How do you stop thinking, "I got lucky that time," and start thinking, "I survived that," instead?
The answer to this question might be somewhere if I dug into how one changes from a "fixed mindset" to a "growth mindset," but having not read the literature, I'm left asking this question to myself in my current constellation of thoughts.
Current things I'm mulling over:
1.
I've resumed reading How to Deal With Emotionally Explosive People by Albert J. Bernstein, which I started because I realized I was sinking so much time into placating people who were having emotional explosions, and I also felt that it might actually be impossible for me to survive in the event that someone actually did randomly just start cussing me out, which is always a random possibility when you talk to strangers. In other words, I came here for, "How can I do this better and not have to spend so much time?" and "How do I handle a situation I am very afraid of, even if it's unlikely?" and instead so far the whole section on explosions into fear felt like a minor callout for me.
Things I'm contending with: I have had explosions into fear, which is also something that I'm not proud of. But my primary way of handling this has been to mostly avoid things that make me fearful. Interestingly, Bernstein is of the opinion that stuff like PTSD shouldn't be given accommodations around because it encourages people to stop trying. Yet he also admits to occasionally signing people more days off of work even when he doesn't think that it's gone past the length that it could actually be helpful, even though he also usually regrets it because he's right about them.
I need to do a better review/summary of this book once I've finished reading it for my future self, but things that are also haunting me besides the above:
The way you handle people who are fearful of something is by not giving into what they want, but by slowly encouraging them to broaden their window of tolerance. To do this, you also have to not give them any reason to doubt that you are actually on their side and understanding, even when you might have misgivings because the person might actually be having "second gains" which lets them get out of stuff they don't want to do and increasing your workload in turn (which is why this particular work often falls to people the anxious person is already close to).
You need to encourage these people to quantify how long and how strong a fear attack is, because once they start doing this, over time they will start to realize that all of this is timebound and that there is an end in sight. Feelings are not what they assumed, as an all-or-nothing death sentence. This is literally the first thing my therapist started doing with me, and I thought it was kind of dumb at first and didn't like that I was being told to put a number to something when I didn't know if it was accurate according to whatever measure is supposed to be out there, but they told me that it's just based on personal perception. Every time they asked me how long a spiral went for, I similarly resented being asked this, but they would start telling me that it was less than last time, and the time before. People who have anxious explosions assume that any sign of having a spiral is bad, but actually, any decrease is a win. And if you keep saying this to them...
They eventually start thinking that it was their own idea and observation. And this is the primary way you help them, because the best way to convince someone is to have them believe that they came up with the idea themselves, even when it was literally the thing you've been telling them in therapy week after week. This shit just like CBT gaslighting into better ways of thinking FR........... I hate that he's right about this because this was a thought I started adopting on my own without even realizing it, even though I also clearly remember that it was my therapist who started asking me this stuff first.
Any insight that comes too soon, no matter how correct it is, is utterly useless. This one. Okay this one really hurts me because I kept thinking that if I said the right thing to people and gave them the exact right insight, they'd improve. This is also why I kind of thought I was basically a lost cause too, because I thought I already had all the insights into myself possible and was just going to therapy because I didn't know what else I could possibly do, and I wanted to claim my ticket of "Look, ze's doing something! Ze's at least trying!" To my credit, I guess, my therapist described me as very committed to therapy because apparently a lot of clients just drop off randomly all the time and I doggedly showed up nearly every week for 6 years. It was usually my therapist asking to skip because of holidays and whatever and not me. (Of course, this is also just because I'm overcommitted to most things I do...)
2.
I've been compelled to make a blank Instagram account because apparently that's where all the therapy reels are that people want to link. One account (@thetrishawolfe) I viewed briefly had these words: "Neuroplasticity is experiential, not informational," and "Your body isn't keeping the score; it's responding to a prediction. And predictions, unlike scores, can be updated." Accompanying the first: "no amount of but I know this isn't true changes a brain and nervous system that are still predicting danger, rupture, and loss."
I've been thinking about this. Because I do regularly experience a "I know this isn't that bad," yet my nervous system goes out of whack and I start predicting the worst things and read things into indicating that I'm a lost cause (spiraling and all of that). In therapy, also, I felt at times that I was hitting a wall whenever we didn't do EMDR, yet I'd avoid bringing up EMDR first because I didn't actually want to have to sit through all of that. And the possibility of exposure therapy also always loomed over me, but I didn't want to do that either. Honestly, going out to a book club was probably the best thing for me to do besides the EMDR, and I'm still struggling with that month by month. But that's also why I have plans to sign up for other support groups in probably August, because I just feel like I need June to feel like a normal person again and July has weird stuff going on with the 4th cat that I hope we can get adopted out someday.
I didn't pass my medical terms test today. The reason for it being that I missed a direction that said to only look at the English spelling and not the spelling of steno, so I marked multiple answers that were supposed to be correct as incorrect because the steno did not match what was given in the course. I'm pretty sure I can just retake it and put in the correct answers this time, but I also emailed the course director about it because there was one question where it was marked as wrong and I marked as correct because I could find the spelling on Google Scholar, but the course director said it didn't exist because it wasn't on Merriam Webster. I pointed out that about 25% of the terms in the lessons she wrote are also not on Merriam Webster (and some of them even have 0 results on Google Scholar, but I left this part out). And 25% is a generous estimate, it's probably more like 35% if Merriam Webster is our only measuring bar.
