The Illusion of Control

One of the biggest things things you start to understand as you get older is how much the culture you live within affects how you think about your personal and professional life.

We have a misplaced assumption that the dominating culture today must be the best one with the best values.

We trust that those doing the research on human beings are discovering what’s best for us and that somehow trickles down.

Unfortunately, that is not always the case - let’s look at an example.

Over the last few decades, cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) has grown in popularity and is now one of the most popular forms of therapy and coaching.

It involves analyzing your thoughts, where they stem from, and what they cause you to do.

And CBT can be extremely effective at building self-awareness and helping you understand recurring thought patterns.

But, for some, this can lead to a dangerous assumption.

That you should be able to control what you think and feel.

That truth is though - you can’t.

And trying to control what you think and feel is often what leads to anger, frustration, and rumination.

As Russ Harris describes in The Happiness Trap, trying to control your thoughts and feelings leads to “a vicious cycle- we get mad at our inability to control our feelings which makes us more mad.  Or we avoid the thing that makes us anxious which only makes it more anxiety-inducing the next time.”

This is why it is important to consider multiple schools of thought when working on yourself.

Harris and others subscribe to the Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) framework.

Instead of fighting your thoughts, you learn to accept them using a variety of strategies.

One such strategy to use on negative recurring thoughts is defusion.

According to Harris:

“Defusion techniques help us to see these images for what they are: nothing more than colorful pictures.  Once we recognize this, we can let them be there without fighting them, without judging them, and without trying to avoid them.  In other words, we can accept them.  Acceptance means we no longer have to fear them, or waste our precious energy on struggling with them.”

(Note - avoid using defusion by yourself when trying to deal with traumatic memories)

One method for defusing a recurring image is to put it into a television screen in your mind - yes, I said a television screen.

Taking an image or scene that you constantly replay and placing in a television - then imagine changing the color and the sound and the screen itself - helps to remind us that these are ultimately just harmless images in our heads that we have the power to alter.

What negative images or scenes do you replay in your mind?

How might you defuse them?

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