Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.

 

 —  Aristotle

Bad things happen, and some suffering is unavoidable. But you can create additional suffering for yourself and others by the way you react to the things that happen. A popular way to create unnecessary suffering is to interpret the things that happen from a self-critical or poignant perspective.

If there is a recurring pattern to your misfortunes, it is probably caused by the way you react to the things that happen rather than to repeated bad luck or Divine persecution. The good news about recurring patterns of bad outcome is that you can review the sequence of events and your reactions to them to discover the cause-and-effect principles that maintain the pattern. Once you understand the mechanism by which the Stimulus turns into your Response you have, in Frankl’s words, the power to choose your response.

Understand this: The beliefs and perspectives that underlie your interpretations exist only within you; they are not part of the objective world. Living creatures who must respond in real time have to assume that their interpretations of the things that happen are valid and complete. But this assumption, as necessary as it is, is responsible for the Soul Illusion. Your perceptions and appraisals are the creations of your nervous system, which only has access to the information that is available from your particular physical and psychological perspective; people with different perspectives have different interpretations (of which they are equally certain).

Many of your understandings about yourself and the world around you were acquired when you were a child. Some of these beliefs are no longer valid; some never were. Nevertheless, some of your core beliefs —especially the negative ones about yourself and what others think of you— are not only false but handicap your performance. The resulting impaired performance ends up confirming the negative self-appraisal. So once established, the pathogenic mechanism can maintain itself indefinitely.

In this section you will use a tool that forces you to examine the causal chain from an antecedent event to your perverse emotional reaction from both the first-person perspective and the observer’s perspective.

In my office, the client describes crises from the first-person perspective ["I thought X" "I felt Y"] and I as the psychologist consider the information from the dispassionate, observer’s perspective. My intent is to understand the causes of the client’s reactions, not whether [s]he is "good enough," "right," etc. except to the extent that such client judgments or interpretations are causally related to the subsequent emotional reaction.

Personal Research

During such a session the client describes all the information about the episode: the antecedent events, the client’s thoughts and feelings experienced during the episode, and how things played out. The client experienced these external events and internal states from the first-person perspective of the actor. The psychologist experienced them from the dispassionate perspective of an observer. Neither has an adequate understanding of cause-and-effect! Each can learn something from the other’s perspective.

The client experienced the episode as though the events caused her to react as she did. The therapist says, "It is your interpretations of the events rather than the events themselves that caused your reactions." For your personal research, you will be using the perspective of both the therapist [dispassionate observer] and the client [first-person perspective].

The Cause-and-Effect Research Tool forces you to shift back and forth between these perspectives to study the causal chain that leads from an event to your emotional reaction.

How to use the Cause-and-Effect Research Tool

Consider a time that you experienced a strong emotional reaction. When it happened your reaction seemed to be a necessary response to your circumstance — e.g., "I got angry when she said, ‘X’ to me." When you work on a thought record, you will be viewing the event in retrospect, from the perspective of the dispassionate observer, which will enable you to examine exactly what made you angry.

The challenge here is that the beliefs and perspectives we want to research are so deeply ingrained that they tend to be automatically accepted as valid. To explore your cognitive structure you have to get outside of the beliefs you automatically accept as valid and look at things from the dispassionate distance of a researcher. You will have to put aside all your assumptions — even those you have used since childhood — so you can do this research. Remind yourself, another person in the same situation may have reacted differently because they interpreted the events that happened differently.