Don't Destroy Yourself

It's harder than you might think

Emotions can really inhibit your ability to have a good mental health day, can’t they? What starts as one thought is met with a strong emotional response, and suddenly that thought is held out as a fact. Before you even realize it, you’re trapped in a negative thought pattern, and you’re not really even sure how you got there.

The experts call this emotional reasoning. Emotional reasoning says that something must be true because you’re feeling it and uses your feelings to confirm the supposed truth of your thoughts and beliefs. That’s a mouthful. Let’s break it down with an example.

Emotional reasoning starts with a thought – in this case, “I feel worthless”, but doesn’t stay there. It escalates to “I am worthless” and uses the strength of your emotions to prove the point of your worthlessness. The solution to this conundrum is the fact that your emotions do not dictate your reality.

When you’re caught in this cognitive distortion, sometimes it helps to literally say this aloud. Using the example above, combating this distortion would look like this:

My emotions do not dictate my reality. I am not worthless. I am loved by many and infinitely valuable.

Here’s an example from my past, to bring this mental health tool into better focus. Many years ago, I was afraid to be honest with anyone about my insecurities. I was convinced that I would be rejected by anyone I was honest with, because I would be deemed somehow less-than. It took me a long time to unravel this impostor syndrome fear, but I was eventually able to do it.

I realized that somewhere in my past, I had said to myself, or someone had said to me, I was a failure, and would always be nothing but a failure. This was contradicted by the success I was experiencing in my life, so the insidious thought morphed on a moment’s notice to this:

People only accept you because they don’t know you—if they really knew you, they’d reject you, because you’re a failure.

This thought was attached to deep fear, which made it feel inescapably real and powerful. But once I identified the actual thought that was behind the emotions, I was able to actively counteract both the emotions and the underlying thought. I specifically listed the people who knew the real me and still liked me. I was able to show myself that I was not a failure, based on tangible evidence ranging from kids who love me to professional successes. I broke the power of the thought and the emotions over myself.

You can do the same. Like so many other tools in this toolbox, it takes work. But it’s worth the work to find the freedom. Marty Rubin said, “Every human life has infinite value and to destroy even one is a crime against all humanity.” Have the courage to not destroy yourself.