Dear Helen,
In my own counseling I deal with individuals who struggle with black and white or all or nothing thinking. How can I help them move beyond these cognitive distortions so they don’t sabotage their progress?
Thank you!
Fellow Helper
Dear Fellow Helper,
I know it can feel hard to be on the other side, seeing something clearly and truly while the person in front of you is believing the lies that their mind is telling them!
But you know what?
It can also not feel hard.
What do I mean?
Well, of course you want your clients' suffering to end. You want them to experience more peace and freedom. You can see how their relationship to their thinking is the only thing standing in their way. (In other words, the fact that they're thinking isn't the problem; we're all always thinking. Believing what they're thinking is what's causing them to suffer. Identifying with their thoughts is what's giving them grief.)
Similarly, if you're believing what your mind is telling you, then this process of helping point someone in a different direction might feel more fraught, more urgent, and more like sabotaged progress is a legitimate threat.
When I'm coaching someone around a particular topic and I see what their mind is doing, how it's coming in and creating suffering for them, it only ever feels urgent and fraught when I, too, am getting pulled into a mind-created story. When I'm buying into the thought that it's up to me to fix them. When I leave the present moment and imagine some future scenario where my client is back at square one, because I didn't ever manage to get them past their cognitive distortions.
Only a busy mind would suggest that a client could "sabotage their progress." How do I know?
Because it's an overly simplistic assessment of psychological experience, which, by its very nature, is ever-changing.
The word choice is loaded, kind of extreme. It doesn't sound like it's coming from a calm, centered, peaceful source.
It doesn't account for all the growth and change that's happening constantly, even as a client appears to struggle with some of the same thoughts week after week.
It's predictive. Minds loooooove to make predictions, and they'll go after certainty like it's their job.
Kind of sounds like black and white thinking, huh? 😉
(Coaches and counselors: They're just like us!)
I'm not trying to poke fun at you here; far from it. I just want to help you see that the journey isn't so binary as our minds would have us believe. Clients are not either making progress or sabotaging themselves. Minds are funny things that want to draw neat and tidy (and horribly inaccurate, bless them) conclusions, both for our clients and for us.
Anyway, just start to notice where your mind is jumping in with a story about your clients. And get curious.
As for the clients, themselves: What if the person sitting in front of you already has everything they need, they're just experiencing some in-the-moment thought that looks absolutely real and personal to them?
(This is how I view each and every client who comes my way.)
How should you help them?
You're going to keep helping them in whatever ways occur to you.
Sometimes that looks like continuing to point in the same direction, again and again, until something clicks for them. They have an insight, a morsel of new thinking about who they really are beyond their psychological experience, and everything suddenly looks different to them.
Sometimes that looks like changing your language or using a different metaphor to illustrate what you're saying.
Sometimes that looks like scrapping everything you've done thus far and just sitting down and listening deeply to them. Not with two ears, but more with a consciousness. Don't listen for anything. Don't fixate on what they need to see differently in order to find peace and freedom. Know that there's health beyond what they're thinking. And then respond from whatever wisdom shows up. Something always shows up.
And finally: Know that when the cognitive distortions resurface (as they often do—minds are conditioned machines, after all), this isn't a sign that anything is wrong, that there's been a "relapse" into old thinking, or that all progress is lost. It's just what a perfectly normal mind does sometimes, and the less meaning we make of it, the quicker it changes and is replaced by new experience.
I hope this helps!
Love,
Helen