(This is Part 4 of a series. Go back to Part 3.)
The second principle of helpful intervention is calling attention to distorted thinking.
As Penelope Russianoff points out, a good therapist does not have a bag of magic tricks. Rather, they have an ability to detect a client's distorted thinking, erroneous perceptions and negative emotional habits.
You know, in the end it all comes down to habits—habits of activity that do not support the person, yes, but especially habits of thinking and feeling. We can become addicted to dysfunctional and entrenched habits of thinking, feeling and acting. Why dysfunctional? Because in one way or another the person's mental and emotional habits are not accurately reflecting reality.
This is where Byron Katie's work can be so helpful, since it challenges distorted thinking with four powerful questions, starting with "Is it true?" and "Can you absolutely know that that's true?" and going on to "How do you behave when you think that thought?" and "Who would you be without that thought?" These questions help to loosen our death grip on—or to put it another way, our worship of—dysfunctional habits of mentation, feeling and perception.
There are various kinds of cognitive therapies and what they have in common is that they aim to point out distorted thinking. It is not necessary to correct such thinking, because the very clear seeing that the thinking is distorted is itself the correction.
If a person's hand is clenched into a fist but they're unaware of it, once they do become aware of it they don't have to unclench their fist: that happens automatically. The awareness itself unclenches the fist. "Oh, my fist is clenched!" It unclenches automatically, just in the light of the awareness of it.
A good therapist is very much like that. he or she doesn't unclench the client's fist for them, even if such a thing were possible; no, he or she simply points out in skillful ways that the fist is clenched, and then the unclenching occurs by itself.
Because clenching can occur in lots of different ways, a good therapist, or for that matter a good spiritual teacher, can sound contradictory from one person to the next. To the person veering into the ditch on the left they're responding, "Notice the ditch on the left!" To the person veering into the ditch on the right they're responding, "Notice the ditch on the right!" But though the words vary, the noticing is the same.
Thus in the second step the therapist, based on the deep listening in the first step, is simply calling attention to distortions in thinking that they perceive, distortions of reality ranging from "I'm too old" to "My father hated me" to "I should be smarter" to "She never really cared" to "My body is unattractive" to "I should be different" to "I need his love."
Oh, really?
(This is the end of Part 4. Go to Part 5.)
—jim sloman, 10.20.06
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