by Karl Ericson

Too many popular self help books tell their readers that if they just think positive they will overcome all their problems and achieve everything their heart desires. My experience has taught me that self help is an ongoing struggle. It's not a simple recipe which one follows and which transforms one into a happy successful person. This has been important to understand because it is easy to get discouraged when one makes the effort to improve one's mood and one's situation and one fails. It's easy to become self critical when one fails. 

I write that self help is a struggle but what opponent is the struggle against? The primary opponent in the case of self help is incorrect painful thinking. 

The word incorrect is a very important one. The opponent is not painful thinking it's incorrect painful thinking. 
Painful thinking if true can be a very positive thing. The painful belief that one may get in trouble is one steals from the bakery section of the supermarket is a good and positive belief. Painful emotions such as fear can be a valuable warning. The first step of my method of self help is not to attempt to eliminate a painful emotion but rather to attempt to evaluate whether it is warning about something real and if one concludes that it is, to develop a plan to deal with the problem one's painful emotion is warning about. Once we develop a plan of action and take it becomes easier to overcome the painful emotions that we feel because we can tell ourselves that we our doing all we can and it is not to our advantage to feel the painful emotion any more and that now that we our doing what we can it is to our advantage to try and be happy with things the way they are.

Before I discuss further approaches to self help I need to discuss the categories of painful thoughts that people generally have to deal with. We can classify these thoughts under the three categories of: 

1. Low Self Concept
2. Paranoia
3. Pessimism 

Painful thoughts such as these often take the form of painful self talk in which we tell ourselves things that hurt our self concept or that make us feel not loved (paranoia) or that lead us to feel pessimism. We can think subdivide approaches into fast and slow approaches.  One fast approach is simply to take some time to concentrate one's efforts on not feeling the painful emotions that one is feeling. For one example if one is feeling angry one can simply try and feel less angry. 

Another fast approach is to respond with some prethought out positive self talk. We can do this by identifying which of the core categories our painful self talk falls under and then saying a positive statement relating to that 
category. It might seem that the best approach is to try and think the opposite. If one feels low self concept and 
thinks "I'm no good" it might seem reasonable that the appropriate positive statement is "I'm terrific". 

If one feels paranoia and believes that "so and so hates me" it might seem reasonable that the way to counter this painful self talk would be with the positive statement "so and so loves me". If one feels pessimism it might seem reasonable that the way to counter the pessimism is to tell oneself "everything is going to be great".  I call this approach reversal. I used to use it and in the beginning it helped me a great deal. 

There are several problems with reversal. One is it's often very hard to believe the opposite of one's painful  thoughts. The other is that often the opposite isn't true. This was correctly pointed out to me by Albert Ellis. 

Can we come up with quick positive thoughts to counter our negative thoughts that are more accurate than reversal?

One problem with trying to do so is that negative thoughts may be true. If we feel anxiety about our future there  may be a good reason for that anxiety. If we feel low self concept we may be doing something unethical that we should feel low self concept about. Painful emotions can be a valuable warning and instead of trying to stop feeling them we may be better off listening to what they are telling us.

Sometimes however, painful thoughts become exaggerated and result in painful emotions that bother us continuously and make us depressed. In this case it's time to bring out the big guns, positive counter statements.  I give a table below with general negative thoughts in one column, the reversal of those thoughts in the second column and positive counter statements in the third column. 

Painful Reversal Positive Counter Statement
Thoughts/Emotion 

Low Self Concept I'm terrific I approve of you

Paranoia Everybody loves me I love you.

Pessimism Everythings going to work Things will be better
out great. if I feel more optimistic.

The first two positive counter statements are true if you make them true. There are many times when pessimism  hurts us more than it helps us and in those cases the third positive counter statement is true as well.  Reversal is likely to only be partly true. It's important to use statements that are as close to the truth as possible because it's important to face reality. There are times when reversal may be closer to the truth than what we are thinking. A surgeon for example, may feel he's no good because a patient died on the operating table when in reality he may be a terrific surgeon and the patient died due to circumstances beyond his control. In this example his thinking "I'm terrific" would be closer to the truth than "I'm a terrible person".

There are advantages and disadvantages to the fast approach. One advantage of this approach is that it is fast. It counters painful talk quickly and can be used to prevent painful self talk from building up a depressed mood. A disadvantage is that it doesn't always deal with the cause of the painful self talk. If one treats the symptom and does not eliminate the cause then the symptoms will keep coming back and one will have to keep treating them.  Another disadvantage is that because it is a fixed answer it often doesn't deal with the specific problem and so is not as effective as an answer that does.

