Coping With Difficulties

There are a lot of things that we each have to deal with in life. We don't get to choose what we go through, but we can choose how to react to each of the trials we face.

Two of the things we learned in class that really stuck out to me were, "the ABCX Model" and "The Ten Forms of Twisted Thinking." We were able to apply these in class which I really liked. Seeing these principals applied to actual situations made it easier to identify these things in my own life and the lives of those close to me.

In the ABCX model each letter stand for something specific. A: Actual event, B: Both resources & response, C: Cognition, and X: Total eXperience.

Its important to know the ten forms of twisted thinking as well. The following are the ten forms:

1. All-or-nothing-thinking
2. Overgeneralization

3. Mental filter

4. Discounting the positive

5. Jumping to conclusions

6. Magnification

7. Emotional reasoning

8. "Should statements"

9. Labeling

10. Personalization and blame

We discussed the different ways we could identify these things in a real life situation given to us. The situation we were given was the loss of a child. It was a newly wed couple, their first child. They had lived in a very small apartment on the second floor of a building. To get up to the second floor you had to go through a very narrow hallway and go up some steep stairs. One night the pregnant wife was going out and as she was going down those stairs she fell and landed in such a way that she went into labor. She was rushed to the hospital immediately. The husband who was working at the time went straight to the hospital after his shift. A baby boy was born, he was born early and was in bad condition. In the time this story took place the husband wasn't allowed to be in there with his wife or stay the night, so the nurses told him to go home and they would call him with any developments. The next morning when he went to the hospital he was able to see his wife, she told him that they should start making the funeral preparations. When the husband heard this he was shocked and asked why she was giving up on their son so quickly. What the husband didn't know was that their son had already passed away. His wife was obviously distraught and angry, she felt like he didn't care and had preferred to get sleep over staying with their son. The father now in shock wasn't sure what to do. 

This young couple had moved to another state from where they were originally living for the husbands work. They were now in a place where they had no friends, and a select few family members close. They were both blaming themselves for the loss of their son. The wife thought if she had just been more careful she would never had tripped, while the husband thought if he had been able to provide better they never would have had to live in a place like that where she would be in danger. The husband started taking longer shifts so that he would be able to earn more money for a better place for them to live.

We now can see the ten forms of twisted thinking come into play. They both are blaming themselves, we can see that there is all or nothing thinking because they are feeling like they will never be happy again. Some jumping to conclusions, the wife thinks that the husband is running away from the problem by working more shifts, when in reality hes doing it out of his feelings of guilt and wanting to provide. They are both to far into their own thoughts to focus on the positive things that have already happened. 

There was another story told of someone who also lost a child but was able to heal, recover, and regain hope because she decided to focus on the positive and change her attitude. She had felt that she and her husband were growing further and further apart after the loss of their child, but when she saw those ten ways of twisted thinking in her life she did all that she could with the support of her friends and family to change it. 3 months after the loss of her child she was pregnant again and filled with hope for the future.