Day 14: Lies, Deletions, Distortions and Generalisations
Week 2 Diagnosis
Sometimes it’s not about the language you use. Sometimes you’re just lying to yourself.
You tell yourself things that, if you stopped for a few moments and actually thought about what you’d just said, you’d know you weren’t telling yourself the truth. But you don’t stop. You don’t think. You just accept the lie and move on.
There are patterns you can look out for. These language patterns are often in the lies you don’t catch, the ones that tend to slip through your mental net. And these lies are all the more common when you have a distorted view of the world, especially when you feel upset or down.
Here’s the basic concept: your internal state and how you feel changes the way you see the world. Perhaps the first bit of advice is that you can’t always trust your thoughts and your internal self-talk when you’re feeling really down. When you’re feeling like this, the language you use in your self-talk isn’t a true reflection of the real world. It can also contain a lot more of the following three patterns: deletions, distortions, and generalisations. Or even a combination of all three.
Spotting the Danger Words
These deletions, distortions, and generalisations are easy to spot without getting into too much detail. All you have to do is start looking for some of the danger words in your self-talk: every, everyone, nobody, no one, always, never, don’t, and can’t.
Here are a few examples of the lies you can tell yourself using these words:
Nobody loves me.
Why does it always happen to me?
Everyone hates me.
It never goes right.
No one listens to me.
He never smiles at me because he doesn’t love me.
Generalisations
These words are called generalisations. Words like everybody, nobody, every. They indicate that you’re making generalised statements about something. Seldom are generalised statements true, but with your emotions distorting your thinking at that moment, you tend to believe them as if they are.
Generalisations are mostly wrong. The best of us, when faced with adversity, hang onto that one thing that drags us through those bad times. Not everything that’s wrong or gone wrong. All you need to do is catch yourself generalising and question what you’ve just said. Figure out where that logic is wrong. And hang on to what’s actually true instead.
Deletions
Following on from generalisations, there are also patterns called deletions. This is where your self-talk is distorted because your mental state deletes some of the truths you’re not telling yourself. Perhaps when you say to yourself that everybody hates me, as well as generalising, you’re deleting the fact that somebody somewhere doesn’t. Often with really negative self-talk, we fail to tell ourselves the positive things around us.
Both deletions and generalisations are distortions of how we see the world.
Distortions
There are also examples of distortions that aren’t deletions or generalisations, and these are the hardest to spot because we can tell ourselves some really convincing lies when we want to.
Look at one of the examples above: he never smiles at me because he doesn’t love me.
Does the fact that a person never smiles at you really indicate that he doesn’t love you? If you notice the never in the example, that’s a generalisation. And the never indicates that you’re probably deleting the times he has actually smiled at you too.
What you should be doing is challenging the statement. Perhaps you could ask yourself: when was the last time they smiled? How many times would they need to smile to make you sure of that love? And if you love that other person, why aren’t you smiling now?
The real distortion in this example is perhaps the belief that you must smile at someone if you love them. There are times when all of us stop smiling. Or when we smile at others we definitely don’t love either. Sometimes, of course, the relationship really is the problem — this lesson is about the times when it isn’t, and you’ve convinced yourself otherwise.
Distortions are untruths that can sneak into our self-talk. And often, if we repeat them to ourselves, we may even start believing them. Even in the face of solid evidence to the contrary, we can start defending these distortions when questioned by others.
When You’re Most Vulnerable
It’s a fact that you lie to yourself more when something goes wrong or you’re feeling down. When you’ve had a knockback or fail at something, you’re more likely to tell yourself I’ll never be any good at this. If you’re going through problems in a relationship, you’re more likely to hear yourself saying nobody loves me.
So there are times in your life when you need to be extra vigilant for these lies. For the generalisations, deletions, and distortions that creep into your self-talk when you’re not feeling good. Because there are definitely times when a negative and distorted view of the world isn’t going to help you one bit.
What to Do About It
Get into the habit of listening for words like every, everyone, nobody, no one, always, never, don’t, and can’t. This will really help you in the future when things go wrong. Because if you clean up your self-talk language, these lies are going to stick out more when you really need to catch yourself saying them.
I’ll never get good at this, you might be saying to yourself. Now it’s time to stop right there and look at that statement again. Is it actually true? Where’s the evidence? And when something goes wrong, perhaps you’ll now accept that seldom does it always happen to you either.
Your self-talk when you’re at your lowest isn’t an accurate report of reality. It’s a distorted, edited, exaggerated version of it. Knowing that is the first step to not believing everything you tell yourself.
References
- Beck, A.T. (1979). Cognitive Therapy of Depression. Guilford Press.
- Burns, D.D. (1980). Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy. William Morrow.
- Bandler, R. & Grinder, J. (1979). Frogs into Princes: Neuro Linguistic Programming. Real People Press.
- Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
- LeDoux, J. (1996). The Emotional Brain. Simon & Schuster.
- Neff, K. (2011). Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself. William Morrow.
- Sapolsky, R.M. (2004). Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers. Henry Holt.
- Seligman, M.E.P. (1991). Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life. Knopf.
- Kabat-Zinn, J. (1994). Wherever You Go, There You Are. Hyperion.