How Many Times In Your Life Do Prediction Has Come True

Individuals are fused with their thoughts, such as I am worthless, it means that they might be struggling to differentiate between the experience of having such a thought and a fact. Our job is to support the client in following their own life directions and face the monsters that might show up along the way. A number of different internal and external aspects can pose as obstacles in the client’s life. As if all of these obstacles were already not challenging enough, many clients, kids, and adults alike might be further affected by the erroneous notion that they should not feel the way they do and that they will never be able to overcome these obstacles. Many clients, both kids and adults alike, can be held back by their thoughts, often assuming that because they believe they are incapable of facing their obstacles, it is automatically true. Such thoughts can become an internal obstacle for the client, sometimes causing them to further create external obstacles for themselves. Clients who are struggling with psychological flexibility are likely to be held back by their beliefs about their own abilities to face their feared obstacles. In fact, clients might often believe that they are likely to fail, or that others are judging them for their perceived shortcomings, or believe that they are incapable of managing a potential stressor they are faced with. The following worksheets can be used with clients to help them work toward overcoming their internal obstacles and increasing their psychological flexibility. She often makes terrifying predictions, such as that someone is going to die or that something awful will happen. A professor could serve as an example of an unreliable psychic. Unreliable psychics make many catastrophic predictions, but very few of them actually come true.

Hearts Of Stone

If there was a psychic in your neighborhood who was known to make ten predictions every day but was only right in her predictions once every 15 years, it would mean that the psychic in this example would make only one correct prediction for every 54,750 incorrect ones!1 Would you trust this psychic? Our mind is kind of like an unreliable psychic. It might make hundreds or thousands of catastrophizing predictions, most of which don’t come true. Write down or draw a few of your most common catastrophizing thoughts. Now approximate how many times in your life this prediction has come true. Imagine now that you could talk back to the unreliable psychic, perhaps stating something like, Thanks for your forewarning, but you and I both know that your predictions tend to not be very reliable. What could you say? For some people, especially younger children, the Unreliable Psychic activity might be too challenging. The Joker often lies and plays jokes on Batman and other citizens of Gotham City, trying to scare them and confuse them. Tricksters might try to confuse us, but we can stand up to them by being a detective like Batman or Sherlock Holmes. Let’s try an example. Write down a scary thought that your own mind trickster might tell you. To do that, let us look at the evidence for and against this thought. Evidence is a hard fact that you can prove in court.

Talk About Your Feelings

What is the evidence for this thought? Has this happened before? What is the evidence against this thought? What can we say to our mind trickster? I know what you’re trying to do. I know that these are just scary thoughts, they are not accurate and you are just trying to trick me. The trickster might run away and you can catch him again because you are the true superhero. You are the true detective. Unfortunately, most people are so preoccupied with getting rid of these emotions and sensations that they are unwilling to partake in meaningful life activities. Most believe that they are unable to live until the unwanted sensations and emotions are gone. However, getting rid of these sensations might be an unworkable solution. Elizabeth often reported that she felt as if she were in a different class than people who were thinner than her. She avoided taking pictures, going to the beach, dancing, and any other activity that she wanted to do for fear of being made fun of her weight. She believed that she could not enjoy those activities until she lost weight. Elizabeth viewed her weight as an obstacle, one she struggled with all her life. In fact, the more she tried to avoid thinking about her weight, untag herself from pictures, and avoid social functions, the more internalized shame she felt about herself and the less authentic she was to herself and to her core values.

Make It Better

Instead, her life was focused on avoiding being seen. In our therapy together, Elizabeth and I worked on changing her relationship with her weight. Rather than seeing it as an obstacle, something that she thought prevented her from going dancing or being in pictures or videos, Elizabeth started seeing her weight as a neutral part of her, the same as her earrings, her hands, and her hair. We worked on her attending functions that she was interested in, such as dancing, as a way of her doing something that was meaningful to her and was true to her core values. Elizabeth is now a teacher who stands in front of her students every day. On the other hand, mindful awareness of these experiences can actually help the individual be better equipped to face these challenges. Here are a few activities to support the client in understanding this point. The second deals with anxiety and other intrusive and judgmental thoughts. Sometimes we might feel sad, sadder than we have ever felt before. At other times, we might feel numb, the kind of numb that is both painless and also excruciating. Of course, no one wants to feel this way. Yet sometimes we do. Sometimes we might feel depressed because of a particular event, such as a breakup, or another painful loss. Can you make it any worse?