What is your unpopular opinion?

[BoomerD]

Well I think I am the gods special gift to women, but for some reason they can't see a gift that is right in front of them.

but it's SUCH a tiny little package...

 

[whm1974]

but it's SUCH a tiny little package...

So? it is the performance that counts!!!

 

[Zeze]

So? it is the performance that counts!!!

That's not what your dad told me last night.

Wut.

 

[brianmanahan]

That's not what your dad told me last night.

Wut.

found alky's anti-alt

 

[nakedfrog]

I guess we found a really unpopular opinion, at least!

 

[BoomerD]

So? it is the performance that counts!!!

Yeah...sure. Keep telling yourself that.

 

[whm1974]

That's not what your dad told me last night.

Wut.

And just how would my dad even know about my performance?

 

[Kaido]

The solution to gun violence is more gun violence.

 

[whm1974]

What an idiot, you don't pull the trigger until you are ready to shoot the gun.

 

[brianmanahan]

What an idiot, you don't pull the trigger until you are ready to shoot the gun.

well you gotta make sure it works first

 

[whm1974]

well you gotta make sure it works first

Go to the gun range for that.

 

[pmv]

It's a common sentiment among millennials and overall industry awareness of mental health. The stigma of therapy is changing a lot since 80s/90s and we're 20 years into 2000s'.

You take your car to a mechanic for checkup. You go to PCP for your physical. Why wouldn't you do it for your emotional well-being?

It's not strictly for 'crazies' and doesn't always involve drugs. We all fight the greatest battle of our lives - We go through tons of stress from work, raising kids, family crap, whatever life throws at you...

Even my insurance, the second drop-down on the main page after 'Find a Doctor' is Mental Health.

We can all benefit from awareness of mental health. Here's a snippet of CBT - cognitive behavioral therapy

I actually have doubts about psychiatry/clincial psychology as a field/profession. Not saying I'd throw it out entirely, but I worry that it's inherently conservative and not particularly evidence-based. As a 'science' it is very much in its infancy.

I don't think I entirely buy the CBT model. What underlying principles or evidence is it based on? Where is the evidence that human experience is actually as it appears in that diagram?

I don't think humans work like that. We aren't defined by a stream of testable prepositions in the form of coherent and verbalisable 'thoughts', the physical reactions part is hugely overstated (it just seems to _assume_ a powerufl mind-body influence, that hasn't really been proven scientifically to be the case, mostly it seems to be based on just declaring any physical sensation not otherwise explained must be caused by thoughts, without any evidence at the level of biochemistry and physics), and the suggested treatment, of challenging the thoughts with the 'evidence' seems simplistic, even patronising, because it assumes that the thoughts drive the emotions (rather than emotions having an independent existence or being driven directly by the body) and also that negative thoughts are necessarily irrational, rather than being derived from the evidence in the first place.

If someone is punching you in the face, do your emotional reactions to that really depend on an intermediate step of having thoughts about being punched in the face? Or is there not a pretty direct emotional response to bodily sensations? At the very least such responses may be very tightly hard-wired, without any conscious awareness.

It just seems to have a lot of insufficiently-grounded assumptions in there.

And there seems to be a weird role played by the concept of 'rationality' in it. How, exactly, does one rationally justify 'core values'? (As CBT seems to eventually come down to having to challenge your 'core values' when challenging individual thoughts doesn't succeed).

Rationality surely applies to means, not to values? Maybe I have it wrong, but It seems as if cbt defines rationality as meaning 'what benefits the individual', which makes truth value dependent on an individual's circumstances and social status. So Donald Trump's non-factual beliefs are 'rational' because he does well out of them, but if he were in a different social situation - not white rich and powerful - they'd be 'irrational'? And can people just choose their beliefs based on what benefits them? Does belief really work like that?

Just judging from the bumph I've seen from psychologists on the web, and from encounters with CBT practitioners (seeking help for chronic pain) it even seems as if they decide that things like 'anger' and violence as a response to situations are by definition 'irrational'. Who's to say that is the case? Most angry people have reasons for being angry. What if violence is in some cases a rational response? Is it not confusing ideas of 'rationality' with morality?

I have very mixed feelings, because I get the point about people needing an emotional 'check up', but I just think there's a difference, because I am not convinced there are any neutral, objective 'experts' when it comes to the experience of being human and dealing with life. We can't stand outside it the way we can when looking at physics or even physical medicine, everyone is inside the system they are trying to analyse. Psychologists are all coming with their own particular limited perspective, which is probably why the field, like economics, but unlike physics, is divided into different 'schools' with different underlying assumptions.

