Negative
Core Beliefs and Black-and-White Thinking
As you know, for a long, long time, I’ve been writing a book about
Recovery from Eating Disorders – and finally I am in the process of doing the
final “hard edit.” This means that many
good sections of the book are being cut.
I’ve been saving these sections in a file I call, “Good Stuff That’s
Been Cut From The Book.”
So I’ve decided to share these sections with you via our Blog. This one is about Negative Core Beliefs and
Black-and-White Thinking. FYI - The
Bully and the Outcast are two of your ‘Parts’ in their negative extreme roles.
Namastè,
Amy Grabowski
…Like the Bully, the Outcast also
has distorted thoughts that reinforce negative Core Beliefs. Black-or-white thinking is common, “There are
good people and bad people. If I do
something bad, I am a bad person.”
Black-or-White thinking can be
tricky, sometimes it’s not directly stated, it’s merely implied. We need to dig a bit to reveal the
Black-or-White thought distortion. When
your Outcast thinks, “I’m not lovable,” it implies that you, the whole person,
do not possess one lovable quality and not one person in the entire world finds
you lovable.
When my clients say, “Nobody
likes me,” I respond in a warm but teasing tone, “Wow! Even all the people in Asia?! I didn’t even know that they all knew you!” Usually the next response will be more
realistic, “Well, no one at my office likes me.” But not to concede to the distortion in even
that thought, I question, “No one? Not
even one?”
At this point I’ll get one of two
responses, a realistic response or another distortion. A realistic response would be, “Yeah, I’ve
got a few friends at the office. But the
office manager, Joyce, acts like she doesn’t like me.” At this point I will ask, “How does that
statement feel compared to when you said nobody likes you?” Usually it feels much more manageable,
something we can work on, something we can fix.
More often than not, instead of a
realistic response, my question will elicit a very insistent distortion, “But
it feels like no one likes me.”
In his book, Feeling Good, David Burns calls this Emotional
Reasoning - believing something to be a fact merely because it feels like it is
true, even if there is evidence to the contrary: “If I feel it, then it must be
true.”
Emotional reasoning is based on
our Core Belief System. For example, if
most people at work show signs of liking you: they smile at you, and show
interest in your weekend activities, this would clash with your Core Belief
that you are not likeable. So, you get
rid of the evidence, “They don’t really mean it. They just feel sorry for me. They must want something from me. You can’t trust others.”
Sometimes the Outcast may even
invent evidence to support her Core Beliefs.
For example, if you believe you are boring, every time someone glances
away while you are speaking, the Outcast may think, “See, I was right. They are bored with what I am saying. I am boring.”…
Amy Grabowski, MA, LCPC is the director and founder of The
Awakening Center. She hopes that her
book will be accepted for publication this year!!! You may contact her at awakeningcenter@aol.com or (773)
929-6262 x11.
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