One Red Hot Country Mama!

I was grabbing a Starbucks between meetings the other day near my office in the fashion district in Toronto (King and Spadina) and I saw a little advertisement for a special camp called Camp Okutta where kids could learn how to throw grenades among other activities. I was outraged for a few seconds, but then thought that it was probably a joke or trying to make some sort of point.

That night, a friend sent me a link to the camp – and I saw the answer – someone was trying to make a point. It was War Child Canada, bringing visibility to the fact that there are 250,000 child soldiers in the world today. They thought that using pale suburban-looking campers holding guns and running through fields of grenades would have a stronger impact than showing the real child soldiers.

The ever-earnest CBC reported Hoax Camp Outrages Torontonians which revolved around the fact that some Toronto residents had their feathers ruffled by the same advertisements that I saw and started ripping them down. Late in the article they quote James Topham, War Child’s Marketing Director:

"The message of the advertising is that we would never stand for it over here, so we should not stand for it over there either," he said.

Topham said that he was a little surprised to hear that people were tearing down the posters, but said that it proved their message hit home.

"If people were ripping them down, it shows that such a camp would be outrageous in Canada," he said. "And yet these camps exist all over the world."

Thanks Topham et al.

Psychological theorists say we all have an internal critic that is eternally cutting us down and damaging our self-esteem. For example, you may be throwing a softball, then suddenly and without warning, the thought pops into your head: “you’ll never throw it straight – you suck!” Ball-sport analogies work for me here since I am not skilled at them, but insert your own example about something that you feel insecure about.

Some of the main tools of the critic are cognitive distortions. These are habits of thought that interpret reality in an unreal way. They are based on emotional rather than rational processes and can separate you from living in the real world. I have discussed these on this blog before, but I find the McKay and Fanning distortions more accurate than other versions widely available on the web. 

1.    Overgeneralization
“Overgeneralizations create a shrinking universe in which more and more absolute laws make life more and more confining. It is a universe in which the scientific method is turned upside-down. Instead of observing all available data, formulating a law that explains all the data, then testing the law, you take one fact or event, make a general rule out of it and never test the rule.”*

You can tell you are using overgeneralizations when you use words like: never, always, every, none, no one, nobody, everybody and everyone. It is when you use absolutes and totally close the door to possibility. Examples are “I am always late.” or “He never says sorry.”

2.    Global Labeling
“Global labeling is the application of stereotyped labels to whole classes of people, things, behaviors and experiences. People who practice global labeling live in a universe populated by stock characters who act out unrealistic melodramas. Global labelers with low self-esteem often cast themselves in the role of the villain or the simpleton.”

You are global labeling if the messages are negative clichés about your appearance, performance, intelligence, relationships and so on. “My love life is a mess.” “My degree is a worthless piece of paper.”  “All of my efforts to improve are futile grasping at straws.”

3.    Filtering
“When you filter reality, you see your universe as through a glass darkly. You can see and hear only certain things. Like a voice-activated tape recorder, your attention is awakened only by particular kinds of stimuli: examples of loss, rejection and so on. You selectively abstract certain facts from reality and pay attention to them, ignoring all the rest. You have blind spots that obscure evidence of your own worth.”

You can suspect filtering when you are repeating the same scene over and over again and use words like: loss, gone, burnt, dangerous, unfair and stupid. If you were at a 3-hour party and can only remember the 15 minutes where you spilled wine on someone – that is filtering.

4.    Polarized Thinking
“If you habitually indulge in polarized thinking, you live in a black-and-white universe, with no colors or shades of gray. You divide all your actions and experiences into either/or dichotomies according to absolute standards. You judge yourself as either a saint or a sinner, a good guy or a bad guy, a success or failure, a hero or a villain, a noble or a bastard.”

You can catch yourself doing polarized thinking by listening to either/or messages: “I am either going to win the scholarship or completely blow my future.” “If you can’t be funny and ‘on’ then you are a bore”

5.    Self-Blame
“Self-blame is a distorted thinking style that has you blaming yourself for everything, whether you are actually at fault or not. In the self-blaming universe, you are at the center of a universe of bad things, and they’re all your fault.”

The easiest way to spot self-blame is incessant apologizing. Your partner doesn’t want to see the movie you prefer so you apologize. The clerk at the post office says you don’t have enough postage and you say, “God, I’m so stupid, I’m sorry”.

6.    Personalization
“In a personalized universe, you are the universe. Every atom in it is somehow related to you. All events, properly decoded, seem to have something to do with you. Unfortunately, there is very little power or of being in control of these events. It feels more like you are under pressure, under siege, or under observation by everyone around you.”

Personalization is a difficult one to catch. One way is to notice your reactions to people complaining. If someone at the office is complaining about the staplers never being returned to the proper spot, do you assume that it has something to do with you? That is personalization.

7.     Mind Reading
“Mind reading is a distorted thinking style which assumes that everyone in the universe is just like you. This is an easy mistake to make, since it’s based on the phenomenon of projection – you assume that others feel the way you do, basing your assumption on a belief in a commonality of human nature and experience that may or may not actually exist”.

You can see mind-reading when you are testing your assumptions: “I just had a strong hunch.” “I just know.” “It’s my intuition.” “I’m sensitive to these things.” These statements show that you are just jumping to conclusions without real evidence.

8.      Control Fallacies
“Control fallacies either put you in charge of the whole universe or put everyone but you in charge. The distorted thinking style of overcontrol gives you a false feeling of omnipotence. You struggle to control every aspect of every situation.”

