Stop looking for causation and start changing behavior. That’s what I tell people these days. Modern trends in psychology point toward identifying irrational thinking rather than emotional catharsis. Trying to pin down causation is a difficult and often pointless task when the real issue is distorted thinking. Who really cares why you think that way? Most of us would rather just identify the error and correct it.
Old school psychology loves to ask the question “why”. In my line of work, dealing with criminal types, I can’t use this “why” based focus. It encourages the criminal to blame someone other than themselves for their poor choices and criminal behavior. Rather than trying to get the criminal to cry, morn, or place blame on past experiences with mom, dad, the church, a friend or a trauma, I focus on their present behavior and present thinking errors.
Change the thinking and you change the behavior. In regard to our emotions, they follow our thinking, not the other way around. So, if you want to feel better… change the thinking. Do you get the picture?
It’s especially true that criminal personalities do not benefit from placing blame. It’s actually counter productive and they will use it as justification for their behavior and/or minimize their responsibility for their criminal actions past, present and future. We are all accountable for our actions as adults no matter what was done to us, or not done for us.
Early on in my counseling experience, I treated a multiple personality client, now called Dissociative Identity Disorder. I spent a lot of fascinating time chasing causes. Her father was probably a bad man, but the problem was that her memory was severely compromised and the facts were impossible to corroborate. Eventually I had to stop trying to determine how she got these thoughts and who did what, and simply work on changing current behavior by identifying the current distorted thinking.
Identifying false guilt, shame or false responsibility is a natural by-product of addressing distorted beliefs or irrational thinking. Where it came from is ultimately inconsequential to changing behavior. We older folks forget so much as we age and young children often have distorted recall and the average person’s memory changes so much that we can never know exactly when, or where the erroneous thinking started. It’s enough to know that it did and it’s enough to know that we can change without going back and digging in the past.
People seem to have a love relationship with trying to identify why they do what they do, or did what they did. It’s as if this knowledge will lessen their culpability, or reveal some inner emotional need yet unmet. Oh come now, do we really need this? If you ask me, no, but don’t tell practitioners of some of those really groovy psychological orientations that want you to look at your family of origin. That may be fun if you have lots of time and money, but for most of us real world people, we just want to change behavior and increase our happiness and success in life, not emote over the past.
Those countless pop psychology books, which once seemed so chic, are now fodder for Goodwill stores in every state of our illustrious union. They were fads, which made someone a paycheck, but the long-term benefit is highly suspect. If you want comfort, or feel like emoting, go talk to a caring friend. It is way cheaper, and personally I think it’s much more satisfying. If you really want to improve your life, change self-destructive or self-defeating behavior then its time to identify distorted thinking which leads to inaccurate emotions and ultimately wrong behavior. It’s time to apply some good old… err newer, cognitive behavioral psychology.