Category: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

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Ruminating Cycles and Triggers

Ruminating Cycles and Triggers

In previous blogs we’ve talked about the idea of ruminating cycles. If I have a negative thought, and that negative thought leads to two or three more negative thoughts, then those negative thoughts lead to a couple of dozen more negative thoughts, I am ruminating on negative thoughts. “Ruminating” literally means “to chew on.” So a ruminating cycle is a cycle in which I am “chewing on” a chain of thoughts.

Ruminating is sometimes called snowballing because of the way it behaves. Negative thoughts tend to naturally multiply, attracting more and more negative thoughts and growing like a snowball rushing downhill. It’s much easier to stop a snowball at the top of the hill before it has accumulated mass, momentum and speed. Likewise, it is much easier to stop a negative ruminating cycle when it begins than it is to try to stop it once it has gained momentum.

This is accomplished by identifying triggers that lead to negative rumination. The earlier in the ruminating cycle it can be stopped, the easier it is to stop the cycle. The way to catch a ruminating cycle and to stop it before it begins is to identify your triggers for negative rumination.

Suppose your husband isn’t paying attention to you, and that this lack of attention becomes a trigger for a negative ruminating cycle. Your negative ruminating cycle in this case might look something like this:

“He’s not paying attention to me. Is he giving me the ‘cold shoulder’? What have I done this time? Is he mad about something? Great…now he’s going to ignore me for the rest of the day! Why do I put up with this? I don’t see how this relationship can continue if he’s going to keep acting like this!”

This entire cycle of negative rumination was started with the simple observation that, “My husband isn’t paying attention to me.” The rest of the cycle was perpetuated by the assumption that his lack of attention had a negative origin. If that assumption hadn’t been made, then the negative cycle of rumination would not have been necessary. In order to stop the cycle before it began, the original assumption could have been challenged.

Challenging Ruminating Cycles

One way to challenge such negative ruminating triggers is to reframe them by making a different assumption about the observation. In the example above, you could reframe that trigger in such a way that it starts a positive ruminating cycle. Some possible reframes might be:

My partner’s busy right now, so that means I can have some ‘me’ time!
Maybe he has a lot on his mind. I shouldn’t take it personally.
This is an opportunity to show my support!
Each of these reframes assumes a positive rather than a negative intent from the observation, “My partner isn’t paying attention to me.”

Note also that even if the original assumption was correct, it is still possible to reframe the trigger so that it doesn’t lead to a negative ruminating cycle. Remember that the original assumption about the observation was, “He’s not paying attention to me. Is he giving me the ‘cold shoulder’?”

This correct negative assumption could be reframed in the following positive way:
“Well, just because he is choosing not to interact with me right now, I don’t have to let his mood spoil my own mood.”

Such a reframe allows you to validate your husband’s feelings without having them impact negatively on your own. Negative ruminating cycles can act as barriers to compassion. By assuming compassionate motives from our loved ones, we tend to act in ways that create a compassionate environment. By choosing to avoid negative ruminating cycles, we can act out of compassion even if our loved ones choose not to.

This doesn’t mean that we have to be doormats. We can still set firm boundaries while acting out of compassion. The way to do this is to expect the best from our loved ones while preparing for less than the best if necessary. When they choose to act in ways that are not compassionate, we can make it clear that we love them and care about them even when we may not agree with the way they’re acting right now.

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The Assumptions-Perceptions-Reality Triad

The Assumptions Perceptions Reality Triad and Cycle

Our assumptions work together to create our perceptions, and our perceptions create our reality. Let’s take a closer look at how this process works.

Suppose I have an assumption that, “Everybody in the world is out to get me.” That assumption will set my perception filter to look for evidence that supports my assumption. So any time anyone acts towards me in a way that can be interpreted as negative, I add that to my collection of evidence that “everybody is out to get me.”

At the same time, something interesting happens. Because my perception filter is set to look for evidence that people are out to get me, I’m going to look for that evidence even when people aren’t out to get me. Suppose someone isn’t out to get me, but is instead trying to do something nice for me. Since my perception filter is set for “people are out to get me,” how am I going to interpret this person’s nice actions? The answer is that since my assumption is that everyone is out to get me, this person can’t really be doing anything nice just to be nice. So I’m going to conclude instead that this person is only being nice in order to get something from me or to take advantage of me. My perceptions will cause me to believe that the reason this person is being nice is to set me up so that I’ll be caught off-guard.

