By Mike Toohey, M.A.
Clients tend to begin therapy thinking that the world controls how they feel. “My husband made me angry!” Or “I received a C on my exam so I am depressed : ( ” It’s only natural then, that because the world is so volatile, emotions will be too. If you had a choice, would you rather that you control your emotions or that the world does? I choose me. Therefore, one of my immediate goals with clients is to introduce them to the concept that they are currently letting the rest of the world control how they feel. I try to give them back control of their emotions by showing them that, it is not the actual event, but how they think about the event that affects how upset (or not upset) they become.
I have learned a few ways of showing clients that their thoughts largely contribute to their emotions. For example, if a client is anxious about an upcoming test, I can never go wrong with:
1.The classic 100 person example:
I might say, “If 100 different people were taking the test, would they all have the same exact level of anxiety? Even if they all felt anxious, would it be at the exact same intensity?” We know that the answer is: of course not. Even if everyone had similar upbringings and they all had a bad day their anxiety would be different. I then help the client understand that it is the different thoughts that the people, and therefore, the client, have about the incident that make them anxious – not the test itself.
Suppose a man is angry because his wife told him to clean the house more.
2. The Coma example:
I could say, “Suppose that your wife was in a 3 year-long coma and the first thing that she says as she comes out of it is, ‘you need to clean the house more!’ Would you feel angry? You probably would think of what she said as a good thing because at least she is out of a coma. Even though the anger trigger, her request for you to clean the house more, was the same, it was how you interpreted the words that changed how you felt about it. Therefore, it is not the statement that made you angry, but how you interpreted it.”
As a final example, a client might be depressed because his mother told them that he is a bad person.
3. The different language example.
In this case, I might say, “What if every time your mother called you a bad person, she said it in Latin or some other language that you didn’t understand? How would you have felt when she called you a bad person?” The answer is usually that the client would have felt pretty indifferent or confused. So then I would say, “So it’s not true that her calling you a bad child that made you depressed is it? Or you would have felt depressed no matter what language she used to say it. It was how you interpreted what she said.”
After using any of the three examples, I reiterate to clients how, at the start of the session, the world controlled their emotions and that now the goal is to have them work toward giving themselves back the control.
#tbt