And I have a suspicion that there are sociological and political reasons why CBT is currently so fashionable.

Edit - thinking CBT may be over-rated for political and sociological reasons may be my 'unpopular opinion'!

 

[Zeze]

I actually have doubts about psychiatry/clincial psychology as a field/profession. Not saying I'd throw it out entirely, but I worry that it's inherently conservative and not particularly evidence-based. As a 'science' it is very much in its infancy.

I don't think I entirely buy the CBT model. What underlying principles or evidence is it based on? Where is the evidence that human experience is actually as it appears in that diagram?

I don't think humans work like that. We aren't defined by a stream of testable prepositions in the form of coherent and verbalisable 'thoughts', the physical reactions part is hugely overstated (it just seems to _assume_ a powerufl mind-body influence, that hasn't really been proven scientifically to be the case, mostly it seems to be based on just declaring any physical sensation not otherwise explained must be caused by thoughts, without any evidence at the level of biochemistry and physics), and the suggested treatment, of challenging the thoughts with the 'evidence' seems simplistic, even patronising, because it assumes that the thoughts drive the emotions (rather than emotions having an independent existence or being driven directly by the body) and also that negative thoughts are necessarily irrational, rather than being derived from the evidence in the first place.

If someone is punching you in the face, do your emotional reactions to that really depend on an intermediate step of having thoughts about being punched in the face? Or is there not a pretty direct emotional response to bodily sensations? At the very least such responses may be very tightly hard-wired, without any conscious awareness.

It just seems to have a lot of insufficiently-grounded assumptions in there.

And there seems to be a weird role played by the concept of 'rationality' in it. How, exactly, does one rationally justify 'core values'? (As CBT seems to eventually come down to having to challenge your 'core values' when challenging individual thoughts doesn't succeed).

Rationality surely applies to means, not to values? Maybe I have it wrong, but It seems as if cbt defines rationality as meaning 'what benefits the individual', which makes truth value dependent on an individual's circumstances and social status. So Donald Trump's non-factual beliefs are 'rational' because he does well out of them, but if he were in a different social situation - not white rich and powerful - they'd be 'irrational'? And can people just choose their beliefs based on what benefits them? Does belief really work like that?

Just judging from the bumph I've seen from psychologists on the web, and from encounters with CBT practitioners (seeking help for chronic pain) it even seems as if they decide that things like 'anger' and violence as a response to situations are by definition 'irrational'. Who's to say that is the case? Most angry people have reasons for being angry. What if violence is in some cases a rational response? Is it not confusing ideas of 'rationality' with morality?

I have very mixed feelings, because I get the point about people needing an emotional 'check up', but I just think there's a difference, because I am not convinced there are any neutral, objective 'experts' when it comes to the experience of being human and dealing with life. We can't stand outside it the way we can when looking at physics or even physical medicine, everyone is inside the system they are trying to analyse. Psychologists are all coming with their own particular limited perspective, which is probably why the field, like economics, but unlike physics, is divided into different 'schools' with different underlying assumptions.

And I have a suspicion that there are sociological and political reasons why CBT is currently so fashionable.

Edit - thinking CBT may be over-rated for political and sociological reasons may be my 'unpopular opinion'!

I haven't done CBT. I'm a skeptic in nature. I'll keep these in mind and let me see if I even agree with it or CBT.

 

[pmv]

I haven't done CBT. I'm a skeptic in nature. I'll keep these in mind and let me see if I even agree with it or CBT.

Well don't let me put you off! I entirely accept I might have this all wrong - I don't have a qualification in psychology, none of my reservations are coming from any sort of expertise.

But I just struggle to see that field as a well-founded science (just reading about its history makes me skeptical, not to mention people I have personally known who have experienced mistreatment as patients in the mental health-care system)

 

[Muse]

In case you too were wondering what CBT teases out to, I dug in here to find Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. You're welcome.

 

[Kaido]

I actually have doubts about psychiatry/clincial psychology as a field/profession. Not saying I'd throw it out entirely, but I worry that it's inherently conservative and not particularly evidence-based. As a 'science' it is very much in its infancy.

I don't think I entirely buy the CBT model. What underlying principles or evidence is it based on? Where is the evidence that human experience is actually as it appears in that diagram?

