Thanks guessed! These were very helpful, at least the "ten forms of twisted thinking" thing, because I recognized many of my own thought patterns. The "ten ways to untwist" just seem impossible to me right now, but maybe with some practice...who knows?
To take this example one step further. Suppose you are at work, and you are having a bad day and are falling behing. You are fully aware of this, so when your boss comes up to you and suggests that you pick up the pace, you have every right to feel anxious. This is where you need to calm down and tell the boss that you are having problems and why you are having the problem. Also remember that he / she is pressured into getting the work out on time too, so they need to ask you to pick the pace up so they can show that they took action.
Another example. You are at a bar, and a group of drunk young men look at you and say "hey check out the fatty" etc. Your mission is then to tell yourself that it is the alcohol doing the talking, that there are a lot of people that are fatter than you, that their opinion of you is only valid to them. If you feel like making a comeback you could with something like "Oh and you must be the hottest guy on the face of this earth".
These aren't specific CBT techniques, but should give you an idea of how to start turning your thinking around.
Hmm... now I'm starting to think that I was wrong about Wayne Dyer's book/philosophy. These scenarios and coping techniques that you've mentioned seem like stuff right out of Dyer's "Your Erroneous Zones" book. So maybe Dyer's techniques ARE based on CBT after-all.(sorry Katie
)
The only difference is that Dyer believes that stuff like "comebacks, retaliation, etc" are useless and basically mean that you ARE letting someone else's opinion effect you. After all, if you REALLY don't care what someone thinks, then you wouldn't need to "tell them off" to feel better. Dyer believes that just realizing that their opinion is truly meaningless in your life should be enough to dismiss it, as you would dismiss the ramblings of a mentally disturbed person on a sidewalk.
The thing is, people with social phobia think any and everyone is judging them or will judge them.
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A more typical situation for a social phobic is where he/she talks with a person or group of people, then leaves thinking, "Oh man I sounded like such a loser, they probably think I'm so stupid, I bet they're talking about me right now."
[SNIP]
There is a "distorted thought" in the CBT list for these very situations. It's called "Mind Reading." The idea is that when you start to think in this fashion, you remind yourself that you can't read other people's minds, and it is irrational to think you can, and futile since you'll never be able to even if you want to really bad.
I definitely have the irrational thought that people are always judging me. It's absolutely ridiculous. When someone is walking towards me on a sidewalk, I think that they are evaluating me, the way I'm walking, whether or not I look like a "weirdo", etc etc. It's really silly since I'm never doing the same to them, so why would they be doing that to me? And if they are, then they are
REALLY strange, so why should I care?
On the old "Lovelines" radio show, Dr. Drew used to refer to this kind of thinking as believing
"I'm a piece of crap... that the world revolves around" . In other words, you feel absolutely worthless, yet you still manage to convince yourself that people are so consumed with you that they are busy judging, evaluating, and discussing you behind your back. After all, if you were such a loser, people would simply dismiss you with maybe one sentence and that's it. They wouldn't put much mental energy into evaluating you.
My problem with the "mind reading" irrational thought- is that I've often told people things about others that no one else seemed to notice, like "that guy is really selfish", "that girl is untrustworthy", or "that guy is not a very good friend". This was not from "mind reading" but just from closely examining them, how they act, what they say, their body language, etc(yes I know all SPers do this
). The problem is that MANY times my "evaluations" of people have proven to be true. People have said to me "Wow you are very intuitive. You were right about him".
For example, a group of my friends once had a roommate named Nathan that they all absolutely loved and thought he was the greatest guy in the world. I kept telling them "There's something a bit off with that guy. He seems a little strange or withdrawn". In short, I just didn't like or trust him.
One night, while my friends were all out of town for the weekend, Nathan loaded all of their valuables into his car, and just left, never to be seen again. He cleaned them out.
Everyone was astonished by this, except me. In fact the story was told to me by each of them and every time they always started the story with "Remember how you always used to say that Nathan was strange? Well..."
Anyway, my point being that I've had many incidents like this where my supposedly "irrational thoughts" about people were confirmed. This just tends to make me hang on to my "people reading" behavior and makes me believe that my impressions of people are accurate.
Then again, I also have the VERY pessimistic/avoidant attitude that if you always think the worst of people, eventually you'll be proven correct. Sad thing is- this usually turns out to be true.
i would just get totally de-railed the instant someone tried to redefine "rational thinking" for me in the cbt program. but then, i've stood in front of a car going 40mph as it came screeching to a halt to nudge my shins because i didn't want to look jumpy and panicky to everyone in the intersection.
I hear ya brotha!
I've done similar things. The sadly ironic thing about these situations is that you're SO obsessed with trying not to look "weird" or "silly" that you actually end up DOING things that MAKE you look weird or silly. Grrr, it just sucks :
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