Welcome to Emotional Wellness Daily Project of SIMHA, the Sephardic Initiative for Mental Health Awareness.
We are continuing with cognitive distortions as delineated by Dr. Greenwald in his sefer Etzot V’Hadrachot, based on the advice of the Steipler HaGaon.
Cognitive distortion number four, that “The situation of a lack of happiness in life and a lack of satisfaction are the outcomes from events in happenings that are around him.” These situations, that are out of his control, are causing him to be unhappy and unsatisfied. Or the people around him don't act properly to him, and they cause his difficult situation.
In short, life's events and the people around me are the source for my unhappiness. Mistake!
It's true that a person's surroundings can cause him physical damage and pain, but emotional pain ultimately comes from the person himself. The only way someone can suffer emotional distress is if he allows it to happen to himself.
*I will add that trauma, which stems from unprocessed situations that are too much to hold and too much to process, are not necessarily up to the person's ability to accept. For example, someone that was abused as a child, you can't say, well, it's ultimately up to the child.
That’s why he says in general, it's basically the way you react to things.
He says a person, in his head, always has self-talk which is a reaction is what's going on, and it can cause the problem. For example, they think, “It's terrible how my friend is acting toward me, not respecting me.” That reaction of ‘It's terrible,’ is what's causing the distress, not the way the person reacted to you. It's your reaction that causes the pain. If you’d look at this person as if he was mentally ill, then you‘d think it's not his fault. Similarly, you're not going to get upset when a small child insults you. It's you who decides to get insulted, not the insulter.
This is an important fundamental, to realize that a lot of our emotional distress doesn’t come from reality. It comes from how we view it, how we accept it, and how our self-talk works in describing what happened to us. Once you realize and understand that it's really in your control and your perception, then you can start controlling your emotions because (this is really the background of CBT therapy), cognition affects behavior, and cognition affects emotions, and therefore a thinking person realizes that his lack of happiness is really coming from within.
An example is going on a vacation. What is a vacation? Vacation is a change. Some people fly to Japan for their honeymoon, while Japanese people come to the streets of New York.
So where is the place to be? Where's the vacation? Vacation's just a change. It's all in your head. There is no better place or worse place. I once heard someone from Florida say they love the snow, “It's boring here. It's always sunny.”
So that's all up to you. There are people that will fly from warm weather to go skiing in cold weather, and people in cold weather go to warm weather. It's really internal, not external. And although it is human and normal that a person gets upset at situations, he has to realize that ultimately, the only thing that can change the situation is his own personal reaction from within. By talking, by thinking, by looking at mussar books. This is an important concept and one of the fundamentals of proactivity-somewhere between the stimuli and the reaction, there is a human being, with the ability to decide how I want to react to this.
And ultimately, I am in charge of my own happiness.
Have a wonderful day.