I don't think humans work like that. We aren't defined by a stream of testable prepositions in the form of coherent and verbalisable 'thoughts', the physical reactions part is hugely overstated (it just seems to _assume_ a powerufl mind-body influence, that hasn't really been proven scientifically to be the case, mostly it seems to be based on just declaring any physical sensation not otherwise explained must be caused by thoughts, without any evidence at the level of biochemistry and physics), and the suggested treatment, of challenging the thoughts with the 'evidence' seems simplistic, even patronising, because it assumes that the thoughts drive the emotions (rather than emotions having an independent existence or being driven directly by the body) and also that negative thoughts are necessarily irrational, rather than being derived from the evidence in the first place.

If someone is punching you in the face, do your emotional reactions to that really depend on an intermediate step of having thoughts about being punched in the face? Or is there not a pretty direct emotional response to bodily sensations? At the very least such responses may be very tightly hard-wired, without any conscious awareness.

It just seems to have a lot of insufficiently-grounded assumptions in there.

And there seems to be a weird role played by the concept of 'rationality' in it. How, exactly, does one rationally justify 'core values'? (As CBT seems to eventually come down to having to challenge your 'core values' when challenging individual thoughts doesn't succeed).

Rationality surely applies to means, not to values? Maybe I have it wrong, but It seems as if cbt defines rationality as meaning 'what benefits the individual', which makes truth value dependent on an individual's circumstances and social status. So Donald Trump's non-factual beliefs are 'rational' because he does well out of them, but if he were in a different social situation - not white rich and powerful - they'd be 'irrational'? And can people just choose their beliefs based on what benefits them? Does belief really work like that?

Just judging from the bumph I've seen from psychologists on the web, and from encounters with CBT practitioners (seeking help for chronic pain) it even seems as if they decide that things like 'anger' and violence as a response to situations are by definition 'irrational'. Who's to say that is the case? Most angry people have reasons for being angry. What if violence is in some cases a rational response? Is it not confusing ideas of 'rationality' with morality?

I have very mixed feelings, because I get the point about people needing an emotional 'check up', but I just think there's a difference, because I am not convinced there are any neutral, objective 'experts' when it comes to the experience of being human and dealing with life. We can't stand outside it the way we can when looking at physics or even physical medicine, everyone is inside the system they are trying to analyse. Psychologists are all coming with their own particular limited perspective, which is probably why the field, like economics, but unlike physics, is divided into different 'schools' with different underlying assumptions.

And I have a suspicion that there are sociological and political reasons why CBT is currently so fashionable.

Edit - thinking CBT may be over-rated for political and sociological reasons may be my 'unpopular opinion'!

These are really excellent points! CBT is not the whole story; it's simply a tool to use to help identify how you think (reactively) so that you can instead choose (proactively) how you want to think & then feel. It requires taking personal responsibility for yourself & challenging the "defaults" that you've grown up with & adopted into your psyche.

Your example of getting punched in the face is a good one, because that causes an instantaneous physical pain response, which bypasses the thought process & injects the feeling directly into your brain. That's not something that you can really sit there & audit in the moment emotionally, or decide afterward to change your thoughts about, because it's an external input. It's important to realize that CBT isn't a catch-all for every situation in life; per the Wikipedia definition, it has 3 purposes:

1. Challenging and changing unhelpful cognitive distortions and behaviors
2. Improving emotional regulation
3. Developing personal coping strategies that target solving current problems

CBT is basically a way to change how you think & feel about different situations in your life; however, it is only one part of the puzzle. For example, if you struggle with anger management, that could be the result of two things:

1. Cognitive distortions, which can be treated with CBT
2. Fast neurotransmitter response, aka the anger hits your brain quicker than your mind can keep up with, so you go full-throttle right off the bat. In that case, you can take an anxiety medication to slow down that response, so that you have time to decide how you want to react.

So the right solution in that situation might be to (1) take a pill that gives you time to react, and (2) learn how to use CBT to identify what you're feeling & thus thinking (as thoughts creation emotions - noting that pain, such as getting punched in the face, is a feeling, not an emotion) in the moment. So using CBT can help you to see how your thinking patterns are affecting you in a negative way, and working on them to produce better results (better thoughts, feelings, and actions) is basically what emotional regulation means. Implementing that is what the third point above refers to, like if you get really mad in, say, traffic & have "road rage", learning how to audit your emotions, change your thinking, and thus change your response is something you can literally do, both for pre-planning how you want to react & for working on in the moment itself.