So with my perception filter set in this way, everybody looks like they’re out to get me, and I’ve found evidence to confirm my assumption, because to me, even people who aren’t out to get me look like people who are out to get me.

Assumptions, Perceptions, and Reality

How do these assumptions and perceptions work together to create my reality? In the example above, imagine I’m someone trying to do something nice for you. I’m doing it because I think you’re a good person and I’d like to be your friend. But since your perception filter is set to only look for evidence that confirms your assumption that “everyone is out to get me,” you’re going to treat my attempts at being nice as attempts to take advantage of you.

How long would I continue to try to be nice to you if you continue to treat me as if I’m out to get you? Probably not for very long. Eventually I’m going to get tired of being treated like I’m out to get you, and I’ll give up and go away. The longer you continue to act on this particular assumption and perception, the more nice people you’re going to drive away. Eventually the only people left willing to interact with you will be people who are out to get you. So your assumptions and your perceptions have worked together to create a reality in which everybody remaining in your life really is out to get you.

Emotional aggression is usually the result of assumptions that others should be responsible for our emotional states. One way this could occur is if I assume that my partner should be responsible for my happiness. If I make such assumptions, then I’ve given up responsibility for my own emotional states. If I do that, then my moods will always be at the mercy of someone else’s whims, since I’ve placed my own emotional freedom in their hands.

If I instead choose to assume that only I can be responsible for my own emotional well-being, I set my perception filter to reflect that assumption. I can then look for evidence to support that assumption. By looking for evidence that supports my assumption that “I must be responsible for my own emotional well-being,” I create a reality in which I can choose to be happy and content no matter how others respond or react to me.

Think about some assumptions you may be making about your emotions and moods. How have these assumptions altered your perceptions? How have these perceptions created your present reality? How might you change your assumptions to get different perceptions so that you can create a different reality?

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Managing Beliefs

Managing Beliefs

Managing beliefs is a way of dealing with patterns of behavior that lead to emotional aggression. When we can look at the assumptions that support our beliefs, we can better manage our behaviors and avoid the tendency to respond with emotional aggression.

Looking over your answers from the Signs of an Emotionally Aggressive Relationship questions last week, did you identify any behaviors on the list that might be the result of your beliefs? If so, are these beliefs leading to consequences you don’t want? Some consequences you don’t want might include unhappy relationships with your partner, family members or friends, or difficulties with people at work or at school, or behaviors that may have gotten you into legal troubles.

As you examine these beliefs and how they relate to consequences, how many of these beliefs are linked to your answers to the questions on the Signs of an Emotionally Aggressive Relationship? Are there any beliefs that you might be willing to change so that you might get more positive consequences in the future?

If you have beliefs that lead you to unproductive consequences, nobody can change those beliefs for you. It’s up to you to change those beliefs. It’s up to you to manage your beliefs, and the first step in doing so is taking responsibility for them yourself.

Managing Beliefs: Emotional Chaos

Emotional aggression and emotional dysregulation often manifest as emotional chaos. People who have difficulty regulating their own emotions often create emotional chaos around them as a means of distracting themselves from their own inner turmoil. 

In addiction treatment, this tendency to create emotional chaos is called “drinking at” or “drugging at” someone. People with substance addictions, who are in denial about having a problem, cannot take personal responsibility for their addictive behaviors. If they admitted to being responsible for their addictive patterns of behavior, they’d have to admit to having a problem. 

So instead, they blame others. This means that in their own minds, if they drink or do drugs, it’s because of someone else’s behavior. A person in such a state of denial will actually provoke arguments with family members and loved ones. When they’ve provoked such an argument, and then the loved one becomes angry, the person with the addiction has an excuse to go out and use drugs. The excuse is, “You made me angry, so the fact that I got high (drunk, etc.) is your fault!”

If we replace the substance of abuse (alcohol or other drugs) with a pattern of emotional behavior, we can see how a person in denial about their own emotional dysregulation might provoke others in order to justify their own emotional aggression. 

