Bonus Episode: Understanding Problematic Thinking Patterns

This is the third mini bonus episode that looks at rigid thinking which is quite common in both adults and children.  It often leads to frustration and even conflict within yourself and in your relationships. In this episode, we explain problematic thinking patterns, identify lots of examples and how to catch and change your thinking to help you live more effectively to get what you want and deserve.  

Time Stamps

1:40 Definition of Rigid thinking and its various names:

• All or nothing thinking
• Black and white thinking
• Dichotomous thinking

3:01 LImits of Dichotomous thinking - creates conflict because it 

• Limits our ability to take another person’s perspective
• It often leads to the two categories of right and wrong

4:35 There is an impact of your words on both yourself and on others

5:04 These are cognitive skills - understanding and observing your thoughts

6:20 Label thoughts as “a thought is just a thought” — Planning thoughts, worry thoughts, judgmental thoughts

7:50 Society teaches us and reinforces all or nothing and dichotomous thinking

8:45 First step is to recognize your thoughts

• Look for problematic thinking patterns (formerly known as thinking errors)
  • All or nothing thinking
  • Catastrophizing or predicting negative outcomes
  • Mindreading
  • Overgeneralization
  • Mental filter
  • Disqualifying the positive
  • Emotional reasoning - 
  • Should statements
  • Labeling
  • Personalization

12:28 Strategies: 

1. Listen to yourself - observe your thoughts
2. Catch it
3. A thought is just a thought
4. Don’t believe everything you think
5. Imagery of passing clouds

13:13 Learn to think dialectically

• Ask what’s missing
• Adding other perspectives 
• Use the phrase, “its a feeling, not a fact”
• Use the magic “AND” to make a dialectic statement 
• Change your extreme words (ex - always —> often)
• See the negatives as well as the positive aspects of a situation

Resources:  

Handout of Problematic Thinking Patterns (formerly called thinking errors)

Leslie-ism: When it comes to your problematic thinking pattern - look for it, catch it, and change it

For a full transcript of this episode and more information about the host visit https://lesliecohenrubury.com/podcasts/ . You can also follow Leslie’s work on Facebook,  Instagram, TikTok and YouTube. Join the conversation with your own questions and parenting experiences.

Credits: Is My Child a Monster? is produced by Alletta Cooper, Camila Salazar, and Leslie Cohen-Rubury. Theme music is by L-Ray Music. Graphics and Website Design by Brien O’Reilly. Transcriptions by Eric Rubury.  A special thanks to everyone who contributes their wisdom and support to make this possible.

Transcript

[Music: The Wilds Beyond by L-Ray Music]

[00:00:00] Leslie Cohen-Rubury: Hello! Welcome to my third mini bonus episode of, Is My Child a Monster?, where we reinforce skills we've talked about in the previous episode. This bonus episode is about all-or-nothing thinking and how it can lead to the feeling of being stuck or even trapped. I’m Leslie Cohen-Rubury and, no, your child is not a monster—just misunderstood. 

In my first session with Jean and Alex, we touched on the idea of rigid thinking. And how often that can lead to frustration and even conflict. This is something that impacts all of us, and we saw in the last episode how the whole family is dealing with all-or-nothing thinking and what we can do about that.

So, I just thought this was a really important topic because it impacts all of us. We all get into that rut. I know I have felt that feeling of I can't do something or this is never going to happen. So this is about helping us understand what is rigid thinking and what we can do about it. 

So, as a reminder, this show is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for therapeutic intervention.

My producer, Alletta Cooper, is here with me today to have a conversation about rigid thinking. Hi, Alletta. 

[00:01:25] Alletta: Hi Leslie. Thanks for having me back. 

[00:01:27] Leslie: Absolutely. 

[00:01:30] Alletta: Okay, so why don't we make sure that we're all starting on the same page with an understanding of what rigid thinking is, what all-or-nothing thinking is. Can you just give us a definition? 