Again, if you find that just trying to talk it out mentally isn't helping all that much, then medication may help because it can delay that instant-throttle response that your brain has to go straight into max-anger mode when you experience road rage...but you still have to audit your thinking & define how you'd prefer to react in the situation, instead of yelling & screaming & feeling angry & gripping the steering wheel white-knuckled or making offensive hand signals out the window. In that case, a combination of techniques would be required to remedy the situation. Every situation is different. So to recap:

1. Feelings are different from emotions
2. Thoughts create emotions
3. CBT helps you identify how you think & proactively decide how you'd rather think & thus feel in a particular situation (note that this is situation-specific, not a generic "just be happy!" sort of thing)
4. CBT is focused on thoughts & emotions and does not cover the full spectrum of the human experience; experiencing a feeling (which is not an emotion), such as getting punched in the face (a physical feeling) or having hot anger surge through you in bad traffic (also a feeling) needs to be addressed & managed separately from CBT, or sometimes in parallel with CBT...you may take a pill to manage your anger response to bad traffic, but if you haven't changed your thinking, you're still going to experience that thought pattern when you're in that situation again - unless you proactively decide to audit that thought process & change how you think, and thus, how you feel

And that's why I think it's important to realize that we're both a product of our environments AND of our choices. We experience situations, we have an initial thought about them, and that turns into an emotion. We hardwire those thoughts into our lives & operate emotionally throughout the day, per our pre-mapped decision-responses. Yes, everyone is on the hook for their behaviors, and personal responsibility is the name of the game, but no one operates independently of how they've gotten imprinted their whole lives, and it's a whole lot of work to change even just one thing in our lives, because that path has already been setup & stored in our brain. Expecting (1) someone to change everything they've developed up to that point in their lives, and (2) instantly & perfectly do it immediately, without having to struggle to make the adjustment, isn't realistic.

That's not to say that people should get off the hook for their behavior, just that it tends to explain some things about why people act the way they do (and also offers a path to help you change, if that's something the individual person wants to do). The bottom line is that you are 100% responsible for your thoughts, words, and actions in life...but change is hard, and specific, and requires continuous work to truly change, and people still slide back into their old patterns of thinking & behaviors. CBT is simply a tool to help you audit your own personal thinking in a specific, given situation - it helps you to identify how you feel, how you think, and to change that by deciding how you really want to think about it, and thus controlling how you feel about it.

 

[Kaido]

In case you too were wondering what CBT teases out to, I dug in here to find Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. You're welcome.

Yeah, it's a fancy acronym for "how you think = how you feel", i.e. you can alter your emotions by how you think about things. Groundbreaking, I know, lol. But to clarify: Thoughts transform into emotions, it's as simple as that! It gets a little confusing because feelings are not emotions. If you're up for some reading, this is a good article that explains it a little better:

https://www.laughteronlineuniversity.com/feelings-and-emotions/

A really good thing to learn, if you're interested, is fixed vs. growth mindsets. Mindsets are specific to individual situations. But before we continue that discussion, let's define 3 things:

1. How you "feel" about something is a combination of emotions & feelings
2. Emotions are born from thoughts, and can be changed
3. Feelings come from external sources (i.e. not your thoughts), and are things you experience

Getting a papercut is a feeling. Being attracted to someone is a feeling. The first thing to know is that in the case of feelings & emotions, you can change your emotions by changing your thinking (because thoughts create emotions). In the case of how you feel, a fixed mindset would say "I don't have any control over how I feel in this situation", whereas a growth mindset would say "how can I change how I feel in this situation?". So it's kind of like that Wayne Gretzky quote of, "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take". If you shut yourself down with a fixed mindset before you even get started, then the consequence will never happen because you never took the first step.

So step one is deciding to have a growth mindset about a particular situation. Everyone has a mix of fixed & growth mindsets, such as "I can't cook!" or "I'm awesome at basketball!". Downstream, that affects how you feel & what you do. Specifically with how you feel, again, there are feelings & there are emotions, which are two separate things. Emotions can be changed by altering how you think about a particular situation. So the whole point of CBT is to learn how to audit how you think about specific situations & decide how you want to think about each specific situation. You & I are both posting on a tech forum online & we enjoy doing so...if you asked your grandma to do that, she might have an immediate response of throwing her hands up in the air & saying "I don't know how all that technology stuff works & I don't want to" because it feels too hard for her & she feels like it's too much work & effort & complexity to understand. It's the same process (neffing on ATOT), but vastly different emotional experiences in response to thinking about the situation of posting online.

