Cognitive Distortions and Rabindrik Psychotherapy (lecture notes)
D. Dutta Roy
Performing Arts therapy Center
Rabindrabharati University
Kolkata
1.12.2014
বিপদে মোরে রক্ষা করো
এ নহে মোর প্রার্থনা,
বিপদে আমি না যেন করি ভয়।
দুঃখতাপে ব্যথিত চিতে
নাই-বা দিলে সান্ত্বনা,
দুঃখে যেন করিতে পারি জয়।
সহায় মোর না যদি জুটে
নিজের বল না যেন টুটে,
সংসারেতে ঘটিলে ক্ষতি
লভিলে শুধু বঞ্চনা
নিজের মনে না যেন মানি ক্ষয়।
আমারে তুমি করিবে ত্রাণ
এ নহে মোর প্রার্থনা,
তরিতে পারি শকতি যেন রয়।
আমার ভার লাঘব করি
নাই-বা দিলে সান্ত্বনা,
বহিতে পারি এমনি যেন হয়।
নম্রশিরে সুখের দিনে
তোমারি মুখ লইব চিনে,
দুখের রাতে নিখিল ধরা
যেদিন করে বঞ্চনা
তোমারে যেন না করি সংশয়।
Rabindranath Tagore, the seer poet, observed different changes in the layers of consciousness through performing arts. He composed several songs that are examined here to explore his ideas about cognitive distortions in consciousness and therapeautic values.
COGNITIVE DISTORTIONS
Definition: Cognitive distortions are thoughts that cause individuals to perceive reality negatively. These negative thinking patterns are simply convincing the mind of individuals that what they see is true when it is not. They are inaccurate thoughts that usually reinforce negative thoughts or emotions.
Interference: Cognitive distortions tend to interfere with the way a person perceives an event. Since the way a person feels intervenes with how they think, these distorted thoughts feed their negative emotions. As a result, an individual affected by cognitive distortions may have an overall negative outlook on the world.
List of distortions: The cognitive distortions are categories of automatic thinking and are to be distinguished from logical fallacies.
a) All-or-nothing thinking (or dichotomous reasoning): This causes false dilemmas. Splitting involves using terms like "always", "every" or "never" when this is neither true, nor equivalent to the truth. Example: When an admired person makes a minor mistake, the admiration is turned into contempt.
b) Overgeneralization: Making hasty generalizations from insufficient experiences and evidence. Making a very broad conclusion based on a single incident or a single piece of evidence. If something bad happens only once, it is expected to happen over and over again. Example: A person is lonely and often spends most of her time at home. Her friends sometimes ask her to come out for dinner and meet new people. She feels it is useless to try to meet people. No one really could like her
c) Filtering: focusing entirely on negative elements of a situation, to the exclusion of the positive. Also, the brain's tendency to filter out information which does not conform to already held beliefs. Example: After receiving comments about a work presentation, a person focuses on the single critical comment and ignores what went well.
d) Disqualifying the positive: discounting positive events. Example: Upon receiving a congratulation, a person dismisses it out-of-hand, believing it to be undeserved, and automatically interpreting the compliment (at least inwardly) as an attempt at flattery or perhaps as arising out of naïveté.
e) Jumping to conclusions: reaching preliminary conclusions (usually negative) from little (if any) evidence.
f) Magnification and minimization – Giving proportionally greater weight to a perceived failure, weakness or threat, or lesser weight to a perceived success, strength or opportunity, so the weight differs from that assigned to the event or thing by others. This is common enough in the normal population to popularize idioms such as "make a mountain out of a molehill". In depressed clients, often the positive characteristics of other people are exaggerated and negative characteristics are understated.
g) Emotional reasoning: presuming that negative feelings expose the true nature of things, and experiencing reality as a reflection of emotionally linked thoughts. Thinking something is true, solely based on a feeling. Example: "I feel (i.e. think that I am) stupid or boring, therefore I must be.
h) Should statements: doing, or expecting others to do, what they morally should or ought to do irrespective of the particular case the person is faced with. This involves conforming strenuously to ethical categorical imperatives which, by definition, "always apply," or to hypothetical imperatives which apply in that general type of case.
i) Labeling and mislabeling: a more severe type of overgeneralization; attributing a person's actions to their character instead of some accidental attribute. Rather than assuming the behavior to be accidental or extrinsic, the person assigns a label to someone or something that implies the character of that person or thing. Mislabeling involves describing an event with language that has a strong connotation of a person's evaluation of the event. Example of "labeling": Instead of believing that you made a mistake, you believe that you are a loser, because only a loser would make that kind of mistake. Or, someone who made a bad first impression is a "jerk", in the absence of some more specific cause. Example of "mislabeling": A woman who places her children in a day care center is "abandoning her children to strangers," because the person who says so highly values the bond between mother and child.
j) Personalization – attributing personal responsibility, including the resulting praise or blame, for events over which a person has no control. Example: A mother whose child is struggling in school blames herself entirely for being a bad mother, because she believes that her deficient parenting is responsible. In fact, the real cause may be something else entirely.
k) Blaming: the opposite of personalization; holding other people responsible for the harm they cause, and especially for their intentional or negligent infliction of emotional distress on us.
COGNITIVE RESTRUCTURING
Socratic Questioning:
Thought Reading:
Identifying cognitive errors
Examining the cost-benefit
Understanding idiosyncratic meaning
RABINDRIK PSYCHOTHERAPY
Rabindrik psychotherapy is therapeautic approach to create positive flow in the consciousness through cognitive restructuring. By studying his songs, several postulates have been identified that suggests cognitive distortions and how to overcome them. In the next class I will discuss.
1. Negative flow to positive flow:
Listen to this song: Voy hote tabo avaya majhe
2. Overcoming negative prediction and self-efficacious ness
3.Acceptance of negative thoughts and develop self-competency
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