Feelings And Emotions - The ABC of Psychology
Feelings And Emotions - The ABC of Psychology
Many of us believe that exaggeration helps people understanding. In fact, we end up at the opposite. Our vocabulary gets poorer. We are less precise in our description and when we use the correct word, it has lost its meaning. See the word "depression" for example, very often, it will be used to define sadness.
Nowadays, every time I get a bit sad, I am "depressed". When things don't go my way, I am "furious", and when my girlfriend leaves me, I am in a "crisis". In fact, all these words are secondary expressions and don't tell much about your psychological state. They are like inflation: Big words which don't mean much in fact. They are a kind of flea-market-words, you can find almost everything in them.
If a patient tells me he is furious, that doesn't tell me anything about his state of mind or his feelings. You don't just become furious. Furious is an emotion, not a feeling. A feeling is primary and if you add thought to the feeling, you get an emotion. For example:
Sadness + thought like "he shouldn't do that to me!" = furious
Sadness + thought like "everyone does that to me!" = depression
In Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT), which is cognitive psychology, we will definethese principles with A, B and C.
A is the Activating event. It might be something you see, something you hear, something someone tells you or just a thought you had. It is the A that starts it all, and it might be benign or very innocent... seen from outside.
B are your Beliefs. The way you think, the rules or the laws you obey. Why you abide by these laws or when you started to follow them is not important. It is not important that you started to think you were worth nothing when your father told you that he never loved you. It is important that you still think so. What makes the difference is not when or why it started, but that you are, right now, thinking it, and you will continue to run against the same wall as long as you think in the same way.
C is the consequence. The result of it all. It is generally the C, other people will see of you, or that you will tell your friends or therapist. When you will explain what happened, you will just forget the B. You will explain the A and jump to C: He told me I was a loser (A), and I got mad at him (C). Nothing about thoughts or primary feelings, here. In fact, the full explanation should be: He told me I was a loser (A), it hurt me, and I thought he certainly didn't have any right to speak to me like that (B) so I became angry with him (C).
The problem is that in order to change our feelings and emotion and to become better, we have to change our way of thinking. We have to change some of these rules that have followed us for years and years. We have to admit that we are far from perfect and may have acted badly. So when many go in therapy, they prefer to find a therapist who would agree with them and in fact, hold on that the (C) is perfectly correct and adapted to the situation: "of course, it is perfectly all right you dare to answer back when someone calls you a loser, it reminds you of your father. It is not your fault."
Alternatively, many will choose to change the (A), if possible. Changing the boyfriend, moving to another city or getting a new job. However, since they don't change their thoughts, they eventually end up getting in exactly the same troubles, for the good reason that as long as we don't change our direction, we are very likely to end up where we are heading.
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