There's a lot to learn about how our minds work; CBT is a nice starting place because it gives you an easy process to work with. It can be as simple as writing things down in particular situations:

1. What is the situation in question?
2. How do you feel? And what thought did you think to create this emotion?
4. How do want to feel? What thought do you need to create that emotion?

For example, if you're posting in P&N and are getting all mad & flared up:

1. I'm posting in the political forum
2. I'm feeling angry because someone is disagreeing with me & I don't like it because I think I'm right and I think they're wrong and it's irritating me
3. I don't want to feel angry; I'd rather be open to a civil discussion of the situation in question & agree to disagree with other people without it making me mad & ruining my day

From there, you work on things called "cognitive distortions", which are like little bear traps we fall into mentally, which aren't a clear way of thinking. A good list is here:

https://positivepsychology.com/cognitive-distortions/

Here is a list of the common distortions:

1. All-or-Nothing Thinking / Polarized Thinking
2. Overgeneralization
3. Mental Filter
4. Disqualifying the Positive
5. Jumping to Conclusions – Mind Reading
6. Jumping to Conclusions – Fortune Telling
7. Magnification (Catastrophizing) or Minimization
8. Emotional Reasoning
9. Should Statements
10. Labeling and Mislabeling
11. Personalization
12. Control Fallacies
13. Fallacy of Fairness
14. Fallacy of Change
15. Always Being Right
16. Heaven’s Reward Fallacy

#13 is one that kids experience a lot - the fallacy of fairness:

"While we would all probably prefer to operate in a world that is fair, this assumption is not based in reality and can foster negative feelings when we are faced with proof of life’s unfairness. A person who judges every experience by its perceived fairness has fallen for this fallacy, and will likely feel anger, resentment, and hopelessness when they inevitably encounter a situation that is not fair."

Mom, it's NOT FAIR!!! Haha. Well, life isn't fair, and it's not reasonable to expect a fair response in every situation, because that's reality. The distortion is that life SHOULD be fair, and when it isn't, you might feel mad, or be resentful, or feel hopeless, when you encounter a situation in life that isn't fair. If you've ever seen a kid throw a fit because of a perceived unfair situation, that's exactly what is going on:

1. They experience a situation in which there is perceived unfairness
2. They have a thought that turns into an emotion, if it's the first time they experience it, or just experience the emotion straight-up if they've already run into that situation before ("my brother is SO MEAN ALL THE TIME, it's NOT FAIR!!")
3. Because they don't see things clearly, they are subject to the cognitive distortion of believing that life is not fair, and acting accordingly

I mean, this stuff is just the tip of the iceberg. I think it's really fun to learn how we operate...it's no different than a computer, when you think about it - there are parts & operational procedures that combine to create an experience. If you build a low-end PC with an integrated Intel GPU on the CPU, it's not going to be the same experience as building a 1080GTX 6-core gaming rig with 32 gigs of RAM & a solid-state drive. Likewise, once you learn how things work with your brain, and understand that thoughts create emotion, and learn how to audit your thinking instead of just believing everything you think (and feel), you gain greater control over your life & how you experience life. If you're up for some reading, the Feeling Good handbook is a great place to start:

https://www.amazon.com/Feeling-Good-New-Mood-Therapy-ebook/dp/B009UW5X4C

This is the associated handbook, which walks you through capturing a thought & auditing the emotion & deciding how you'd like to feel instead:

https://www.amazon.com/Days-Self-Esteem-David-Burns-M-D-ebook/dp/B009R5H19W

It's basically a ten-day course to help you get used to the idea of auditing your thinking & becoming responsibly for how you feel, emotionally, about different situations in your life. Note that it's easy to have a knee-jerk reaction to the words "self-esteem", "self-help", and "mental health", but again, your brain is no different than building a computer...there are parts & processes in play that work together to create an experience, and if you learn how those things work, you can have more control over them & experience better results!

 

[Muse]

• Star Wars is just silly. It's not an uncommon sentiment for those who didn't grow up with it and watched it 'in a vacuum' as an adult. It's just silly. Is it neither serious nor campy. It's just a very shallow popcorn flick to me.
  
  
• Pizza is overrated. So is bacon. Don't get me wrong, they're good. I don't think I actually 'craved' pizza badly before. But then again, I eat pizza a lot thanks to work lunches paying for 'em.
  
  
• Before you decide your gender is binary or not, you should seek professional help for mental health. I mean this with utmost sincerity, because I believe mental health awareness and therapy are very important to EVERYONE.

I thoroughly pretty much agree on all 3 counts.