Emotional states actually produce neurotransmitters in the brain that mimic the actions of many drugs. It is therefore possible to become addicted to emotional states. Such an addiction is called a process addiction, because the victim of such an addiction has become addicted to certain patterns of behavior (processes) or certain emotional states that generate chemicals in their brains. These chemical transmitters then mimic drugs often used to produce a ‘high.’

If you answered more than five questions on the Signs of an Emotionally Aggressive Relationship questions last week with a “yes,” look back over your answers and see if any of them involved a pattern of emotional aggression as a way of controlling others. 

If so, you may be suffering from a process addiction. That is, you may have become addicted to resorting to emotional aggression as a means of coping with life, or as a means of distracting from your own emotional regulation difficulties.

Next week we’ll start talking about how to deal with process addictions as they relate to emotional aggression.

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Process Addictions

process addiction and emotional aggression

Emotional aggressors can sometimes become addicted to their gaslighting behaviors.

The three major symptoms of an addiction are withdrawal, tolerance, and loss of control. In substance abuse, “withdrawal” manifests in physical and psychological symptoms upon abstaining from the drug of choice. “Tolerance” means that it takes more and more of the same drug to get the same effect. “Loss of control” means that as a person becomes addicted to a substance, they start giving up other things in pursuit of the next “high.”

People with addiction issues lose control over their behavior to the point that their drug of choice is the only thing that matters. They’ll forsake family, friends, work, school and any social interaction in pursuit of their drug of choice.

With emotional aggressors the “high” comes from manipulating others emotionally. For the emotional aggressor, withdrawal manifests as getting irritated, upset or angry when they can’t control you. Tolerance shows up as needing more and more control over the emotional states of others to get the same “high.”

Eventually this leads to loss of control. The emotional aggressor becomes more and more abusive over time, losing control of their ability to respect appropriate boundaries. Over time loss of control means that the gaslighting behaviors have become automatic. They don’t have to think about it and may not even be aware that they’re doing it.

Sometimes these automatic emotional processes can become what is known as process addictions. Robert Minor (2007) defines process addiction as:

“A process becomes an addiction when the process becomes the center of life, the most important reasons for living, when a person becomes dependent upon the process for mood-altering relief from the rest of life. For someone addicted to a process, the process with all its using activities substitutes for taking actions that would change the circumstances of one’s personal life and society that demand addictions to relieve the distress.”

What this means is that emotional aggression can become a conditioned response to a given emotional situation. If emotional aggression is consistently used as an anxiety-management strategy in your interactions with others, then you may be in danger of developing a process addiction. Conversely, if your partner or loved one seems to go on auto pilot whenever there’s a problem that needs to be addressed, they might have a process addiction.

How do you recognize a process addiction? If you’ve ever found yourself interacting with your partner or another friend or family member in a predictable pattern, there may be a process addiction at work. This is especially true if you are using emotionally aggressive responses in such a situation.

Suppose you’ve had an argument so many times that you can predict what your partner is going to say, and your partner can predict what you’re going to say. In other words, you’ve had this argument so many times that it’s almost as if there is an unwritten script somewhere that dictates your responses to each other. You keep going through the motions of this argument, but nothing ever gets resolved. Does this sound familiar?

I call such arguments Index Card Arguments, because it’s as if you’ve both written the argument down on an index card somewhere. You know that if you say this, your partner is going to say that, and your partner knows that if they say that, you’re likely to say this. If you could agree to write these arguments out on index cards and number them, you could both save yourselves a lot of time by saying, “Okay, we both know how this argument is going to turn out, so let’s just skip the argument and say that we had Index Card Argument #45, and take it from there.”

If you find yourself constantly having Index Card Arguments, it could be a sign that there is a process addiction occurring.

If nothing ever gets resolved from these repetitive arguments, then ask yourself honestly why you continue to engage in them. Do you feel better afterwards? Do these arguments cause you to feel more keyed up and anxious? Do they change your emotional state in any way? Are they taking your mind off of anxiety, depression, or bad feelings?

If you or your partner are using emotionally aggressive arguments as a means of managing your mood, then you may have a process addiction.

Minor, Robert N. (2007). When Religion is an Addiction. Humanity Works, St. Louis, MO.