Watching our internal sentences
“You can never expect to be deliriously happy at all times in life. Freedom from all physical pain is never likely to be your lot. But an extraordinary lack of mental and emotional woe may be yours -if you think that it may be and work for what you believe in.”
“A Guide to rational living” by Albert Ellis & Robert A. Harper
“Man is a uniquely language-creating animal and he begins to learn from very early childhood to formulate his thoughts, perceptions, and feelings in words, phrases, and sentences… If this is so (and we know of no evidence to the contrary), then for all practical purposes the phrases and sentences that we keep telling ourselves usually are or become our thoughts and emotions”.
In a nutshell If we know how we generate negative emotions through particular thoughts, especially irrational ones, we have the secret to never being desperately unhappy again.
Human beings, are language-creating animals. We tend to formulate our emotions and our ideas in terms of words and sentences. These effectively become our thoughts and emotions. Therefore, if we are basically the things we tell ourselves, any type of personal change requires us to look first at our internal conversations. Do they serve us or undermine us?
Talk therapy aims to reveal the “errors in logic” that people believe to be true. If, for instance, we are having terrible feelings of anxiety or fear, we are asked to track back to the original thought in the sequence of thoughts that led to our current anxiety. We invariably find that we are saying things to ourselves such as “Wouldn’t it be terrible if…” or “Isn’t it horrible that I am…” It is at this point that we have to intervene and ask ourselves why exactly it would be so terrible if such and such happened, or whether our current situation is really as bad as we say. And even if it is, will it last forever?
This sort of self-questioning at first seems naΓ―ve, but by doing it we begin to see just how much our internal sentences shape our life. After all, if we label some event a “catastrophe”, it surely will become one. We can only live up to our internal statements, whether they make something good, bad, or neutral.