I payed $$$ for the Star Wars disks (in multiple versions) in trying to access what all the excitement was about with regard to Star Wars, but have never felt they are anything special... none of them.

I haven't eaten a piece of pizza for, dunno, a year? I was thinking about this maybe yesterday. I can and do make my own, have homemade Italian sauce from my own vine ripened tomatoes. Just haven't made a pizza in a long time. I think I have a ball of dough in the freezer. Not in my dietary wheel house right now...

Yeah, I figure if you can't dig the opposite sex for satisfaction, you probably have some psychological issues (unconscious) at play. I've got my opinions about this in abeyance because it seems there are DNA issues involved, genes. Some people are just hormonally/genetically a lot different from the "norm" so one size fits all in terms of attitudes, personality and behavior with regard to sexual activities, attitudes and sense of personal identity doesn't work.

Edit: Dang! I was in the gym two days ago and spotted a person whose gender I contemplated for 10+ minutes. I finally decided it was very probably a woman. Only because she wore very very tight shorts and I couldn't spot exterior genitalia! She was super buff. I talking massive back, shoulders and legs. MASSIVE! She was involved in a squatting routine. You can't imagine how muscular that woman is. She had a weight belt on that said something about "Woman" ... that was no proof, I had to look for signs of male genitalia for guidance. I have to think she must have a very high testosterone level. Maybe she's on some kind of drug routine, no idea. On any gender spectrum, she's just way out on a periphery!

 

[Muse]

Yeah, it's a fancy acronym for "how you think = how you feel", i.e. you can alter your emotions by how you think about things. Groundbreaking, I know, lol. But to clarify: Thoughts transform into emotions, it's as simple as that! It gets a little confusing because feelings are not emotions. If you're up for some reading, this is a good article that explains it a little better:

https://www.laughteronlineuniversity.com/feelings-and-emotions/

A really good thing to learn, if you're interested, is fixed vs. growth mindsets. Mindsets are specific to individual situations. But before we continue that discussion, let's define 3 things:

1. How you "feel" about something is a combination of emotions & feelings
2. Emotions are born from thoughts, and can be changed
3. Feelings come from external sources (i.e. not your thoughts), and are things you experience

Getting a papercut is a feeling. Being attracted to someone is a feeling. The first thing to know is that in the case of feelings & emotions, you can change your emotions by changing your thinking (because thoughts create emotions). In the case of how you feel, a fixed mindset would say "I don't have any control over how I feel in this situation", whereas a growth mindset would say "how can I change how I feel in this situation?". So it's kind of like that Wayne Gretzky quote of, "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take". If you shut yourself down with a fixed mindset before you even get started, then the consequence will never happen because you never took the first step.

So step one is deciding to have a growth mindset about a particular situation. Everyone has a mix of fixed & growth mindsets, such as "I can't cook!" or "I'm awesome at basketball!". Downstream, that affects how you feel & what you do. Specifically with how you feel, again, there are feelings & there are emotions, which are two separate things. Emotions can be changed by altering how you think about a particular situation. So the whole point of CBT is to learn how to audit how you think about specific situations & decide how you want to think about each specific situation. You & I are both posting on a tech forum online & we enjoy doing so...if you asked your grandma to do that, she might have an immediate response of throwing her hands up in the air & saying "I don't know how all that technology stuff works & I don't want to" because it feels too hard for her & she feels like it's too much work & effort & complexity to understand. It's the same process (neffing on ATOT), but vastly different emotional experiences in response to thinking about the situation of posting online.

There's a lot to learn about how our minds work; CBT is a nice starting place because it gives you an easy process to work with. It can be as simple as writing things down in particular situations:

1. What is the situation in question?
2. How do you feel? And what thought did you think to create this emotion?
4. How do want to feel? What thought do you need to create that emotion?

