Massage & Bodywork

May/June 2012

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MIND-BODY MEDICINE FOR MASSAGE Cognitive Distortions 1. All or Nothing: Things are black or white. 2. Overgeneralization: You see a negative event as a never-ending pattern of defeat. 3. Mental Filter: You pick out a single negative detail and dwell on it exclusively. 4. Disqualifying the Positive: You reject positive experiences by insisting they don't count. 5. Jumping to Conclusions: You automatically draw a negative conclusion even though there are no facts to support it. 6. Magnification: You exaggerate the importance of a negative event or mistake. 7. Emotional Reasoning: You assume your negative emotions affect situations. 8. "Should" Statements: Unproductive self-statements, usually containing the words should, ought, or must. 9. Labeling and Mislabeling: I'm a ... She's a ... He's a ... 10. Personalization: Even if something really isn't your fault or responsibility, you own it. 11. Perfectionism: You and others must be perfect all the time. 12. Approval-Seeking: All the significant people in your life must love and approve of you all the time. 13. Self-Righteous: People should always do what you think is right. 14. Woe is Me: You regard yourself as a victim despite the ordinariness of a situation. 15. Reductionism: Failure to see the complex causes and potential benefits of a stressful experience by reducing it to one simple cause or consequence. 16. Fallacy of Fairness: You judge a negative event as unfair when it truly isn't an issue of justice. 17. Comparison: You habitually compare yourself to others. 18. Sophism: The combination of two or more related notions which falsely appear to produce a logical conclusion. Adapted in part from D. Burns, Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy (New York: New American Library, 1990); A. Ellis and R. Grieger, Handbook of Rational-Emotive Therapy, vol. 2 (New York: Springer Publishing Co., 1986). really true? No, of course not, but my distorted thinking made it seem that way. Another one was, "We'll never get it rented." Really, it will sit empty until the day I die? No one, ever again, will rent that condo? Again, when you say it out loud and write it down, it seems ridiculous, and what I realized was that it had only been available for two weeks. Not several months, not years. Two weeks. The next column of how I want to feel is pretty self-explanatory. It's the action steps in the last column that are most important. I thought hard about what I could do to remedy the situation, and also added in the fact that it had only been open for two weeks and we had always been able to rent it before. What else could we do aside from taking a deep breath and doing a mini? We could hire a rental agency, we could lower the rent, we could advertise in different places, we could accept Section 8 (Housing Choice Voucher Program), and, if it really got that bad, we could try to sell the property. Just knowing that there were actionable things I could do decreased my stress about the situation. Also, seeing how distorted my thinking was about the situation relieved most of the stress. Was the condo still for rent after I finished this process? Yes. But I could handle the stress in a rational way and better deal with the situation. We can't control our feelings, but we can control our thoughts about those feelings. This process can help our clients deal with their stresses as well. Once they learn how to fill out the simple chart and identify their distortions, they can use the technique for almost any repeat offender of stress. And you can see how useful it would be for you in your own life. Once I started using the chart on a few issues, I now find that I don't even need to fill it out—it comes naturally to me. I don't have the immediate stressful knee-jerk reaction to situations that before would have put me in a tailspin. Hopefully these two methods will help you handle the stress better in your own life and encourage your clients to handle theirs better as well. Kathy Gruver, PhD, is a massage therapist, Reiki Master, and public speaker. She's been involved in healing since 1990. Contact her at www.thealternativemedicinecabinet.com. Celebrate ABMP's 25th anniversary and you may win a refund on your membership. ABMP.com. 87

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