You are using the overcontrol fallacy when you say things like “I’ve got to make them listen.” “He has to say yes.” Or “I’ll make sure she gets here on time.”

“The distorted thinking style of undercontrol takes control away from you. You put yourself on the fringes of every situation, unable to influence others. Of the two fallacies, undercontrol is worst for self-esteem.”

9.    Emotional Reasoning
“An emotional universe is chaotic, governed by changeable feelings instead of rational laws. The distortion in this thinking style is to avoid or discount your thinking all together. You rely instead on emotions to interpret reality and direction action.”

You are using emotional reasoning if you “are what you feel”. So – if you feel useless, you are useless. If you feel ugly you are ugly etc.

So – these are the 9 cognitive distortions. The McKay and Fanning go on to give tools on how to combat them. In general, awareness of these and using rationality to combat them is an excellent start. I find that that learning these cognitive distortions not only helped clarify my own thinking, but it also helps me see errors in arguments coming from my friends, loved-ones and colleagues. Enjoy.

*All quotes are from p. 62-68 in Self Esteem by Matthew McKay and Patrick Fanning

** Permission to use quotes requested of New Harbinger Publications on Aug 19, 2007.

Interesting post today on Everyday Wonderland called 5 Ideas for Stressful Living. It is based on the idea that many of us choose to live our lives in ways that are painful for us. Although I find this idea oversimplifying and cynical of the human motive to do things it is funny and makes me think.

As the first stress-inducing tip, the author suggests trying to control everything, including other people:

Try to control other people; both what they do, and also what they
think. The reason why this is so effective is that we can easily
perceive other people to be difficult, incompetent, and unreliable,
which gives us plenty of reasons why we need to control everything
ourselves. The stress factor here lies in the fact that trying
to control other people is much like herding cats; requires enormous
effort, and you know deep down that it’s futile and ridiculous to even
attempt.

This makes me laugh because of all of the stressed out bad managers I have encountered in my career who have tried to control people rather than trying to get the best out of them. A recipe for stress for themselves and everyone else!

The third tip is to look for satisfaction "out there":

Most people look almost exclusively to external things and circumstances for their satisfaction, instead of looking within.
And apart from being an important factor in the perpetuation of stress,
it is also what mainly drives the mechanics of western society. It’s
the reason why people spend most of their time
working for the purpose of accumulating more things, and then their
free time on trying hard to extract as much satisfaction as possible
from these things in order to justify the means of attaining them.
To be caught in this upward spiral of more and more work for more and
more sensory satisfaction is what characterizes the affluent parts of
our culture, and the potential for stress on this path is endless,
simply because more is never enough. Never has been, never will be.

I think this is a very good summary – especially the part about collecting things and then trying to extract joy. It is kind of striving for happiness by proxy instead of experiencing it directly. Why not deal direct?

The last tip is to "be more to have more":

At the core, all of the above ideas can be summed up in a single method: simply convince yourself that you need more than you have at any given moment, and you will be able to maintain a steady feeling of anxiety throughout the day.

Never being contented is something that runs in my family – but it is definitely not a great way to run a life and we all admit it. It is hard to strive at the same time as being content I suppose. Nice to see some creative work going on in the blogs.

TTC Streetcar at Spadina Station
Originally uploaded by sillygwailo

Lately I have been taking public transit (the TTC) to my new office and there you see a lot of people struggling with physical and mental health issues. On Friday morning I saw a woman, with a pink shirt and pink pants, coordinates which are worn by women of a certain age, ambling backwards down the stairs of a streetcar. I felt bad for her, but thought it may be insulting to offer help. At that moment, I really appreciated how easy it is for me to simply walk up and down those same stairs without a thought.

When I was four, my dad got diagnosed with Malignant Melanoma or Skin Cancer. Today, this is very treatable if caught early, but this was the 80s and it was not found early. So – there was two long years of illness, standard and experimental treatments for my dad – and I watched this man, who was a giant to little me at 6’3, a PhD and a professor, a passionate man with a warm laugh and the only bread earner in our family slowly fade away and eventually die a few days before my sixth birthday.

Likely because of this, I am deeply grateful for the health that I do have and with a few notable exceptions, have mostly made physical health a big priority for me. There are always the fads, but basically if you eat a lot of fruits and vegetables, get enough sleep, exercise and stay out of the sun – in general the bases are covered.

I remember an acquaintance I had once who had spent her life in a wheelchair called people with little or no health problems TAB, or Temporarily Able Bodied. She said that for “TABs” like me, it was just a matter of time before I got sick or somehow disabled – because most of us become so sometime in our lifetime. Just think of your parents or grandparents and you will think of how.

So – while we are all TABs, we might as well appreciate our bodies for what they can do now – like eating, exploring somewhere beautiful, exercising and all of the other physical pleasures to be had .

I was searching around online and I found this Waistband Stretcher courtesy of Hedonics of Toronto. Description:

Don’t park your tight-fitting pants or skirts in the back of the closet because you’ve gained an inch or two around the middle! Waistband Stretcher can add up to 5 inches to the waist of your jeans, shorts, pants or skirts. Simply moisten the garment waistband, insert the stretcher and extend it to the desired size.

So now you can eat what you like and wear the size that you like. And we slip deeper into denial. Don’t worry – the Waistband Stretcher fits up to a 50" waist!