[00:01:40] Leslie: Yes. It actually has sort of a technical, clinical definition, but it's called many things. So first I'm going to start out by other names that people might know rigid thinking by. It is all-or-nothing thinking, black-and-white thinking, and actually as a category, we call that dichotomous thinking.

So rigid thinking is when our brain puts things in two categories, what we tend to think of as good and bad, right and wrong, success and failure. It just makes things very hard to try to explain things or try to understand another person's perspective. But we do teach that, with rigid thinking, if we understand it, if we catch it, we can change it. Does that make sense? 

[00:02:31] Alletta: I think so, yes. So with rigid thinking, with this black and white thinking, there's no gray—it's hard to kind of see nuance sometimes when you are putting things in black and white categories. 

[00:02:44] Leslie: Yes. Because if you and I are having a conversation and I think dichotomously, then I'm going to try to be right.

And if I'm right, that means you have to be wrong. 

[00:02:52] Alletta: Yes. 

[00:02:53] Leslie: But what if there's truth in what you are saying and there's truth in what I'm saying.? So, rigid thinking limits our ability to take another person's perspective; and there's that feeling of: if there's only two categories of right and wrong, then I've got to be in one, you've got to be in the other. 

[00:03:12] Alletta: Can you give me an example of what rigid thinking would look like? 

[00:03:16] Leslie: Sure. So, rigid thinking is when I might say, “I'm never going to get this homework done.” That means I feel when I say it, I'm going to believe what I say…unless I learn not to believe what I say and realize that “I'm never going to get this done,” is a feeling, it's not a fact. And the truth is it's not an all-or-nothing situation. I probably will get the homework done. But the words are putting it into this all-or-nothing category, which makes me feel stuck, which throws me into emotion mind. It just leads to a lot of problems. 

A lot of the parents that I speak with, they do some rigid thinking around their own parenting, like, they might think that they're a bad parent because they made a mistake or they didn't do it the way they should have done it. And I wanted to point that out and say we can do something different about that. 

[00:04:11] Alletta: So rigid thinking, a lot of it has to do with the language that we use when we talk to ourselves and when we talk to other people. 

[00:04:17] Leslie: Yes. 

[00:04:18] Alletta: Because if I say, “I'm having the worst day ever,” that is rigid thinking. But I know it's not the worst day. But using that language over and over and over again does have an impact on our internal self. And impacts our self-esteem and our communication in our relationships.

[00:04:36] Leslie: Absolutely. So when you say, it's the worst day ever, you may know that you don't mean that, but what about the person who's hearing you? Are they going to worry about you? Are they going to think, Oh my God, what do I do to help her? So the words have impact. 

[00:04:52] Alletta: Especially if you're saying it every day.

[00:04:54] Leslie: Yeah. Especially if you're saying it every day. So the impact is very, very important. And what you were saying is that this is the language, these are cognitive skills that we're talking about today. So we are looking at the thoughts. And the truth is our brains are thinking machines. And they go all the time.

[00:05:16] Alletta: I wish I could turn mine down sometimes.

[Laughter]

[00:05:18] Leslie: I know. I tell people we're going to practice mindfulness and they go, “I can never quiet my mind.” It's not that we have to quiet it, we just have to see what our brain does. We really just want to understand. 

So this skill helps you understand one of two things. One is that your brain may be wired in a way that you naturally think in good and bad terms. You might think in…we have children and adults who are fair and unfair. That's the two categories they run by. 

[00:05:50] Alletta: And that’s often really common in autism spectrum disorder. 

[00:05:53] Leslie: Absolutely. So rigid thinking is often associated with autistic brains, with ADHD brains, even; that people can get very attached to the way they see it. And if we understand that my brain works that way, then I can understand that that's a thought. I can change my thoughts. I can ignore my thoughts. I can let thoughts go. There's a lot we can do once we observe the thinkings we have. I mean, have you ever noticed when you're having worry thoughts? Or planning thoughts?

[00:06:26] Alletta: Oh yeah. Yes. And I have to tune into them because I find…for a very long time in my life, I was the person who said regularly, “This is the worst day ever. I'm never going to survive this.” And I'm talking about, you know, like, a bad shift at work. 

