT is not working.
• Person B tries harder and fails harder.
• Therapist C tells him again that he must try harder.
• Person B gives up....

or there is the way I see it;

• Person A criticises person B
• Person B feels bad about it so seeks professional help - Therapist D
• Therapist D discusses CBT with person B but concludes that in this case it is unlikely to be helpful because his experience has informed him of which clients are likely to respond well to CBT.
  
• Therapist D and Person B together look at historical reasons why the particular criticism of Person A caused so much upset. Together they discuss and process the particular memory ( using one of many modalities - psychanalytic / psychodynamic / humanistic / person centred / client centred or one of many other options). Through the processing of the memory the link between criticism from Person A and and the memory is severed.
• Next time person A criticises person B they are able to simply 'shrug it off'

if you believe you don't control conditioning that has happened to you, then that is fine

I don't think it cannot be changed - just not by simply thinking it changed. I believe that it is changed through the processing of the associated memory.

There is a lot that happens unconsciously, such as our heart beating, lungs breathing, senses engaging, but when focused upon you can even control those, such as slowing your heart beat right down (snipers are trained to do this) by nothing other than thought,

I am aware of this. However even a sniper cannot do it 24/7. This ability to control such vital observations is one of the reasons that we are taught to take repeated readings from people as they cannot maintain the control continuously although I accept that a sniper is probably damn good at it. The point - as you say - is that they need to remain focused. I think this makes it difficult when it comes to challenging thoughts - how can you remain focused on it all the time?

There is no grey in a contradiction, otherwise it would not be a contradiction to begin with.

What contradiction? It is you who said it is a contradiction. I asked why you think that it is a contradiction. I am suggesting that you are telling me;

If it is not X it must be Y.

I would suggest that there are many other letters that it could be other than X or Y or Black or White.

 

[anthony]

Therapist C tells Person B that he was simply not trying hard enough and it is his own fault the CBT is not working.

I will give a different version again:

If a therapist ever said that, my response would be to seek a new therapist... because there is no fault in processing rational thinking, it is more simply whether you have the aptitude to produce rational alternatives based on what a person throws at you at any given instance. CBT is more the therapist who fails, not the client. The client merely comes in with the irrational logic, the therapists role is to help them produce a rational logic to their irrational one. If the therapist cannot do that, which suits the clients mindset and thinking style, then the therapist fails, not the client.

On some people who I've helped with complex trauma, people who have been rejected from therapist after therapist and claimed to be untreatable, it has taken me sometimes days of conversation with them for them to find the rational logic in their irrational thinking, and most of that was not saying anything new, but actually them reading over what they write, and because they write it versus say it, they can peruse it and then process it.

IMHO, I think CBT has its best results in written form. Talking will normally only allow minor irrational thoughts to be solved quickly, it takes written form to solve the more complex ones. The problem with this though, is the obvious time limitation of a therapist.

 

[Valentino]

'When Panic Attacks' a book that was later published by Dr. David Burns focuses more on anxiety. In that book, he uses 3 different models which expands on the primarily one model which he used to address depression in the earlier book 'Feeling Good'.

Those 3 models are: Cognitive (Thinking), Exposure (Doing), and Hidden Emotional (Feeling).

This link below has an excerpt from the book, including descriptions of 4 theoretical models to describe cause of anxiety, of which he uses 3.
Link Removed

He has further expanded on that work, to develop a new model for psychotherapy which he calls T.E.A.M. Therapy, which expands upon his earlier model of CBT to include more methods, but also more application & nuance addressing: empathic therapeutic relationship, objective diagnostic tools, and dealing with motivation/resistance.

The acronym of TEAM stands for: Testing, Empathy, (Paradoxical) Agenda Setting, and Methods.

He describes TEAM therapy compared to CBT on his webpage here:
http://feelinggood.com/team-vs-cbt/

And I would think that Dr. Burns would disagree with the approach of trying to address PTSD primarily only through CBT, and probably would find that rather limiting.

An excerpt from his most recent ebook focused on training therapists the TEAM therapy model:

Throughout history, gurus have promoted the idea that you can treat emotional problems with a single method or technique that will cure what ails you. Experts have advocated cocaine, prayer, mindfulness meditation, relaxation training, aerobic exercise, psychoanalytic free association, dream analysis, antidepressants, EMDR, TFT, bioenergetics, hugging your inner child, getting in touch with your "true feelings," St. John's wort, Prozac, and a mind boggling array of fixes for every conceivable emotional problem. Mental health professionals, and the general public alike, routinely fall for each new brand of snake oil.

I call this therapeutic reductionism. It's the attempt to reduce a complex process—psychotherapy—to one simple gimmick or formula. When you think about it, this doesn't make much sense. There are more than 50 different kinds of pneumonia, and they all respond to different kinds of antibiotics, as well as a variety of other treatments. In addition, there are many other kinds of lung disorders, such as pneumothorax, asthma, emphysema, pulmonary edema and lung cancer, to name just a few. You can't treat all these disorders with a single antibiotic.

