Mind and Emotions by Matthew McKay Page B

habitual negative thoughts, they’ll become weaker and less frequent. This will improve your mood and make it easier for you to live your life according to your values and preferences, rather than your fears and doubts.
    Everybody backslides from time to time. You can count on having some days when you forget to defuse from your negative thoughts for hours at a time. When you do finally notice that you’re caught up in your thoughts, don’t beat yourself up. Just return to one of the simple defusion exercises that you learned in this chapter, and remember that at any moment you can start observing your thoughts instead of buying into them. Every moment provides an opportunity to return to having your thoughts, rather than being your thoughts. Also remember that thoughts come and, thankfully, thoughts go. Throughout, you remain constant and can carry on with your life.
    Emotional pain is a red flag signaling that you should return to one or more of your defusion strategies. It’s almost always triggered by a process in which one negative thought launches you into a linked series of related negative thoughts. Defusion is the best way to stop this chain of thoughts.
     

Chapter 7
    Cognitive Flexibility Training
    What Is It?
    Cognitive flexibility training will help you broaden your thinking so you feel less trapped in rigid, negative beliefs and perceptions. Many people find themselves returning to the same negative thoughts over and over: the same judgments (“I’m a failure”), the same images of the future (“Something bad will happen”), and the same interpretations of events (“She doesn’t like me”). They don’t know how to expand their thinking to include a broader array of expectations and perceptions about events.
    The transdiagnostic factor that cognitive flexibility training targets is negative appraisal. This maladaptive coping strategy uses one or more of five negative thinking patterns:
     
     
Making negative predictions about the future
Underestimating the ability to cope
Focusing on the negative while ignoring all other aspects of a situation
Making negative attributions (assuming negative motives and explanations for events)
Thinking in terms of shoulds (rigid rules about how you and others must behave, and the belief that you and others are bad for breaking these rules)
    In cognitive behavioral therapy, negative appraisal was originally targeted with a process called cognitive restructuring (Beck et al. 1979). People were encouraged to reappraise events with more positive interpretations and predictions while an emotionally challenging situation was occurring. The idea was to dispute negative assumptions and cognitive errors and replace them with healthier alternative thoughts. Recently, researchers have suggested that classic cognitive restructuring has two problems.
    The first problem is that trying to dispute and replace a negative thought with one that’s positive implies that the negative thought is false and the positive one is more accurate. Couching things in this true-false dichotomy may not always serve people well. In fact, assuming that negative thoughts are distorted sometimes pushes people to defend them all the more (McKay, Davis, and Fanning 2007).
    The second problem is that disputing negative thoughts in the middle of a distressing situation can function as an avoidance strategy—an effort to stop painful emotions—and there’s a lot of evidence that trying to block or avoid painful emotions actually makes them more intense and longer lasting. So in the long run, disputing thoughts while you’re upset might only make the upset worse (Allen, McHugh, and Barlow 2008). David Barlow, one of the leading lights in cognitive behavioral therapy, now suggests that cognitive restructuring be done before or perhaps after an upsetting event, not during the event (Allen, McHugh, and Barlow 2008). This way you aren’t trying to suppress emotions during situations that provoke strong