[00:06:39] Leslie: Yeah. 

[00:06:40] Alletta: Or, you know, “This job is the worst.” All of these things that were very clearly not reality. 

[00:06:48] Leslie: Yeah. 

[00:06:49] Alletta: And I, when I was saying them, was kind of like, well, I know like this is extreme. I'm saying it kind of “jokingly.” And when you say it so much, it becomes a habit, this repetition in my brain. 

[00:07:05] Leslie: Also, what we want to understand is that if my teacher gives me an assignment and I say—again, I'm using the same example—“I'm never going to get this work done,” then that leads to an emotional response, which we can all picture that afternoon at home. I'm not going to be doing very well. 

[00:07:25] Alletta: Or the thing that I would say to myself in school, which is, “This is impossible. I'm not smart enough.”

[00:07:30] Leslie: Right. Or I can't. I was the, “I can't” kid. And the “I can't” means: you can't do it. 

[00:07:39] Alletta: And that impacts your self-esteem. Because you start to believe that you can't. 

[00:07:45] Leslie:Absolutely. So. As I started to say, there are some brains that, you're born this way. You can see it in family members because it's genetic. But there's also societal norms. We go to school and schools are: you get tested and it's success and failure; and you get your homework and you're right and wrong. So we still have a lot of societal learning that teaches us and reinforces this all-or-nothing, dichotomous thinking. 

[00:08:13] Alletta: Yeah. 

[00:08:14] Leslie: So we want to recognize it, we want to understand that it gets us in trouble. It can increase emotions. It can create conflict because I'm going to want to prove that I'm right and you are wrong; and you're going to want to prove that you are right and I'm wrong. It can be really tricky. 

[00:08:31] Alletta: And if there's no flexibility around that thought, when you're having a conflict with another person, it makes it very difficult to navigate that conflict with any kind of resolution. So it sounds like what you're saying is that the first step in shifting rigid thinking is recognizing that it's happening at all. 

[00:08:48] Leslie: Absolutely. We used to call these thinking errors and I'm so glad we changed the way we described those, and we don't say thinking errors anymore…

[00:08:58] Alletta: …which is, itself, dichotomous thinking.

[00:09:00] Leslie: Absolutely. Good catch. And it also implies bad. If it's a thinking error, it implies that it's bad and we wanted to get rid of that idea that it's bad. But we do want to identify them, as you're just describing. We want to identify them as thinking patterns. And they can be problematic thinking patterns because they're not helping us. They're not effective, they're getting in our way. They're causing emotional dysregulation, interpersonal conflict. 

And so, when they are problematic, there are things we can do about it. Let me take a minute and just read a list of some of these thinking patterns. And we won't go into all of them, but we can certainly go into what we do about a few of them.

So the first category, the first one, is that all-or-nothing, black-and-white thinking, which we're talking about. The second one—and I'm sure our listeners will say, “Oh, yes, I do that”--- is catastrophizing. Predicting negative outcomes. Like, someone says, “Hey, let's take that road trip to Maine, or let's do something.” And all of a sudden it's like, no, no. What about traffic? What about the weather? We're quick to say, “no,” because we catastrophize or predict negative outcomes. 

The next one is mind reading. How often do we think, Oh, she doesn't want me to go there, or, I'm going be a burden if I say that, or I'm going to sound like I'm bragging. So we do all this mind reading and we predict what other people are thinking. 

Then there's something called overgeneralization. Overgeneralization is: because it happened once you think it's going to keep happening. Mental filter is when we have…it's almost like we're wearing rose-colored glasses and everything we see is through that. So if I have a lot of anxiety, my mental filter is: bad things are going to happen, or, what if, what if, what if? And that impacts the way I see the world. That's a big one for you. 

[00:11:00] Alletta: I'm raising my hand. That's me. [Laughter]

[00:11:01] Leslie: That's you. Okay. And then there's disqualifying the positive. When, you know, you came home from work and said this was the worst day, do you remember that that person actually offered to get you a cup of coffee when they went out—we disqualify the positives. 