The brain is vastly more complex than the lung. The number of genes required for the creation of the human brain is far larger than the number required to create a lung. When you think about it that way, the idea that we'd need hundreds of different treatments for pulmonary problems, but only one treatment for emotional problems, seems absurd. For example, the cognitive therapy techniques that can be so effective for depression probably won't help an angry patient with a marital conflict. And the techniques that can quickly cure Panic Disorder won't be at all helpful for alcoholism or an eating disorder.

In addition, every person we treat is unique. Different patients will respond to different techniques, even if they have the same diagnosis. For example, the Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) and Semantic Method ended years of suffering for Daniel, the man we discussed in Chapter 1. However, these techniques may not do a thing for the next depressed patient you see, who may respond to the Acceptance Paradox, the Externalization of Voices, or some other technique.

--- page 61 from "Tools, Not Schools, Of Therapy" psychotherapy eBook by Dr. David Burns
http://feelinggood.com/resources-for-therapists/therapists-toolkit/

 

[anthony]

And I would think that Dr. Burns would disagree with the approach of trying to address PTSD primarily only through CBT

Dr Burns isn't a trauma and PTSD expert, and CBT is not just a counselling method, but an actual trauma therapy, called CBT-TF, and the leading experts in the world cite that CBT is the foundational treatment for the treatment of PTSD (required for longevity): https://www.myptsd.com/threads/removing-therapy-type-confusion.15534/#post-195467

Yes, there are other treatments used in combination with CBT trauma therapies for PTSD, but the foundational treatments are all CBT because of their effectiveness. One should also not confuse foundations versus overall treatment strategies. CBT is a required principle to treat PTSD, the fundamentals, and if you don't know them, make them part of you, you cannot effectively treat the fear and other cognitive distortions that trauma and PTSD create. Other treatments don't treat these, and if they do, then they're using CBT.

One must separate such distinctions... and we aren't being broad in this discussion, but very specific to one issue, being criticism.

 

[Valentino]

The way people are trying to communicate in this thread is a great example of different approaches toward handling criticism from others.

But dealing with criticism doesn't have to be an all out battle between absolute right and wrong. Points shared that are totally wrong on the surface, might still have some useful insights underlying. And vice versa, some points shared that feel very true and useful, might also have limitations and falsity.

And I think that excessive focus on the emotional reaction that gets triggered from perceived criticism can be very counter-productive. Because excessive effort, energy and attention goes primarily toward managing emotions. Which means less effort, energy, and attention to go towards simply accepting, evaluating, and processing any informational feedback within the criticism that can lead to better understanding, connection, and stronger social relationships.

----

I was referring to the 3 model approach of Cognitive, Exposure, and Hidden Emotional models, that Dr. Burns used to address anxiety, because I also find that only using cognitive and exposure techniques can be limiting. If all the attention is spent towards controlling and manipulating thoughts to get improved emotional feeling results. That can easily reinforce blind spots to hidden emotions that are often lying right underneath the surface. Those hidden emotions can lead to deeper core reasons why that 'criticism' brought up unexpected excess emotional reaction and the distorted thoughts and/or self-defeating beliefs attached to it. And sometimes a hidden emotion wants to be discovered and addressed as an unresolved emotional wound, but without awareness and acceptance, it's easily overlooked.

By addressing the hidden emotions, that sort of criticism won't have as strong of a charge in the future. But that doesn't dismiss the value of cognitive and exposure approaches. It's more about having a broad range of tools and understanding, to better deal with the wide variety of reactions and situations.

Are all therapists created equal? Shit no. At a rough guess, you will find within the entire therapeutic industry there are probably 10% who are outstanding at treating trauma and PTSD. That isn't a fault in therapists or education. Some people are wired problem solvers, some are not. To put it simple... 10% will excel in negative thinking problem solving analytical skills.

The TEAM therapy model addresses this earlier point about ineffective therapists, Dr. Burns has also noticed this from working with therapists and incorporated methods to try to improve on therapist's effectiveness.

This is a new video where he talks about how therapists also often have great difficulty dealing with criticism, and that resistance to the discomfort of receiving criticism directly limits their effectiveness.

 

[anthony]

The TEAM therapy model addresses this earlier point about ineffective therapists

Yer, I read that about his shift. Honestly, if Burns was ever purely focused on CBT as the be all model, then I only see it as good that he has shifted to broaden his views, and is trying to shift others from any such fixed view. IMO, and what I have always advocated here, is that a therapist needs to cut and paste on a per client basis, techniques and methods to suit exactly the issues presented. This is why I guess around only 10% of therapists can actually do this, and do it well.