An approach that is similar to reversal and yet doesn't involve false beliefs is trying to come up with correct arguments that support the opposite belief. Supposing a fictitious person named Jim has taken the bar exam once and failed it and is too discouraged to take it again because he believes he will fail again. He could consider arguments supporting the opposite of his belief that he will fail again. Such arguments might include that he was close to passing, that more studying for the next exam will might give him the extra bit of knowledge to pass, and so on. 

The slow approach:

The slow approach is to diagnose the cause of the painful thinking and then to deal with that cause.  Freud used to try and trace childhood and subconscious causes to problems. His approach has been rejected by cognitive therapists and by neurolinguistic programmers for a more here and now approach. In my opinion Freud went too far in tracing problems to the past and his attempts to uncover subconscious thoughts only led him away from uncovering the true causes of problems. I also believe that it is wrong to totally reject looking at past experiences in therapy. If one was bitten as a dog as a child and that's why one is afraid of dogs one shouldn't ignore that.

How do we diagnose the causes of our painful thinking? 
A good first step is just writing done what is bothering us. The next step is to plan a course of action to deal with the problems that we face. Then we can identify which of the core painful thoughts we are thinking and come up with a more appropriate thought. 

The following is an example of how I use the core painful thought list for self diagnosis. One morning I woke up and felt depressed and didn't know why. I asked myself, "Am I feeling low self concept". The answer was yes. "Why am I feeling low self concept?" I asked myself. "Because I am not achieving what I should be achieving" was the answer that came to mind. "Am I feeling paranoia?". "Yes, because I think I'm going to be fired from my job because I'm not accomplishing what I should accomplish." "Do I feel pessimism?" "Of course, I am pessimistic that I'll lose my job." Before using the core thought list I didn't know what was bothering me I just knew that I was depressed.

We may be motivated to think painful thoughts.  At first that may seem ridiculous. Why would any one be motivated to feel low self worth, or paranoia or pessimism? 

Lets start with the motivation to feel low self concept.  Sometimes people put themselves down because they are angry at themselves for doing something foolish. By punishing  themselves in this way they hope they will prevent themselves from doing it again. 

What would be a motivation to feel paranoia? The temptation to blame others is an example of such a motivation. Supposing we do something that causes a problem and a man give us constructive criticism so that we won't do it again. We can react with acknowledging that the criticism is correct and thanking the person who gave us the constructive criticism. Many people however, are more likely to become hostile to the man giving the criticism.   Many people are likely to react to his criticism by blaming him for the problem. Many people are likely to react with paranoia toward the man giving the criticism. It's easier on one's self esteem if one regards the man's criticism resulting from his hostility than regarding the criticism as true. 

What would be a motivation to feel pessimism? We may believe that it is best to be pessimistic so we will be on our guard against threats that we face or take action against them.

How does one deal with such motivations? The first step is to identify the motivation and to evaluate the beliefs leading us to be motivated in such a way. For example, we may believe that it is best to be pessimistic so we will be on our guard against threats that we face.  We can correct that belief to we will be just as effective in facing the threats that we face if we plan a course of action to deal with them and try to be optimistic. In fact we may be more effective if we come across to others as optimistic and we may have more energy to do what we should do if we are not burdened by pessimism. With the above correction, not only do we reduce our motivation to be pessimistic, we also create motivation to be optimistic.


Emotions:

An interesting question is whether these painful thoughts have corresponding emotions. If we list painful emotions we know people have they include, 

1. Anxiety or fear 
2. Anger 
3. Hatred 
4. Sadness 
5. Loneliness

Is there however, a low self esteem emotion or a paranoia emotion or a pessimism emotion or are they simply thoughts that create unhappiness? Certainly there are thoughts associated with these emotions.  Pessimistic thoughts can lead to the emotion of fear. The belief one is being taken advantage of can lead to anger and so on. 

In order to deal with painful emotions we can take three approaches. One is to take some time to concentrate  one's effort on not feeling the emotion. Another approach is to diagnose the thoughts leading to the emotions and altering them and the third is to displace the emotions with positive emotions. 

The topic of self help is too large to cover in depth in this essay, for further information see the Philosophy and Self Help web site at http://www.primechoice.com/philosophy/shelp

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