Anyway, after sending these emails, I started thinking that she might find me really annoying and kick me out of the course. And then I started thinking that maybe I picked the wrong course to enroll in because it's riddled with mistakes and reading the posts from past students is basically all like, "This course helped me get work! But lots of things are defunct in it, and don't even try to issue corrections because they just ignore you!" And then I started thinking about how this course doesn't even get you any certificate because there's no such certification for scoping even though it was proposed at one point, and therefore I might just really be doing things wrong and people are never going to see me as legit, etc., what if I just got scammed, etc.
This is all probably unwarranted (besides the fact that I could fix this course if they would just let me at it, but I'm too scared to ask and I also don't want to do work for free), but I still felt bad for... 6 hours? I prevented a full-blown spiral by trying to just sit with the thoughts instead of chase them, but it didn't actually lessen the suckitude of the whole thing. And I know other people would just tell me I'm thinking too much, and my sister was like, they should be grateful you're actually pointing out how to make their course better, but I just couldn't believe it.
So I started thinking about how if I couldn't believe it emotionally, it had to be the fact that all my predictive pathways were instead saying that I didn't have enough counter experience to believe confidently that this wouldn't end with me being ostracized and having wasted all my money. So while lying in bed with one of my cats, I tried to think about where I was getting these predictions from and if I had any counter experiences to it. Some of this, I realized, had to deal with my 6th grade history/language arts teacher, Mr. Dunce (not his name, sounded similar enough), who literally had us give presentations on news articles and then quiz us on the minute details about what exact date something occurred, or the exact number of money mentioned. I did some presentation on some Yahoo acquisition or something, and memorized all these utterly useless details, and then he asked me some trick question like, "When did the $42 billion trade happen?" (making up a number now) and I internally was like, "billion? wasn't it million?" and so I didn't say anything. And then he was like, "It was million and it happened on [date I knew]." Fucking bonkers. What does this teach literally anyone other than being a public humiliation ritual? There are better ways to teach the difference between million and billion, if you really cared that much, but I know he didn't and he was just picking any random detail to get us on. And he was presenting himself as a nice, concerned teacher, all the while wasting time lecturing us on how we were wasting time and blaming the whole class collectively for things individual students did that I had no part of. YOU DID NOT HELP MY FUTURE OCPD DIAGNOSIS!!!!!!! (My count for terrible teachers/professors I've had is probably like 8.)
When I thought about it, though, even when I made stupid mistakes in my transcription quality assurance gig, and before that, when I was interning for a light novel translation company, I didn't get kicked out. But I still spiraled in all of those cases and didn't learn a single damn thing emotionally. So what's the missing piece?
The problem is that I approach surviving every emotionally horrible thing as, "I got lucky this time, but I won't be lucky next time, so I have to try even harder," and not as, "I survived that, I'm capable of weathering inevitable distress when it comes, and I am capable of growth even if I will never be perfect," which is apparently the magic ingredient you need to have emotional resilience. But how do you switch over from the first (shame mindset) to the second (growth mindset)? How do you emotionally accept this new narrative of events?
I think I'm doing better at this than I was last year, but it's a switch that can't be made immediately and that no one can ever do for you. That's what makes it so hard. I'm ready to accept this insight now, or more ready than I was in the past, anyway, but I also can't give it to anyone else who isn't ready because it will be useless. But who am I to talk, anyway.
Something that came up in the OCPD discussion group is trying things as an experiment. Like, maybe it won't work, but why don't I see, if I just try giving up this shame-based thought for a bit, is that really any worse of an experience? Until you can trick yourself into reframing and understanding your experiences differently. Is therapy, or convincing yourself of anything for that matter, any different from gaslighting? (I'm joking on this one, but that's how it feels sometimes.) Ironically, things only work the best once you wholeheartedly believe it. Oh bother.
3.
Something else the discussion group brought up: There are no perfect decisions, and everything is a tradeoff. So you should just think about what tradeoffs you're willing to live with. Also, thinking about making decisions takes energy too, so it doesn't make sense to expend so much energy on things that aren't that important (or as someone put it, decision triaging. You can literally just flip a coin or run a random number generator for most of the decisions you make). So like, rating how important a decision is and then anything below a 3/5 gets only 10 minutes to think about, for instance. Funny to think about.
I do think this is a helpful reframe, and in the future I don't want to lock myself into something by committing for a whole thing right from the start. I kind of wish now that I had just paid for this course chapter by chapter so that I could've tried out another course concurrently and figured out which I liked better. Even if it would have been more costly, it's also possible that it would've saved me a bunch more time considering that I spent a year reformatting the first chapter of this course (grammar rules) so that I could actually understand what was going on in this haphazard soup. Surely another course couldn't have been that poorly organized? If it was, then I'd feel better about my decision to dog through. As it is, though, no refunds, so I'll finish what I started and hopefully end up for the better for it.
The other thing that I'm thinking of is that maybe I need to also just think of my life in spans of years instead of thinking I'm going to lock anything in anywhere. Like, maybe I'll just ask myself if I think what I'm doing feels good after 2-3 years, and then if not, I should force myself to pivot. If I think about it, spending 7 years on a translation group I can't talk about was way too long, but if I had checked in with myself properly at 2-3 years and then just left then, I would've fared better in the long run.
It's also possible that 2-3 years is still too long, but for now I'll take half of my past mistakes as a starter. At the very least, I am willing to cut the timeline shorter now with this studying and fail faster, as they say. I hope someday I learn how to fail better, fast and with grace.