For example, if you're posting in P&N and are getting all mad & flared up:

1. I'm posting in the political forum
2. I'm feeling angry because someone is disagreeing with me & I don't like it because I think I'm right and I think they're wrong and it's irritating me
3. I don't want to feel angry; I'd rather be open to a civil discussion of the situation in question & agree to disagree with other people without it making me mad & ruining my day

From there, you work on things called "cognitive distortions", which are like little bear traps we fall into mentally, which aren't a clear way of thinking. A good list is here:

https://positivepsychology.com/cognitive-distortions/

Here is a list of the common distortions:

1. All-or-Nothing Thinking / Polarized Thinking
2. Overgeneralization
3. Mental Filter
4. Disqualifying the Positive
5. Jumping to Conclusions – Mind Reading
6. Jumping to Conclusions – Fortune Telling
7. Magnification (Catastrophizing) or Minimization
8. Emotional Reasoning
9. Should Statements
10. Labeling and Mislabeling
11. Personalization
12. Control Fallacies
13. Fallacy of Fairness
14. Fallacy of Change
15. Always Being Right
16. Heaven’s Reward Fallacy

#13 is one that kids experience a lot - the fallacy of fairness:

"While we would all probably prefer to operate in a world that is fair, this assumption is not based in reality and can foster negative feelings when we are faced with proof of life’s unfairness. A person who judges every experience by its perceived fairness has fallen for this fallacy, and will likely feel anger, resentment, and hopelessness when they inevitably encounter a situation that is not fair."

Mom, it's NOT FAIR!!! Haha. Well, life isn't fair, and it's not reasonable to expect a fair response in every situation, because that's reality. The distortion is that life SHOULD be fair, and when it isn't, you might feel mad, or be resentful, or feel hopeless, when you encounter a situation in life that isn't fair. If you've ever seen a kid throw a fit because of a perceived unfair situation, that's exactly what is going on:

1. They experience a situation in which there is perceived unfairness
2. They have a thought that turns into an emotion, if it's the first time they experience it, or just experience the emotion straight-up if they've already run into that situation before ("my brother is SO MEAN ALL THE TIME, it's NOT FAIR!!")
3. Because they don't see things clearly, they are subject to the cognitive distortion of believing that life is not fair, and acting accordingly

I mean, this stuff is just the tip of the iceberg. I think it's really fun to learn how we operate...it's no different than a computer, when you think about it - there are parts & operational procedures that combine to create an experience. If you build a low-end PC with an integrated Intel GPU on the CPU, it's not going to be the same experience as building a 1080GTX 6-core gaming rig with 32 gigs of RAM & a solid-state drive. Likewise, once you learn how things work with your brain, and understand that thoughts create emotion, and learn how to audit your thinking instead of just believing everything you think (and feel), you gain greater control over your life & how you experience life. If you're up for some reading, the Feeling Good handbook is a great place to start:

https://www.amazon.com/Feeling-Good-New-Mood-Therapy-ebook/dp/B009UW5X4C

This is the associated handbook, which walks you through capturing a thought & auditing the emotion & deciding how you'd like to feel instead:

https://www.amazon.com/Days-Self-Esteem-David-Burns-M-D-ebook/dp/B009R5H19W

It's basically a ten-day course to help you get used to the idea of auditing your thinking & becoming responsibly for how you feel, emotionally, about different situations in your life. Note that it's easy to have a knee-jerk reaction to the words "self-esteem", "self-help", and "mental health", but again, your brain is no different than building a computer...there are parts & processes in play that work together to create an experience, and if you learn how those things work, you can have more control over them & experience better results!

Great post! Thank you!

Vis a vis the fairness filter many people insist on using (especially the very young, as you say), I had a close GF many years ago who explained how she was subject to that, and yes, she was pretty young at about 20. She was super smart, so I'm sure she had experienced many perspectives with respect to how this plays out in practical terms in one's personal experiences and thinking. I don't remember discussing this with her, I just listened. Myself, I suppose I wasn't so prone to have the attitude that things had to be fair. She had one sibling, an older brother, who she simply idolized (I never met him, he was on the other side of the country). Myself, I'm a middle child, my two siblings were either almost 6 years older or almost 6 years younger than I was. That's a big separation, and any thoughts I might have had concerning my parents' fairness with respect to us had to seem somewhat absurd, so I didn't take them seriously. Of course, family interactions are where attitudes such as this originally spring from, for the most part.

Mom, it's NOT FAIR!!!

I guess I never expected life to be "fair."

 

[Kaido]

Great post! Thank you!

Vis a vis the fairness filter many people insist on using (especially the very young, as you say), I had a close GF many years ago who explained how she was subject to that, and yes, she was pretty young at about 20. She was super smart, so I'm sure she had experienced many perspectives with respect to how this plays out in practical terms in one's personal experiences and thinking. I don't remember discussing this with her, I just listened. Myself, I suppose I wasn't so prone to have the attitude that things had to be fair. She had one sibling, an older brother, who she simply idolized (I never met him, he was on the other side of the country). Myself, I'm a middle child, my two siblings were either almost 6 years older or almost 6 years younger than I was. That's a big separation, and any thoughts I might have had concerning my parents' fairness with respect to us had to seem somewhat absurd, so I didn't take them seriously. Of course, family interactions are where attitudes such as this originally spring from, for the most part. I guess I never expected life to be "fair."