Emotional reasoning. It's one of my favorites because I grew up thinking, I am stupid. And when I say it that way…emotional reasoning is when you make an emotion, a feeling, into a fact. So when I say, “I am stupid,” I think that it's a fact. And again, I've made it rigid and I've made it: It's all of me. And every part of me is stupid. 

So then there are the should statements; you know, I should do this, you should do that. There's labeling: He's lazy. She never does anything. Those global labels are a problem. And personalization. Personalization, when I think something is happening to me, when it's really somebody else's issue. 

So those are our thinking patterns, and they are problematic when I believe them and I don't catch them. So that's what we're talking about here, is really understanding that our brain is brilliant at doing all kinds of things, including the things we don't want it to do.

[00:12:22] Alletta: So how do we start to shift some of this black-and-white thinking? What are some strategies? 

[00:12:28] Leslie: So I've used the phrase that we want to catch our thinking patterns, so we want to become aware of the way we speak. And so you can listen to yourself. You can realize that a thought is just a thought. A thought does not mean it is always true.

[00:12:48] Alletta: Don't believe everything you think. 

[00:12:50] Leslie: Yes. Don't believe everything you think is a great motto. So when we learn that a thought is just a thought and I can choose to observe it. I can choose to attach to it. I can choose to let it go like a cloud in the sky, just let it go. It gives us some options for what we can do with our thoughts.

So, very quickly, let me go over what I would suggest if you catch yourself with all-or-nothing thinking. Black-and-white thinking means we want to add some more perspective to a situation. You want to ask yourself, What am I missing? We want to basically learn to think dialectically, what is the other person's point of view?

What are other perspectives? And even if two of us are talking, there are even other perspectives that have some truth to it. I want to ask what's missing. And I want to learn to be more flexible, that my idea is not always the right thought or perspective, even within myself. 

I talked about emotional reasoning where I feel I am stupid. We can change that. Just ask yourself the question, is this a feeling or a fact? Once I acknowledge that it's a feeling, I decrease the intensity of that thought by just saying this is a feeling, not a fact. We really want to use the magic, and, that I talk about a lot where when we have dialectic thinking, I say, “This feels like the worst day of my life, and it will pass.”

[00:14:25] Alletta: That's the one that I use all the time because I often find myself thinking things like, This is the worst day ever, I'm never going to get this done. And now I reframe it and say something like, “I am having a really bad day, and it's just one day.” 

[00:14:41] Leslie: I just love using that magic, and. So, remember the magic and.

A second one would be: Change your extreme words from never to often, from always to frequently. Really soften the words that we use. When you are predicting negative outcomes, remember: What are some of the positives? And it's not to say that we always need to see all the positives. It's that we want to hold both. We want to be flexible enough, that it's not one or the other. 

[00:15:16] Alletta: If the worst could happen, the best could also happen. 

[00:15:19] Leslie: That's right. And then the last one that I mentioned is use the line, It's a feeling, not a fact. So there are a few things that you could take away today. Practice those things and I think you'll be amazed at how they can impact how you feel and how you think.

[00:15:38] Leslie: So look for it, catch it, and change it.  

[00:15:43] Alletta: I love that. Thank you so much, Leslie. 

[00:15:45] Leslie: Thanks, Alletta.

 [Music: The Wilds Beyond by L-Ray Music]

[00:15:47] Alletta: And if you want to learn more about these thinking patterns and what you can do to help practice dialectic thinking, we have a ton of links in our show notes all about those topics. 

[00:15:57] Leslie Cohen-Rubury: And come back on Tuesday for my second session with Jean and Alex, where we have a vulnerable conversation about that feeling you get as a parent when you are so annoyed and irritated with your children. 

Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. You can also find a full transcript of this episode or sign up for my newsletter at ismychildamonster.com. The Is My Child A Monster? team is Alletta Cooper, Camila Salazar, and me. Special thanks to Eric Rubury. Our theme music is by L-Ray Music. I'm Leslie Cohen-Rubury. Thanks so much for listening.

Transcribed by Eric Rubury