You're welcome! Yeah, everybody suffers from different cognitive distortions. Like I said previously, I struggled for a long time with "all or nothing" thinking (still do, lol)...I love to have a grand vision, but if I fall short, screw it! Hahahaha. It sounds nuts on paper, but that was my reality for a long time! I also had "imposter syndrome" for a long time, mostly due to anxiety. That was actually one of the things I worked through using the "10 days to self-esteem" workbook, where you identify you thinking patterns, your feeling patterns, and adjust things. When I first joined this forum back in 2004, I was very new to IT still & was clueless in many aspects. Over time, I took classes & learned tricks & built up my knowledge & skill-set, but still felt like I didn't know what I was doing & felt like I was kind of a poser or "fake".

Using CBT to identify my thinking patterns really helped because it made me realize that I did, in fact, have a work ethic, and that I was able to, in fact, fix computers, and that was, in fact, the definition of the job of working as an IT support person. That sounds a bit silly written out, but as long as you're holding those fears & thoughts unaudited in your head, then it's hard to walk them through a logical questioning process to help allay those fears. And that's just one example of one distortion in one specific situation...everyone is different & has different issues. Some people have it together & some people struggle with a lot of things & are a mess at certain points in their lives.

I think it's important to realize that everyone is in the process of growing up, and that everyone has their own set of struggles. I also think that the more you can learn about how the processes of, well, anything works, the more control you'll have over it & the better results you can get. When I first got married, I got home early one day before my wife got off work, and so she called me to ask if I could set some water to boil so that she could make pasta when she got home...I had to call her back & ask her how to boil water, because I didn't know how. That sounds ridiculous, but I didn't know what pot to use, if I was supposed to fill it up halfway or all the way, what temperature to put it on, what a simmer vs. a rolling boil was, and so on. I decided to "git gud" at cooking, and now I understand that cooking is simply 4 things:

1. Cutting (manually with a knife, or power-cutting with a blender or food processor)
2. Stirring (manually with a whisk or spoon, or power-stirring with a mixer)
3. Assembling (using your hands to put stuff together & arrange stuff & knead stuff)
4. Cooking it perfectly (not over-cooked or under-cooked, which varies based on the situation...blackened catfish isn't over-cooked, for example, it's cooked just right, and sushi rolls aren't under-cooked, they're prepared just right)

That covers the full spectrum of the cooking process...given the right tools, ingredients, and procedure, you can now make anything you want, from homemade bagels to the best chocolate-chip cookies ever to an amazing steak. I then branched out into appliance-based cooking to get better, more consistent results & to cook faster & in a more automated, hands-off fashion, which is why I'm so into the Instant Pot & Sous Vide machine. Cooking was still a mental struggle for me, however, so then I designed a productivity system & a meal-prep plugin for it to help me overcome that "weight" of "having" to cook. So now I just spend a little bit of time every day cooking & get to enjoy amazing food all the time, at home, on a budget, easily, with great results!

And that's where the fixed vs. growth mindset comes in...I could have said screw it, cooking is hard & it's a chore & I'm not good at it & I don't want to do it, but instead, I used the growth mindset and asked "how CAN I do this?" and stick with it. There's a lot of really fun aspects of psychology in our lives; sticking with things is called "grit" and is the biggest success factor on the planet - i.e., simply not quitting until you get what you want. There's a really good TED talk by Angela Duckworth on that subject that is worth watching: (under 7 minutes, great to watch while you eat a meal or whatever)

 

[Fanatical Meat]

Pancakes are better than waffles

Beer sucks on a hot day, even cold beer

 

[BoomerD]

Pancakes are better than waffles

Beer sucks on a hot day, even cold beer

Dude....

 

[highland145]

Walls of text are great.

 

[brianmanahan]

Walls of text are great.

better nate than lever

 

[rh71]

Someone mentioned Star Wars and I agree completely. I love a good sci-fi in terms of science and what-could-be but I could never get into the mix of humans with other guys in costumes. Same thing with Star Trek for the same reason. Never watched beyond 20 minutes of that stuff.

Perfect example of what I mean - if you remember Dark Angel it started out with a good sci-fi premise and then season 2+ they started introducing characters in full makeup/costumes. Complete turn-off with the circus in town.