Do you find yourself blaming others a lot? - Video transcript

Hey guys, I'm Kristen, the anxiety therapist. Thanks for checking out my vlog today. I'm going to be discussing a few more cognitive distortions. If you missed the last few videos, cognitive distortion is basically a thinking trap or thinking error. It's an automatic thought process or belief that we're not really consciously aware of and it often leads to distressing feelings.

So anxiety, depression, etcetera. The first one I want to talk about is the concept of control fallacies. And basically, if we feel externally controlled, then we feel pretty helpless. We kind of assume this victim mentality and then on the other side of the spectrum, we might actually feel responsible for other people's emotional states or feelings.

This is closely connected to the other cognitive distortion of blaming, where we feel others are responsible for our pain or that we are to blame or responsible for other people's problems. And the issue with control fallacies and blaming is that there there's no opportunity for change, right? We often feel stuck and trapped and um not in control of our own situations, right? Because somebody else is in control of our emotions or what's going on in our lives or we are perceived to be the cause of someone else's problems or distressing emotions.

And this kind of leads to the third cognitive distortion, which is the fallacy of change. And this is the idea that we need others to change because our emotional state depends entirely on them. And so we might pressure them to change in order to suit our needs in some way and this is actually what leads to a lot of co-dependency right?

Where we feel like someone else's emotional state is um, so impactful for us that our own emotional state is not completely in our control, that it depends on how that other person is feeling or how they're acting. That has a tremendous impact on what goes on for us internally. So the idea is to create awareness for ourselves when these cognitive distortions show up and then to be able to reframe them and remind ourselves that truly we are only in control of our own thoughts and feelings.

We do not have control over other people. And so much anxiety stems from this. Want to control others, not not in a controlling sort of way, but rather have this idea that, you know, if other people would just change or if they would do a certain thing or be a certain way or think or feel a particular way that that would somehow alleviate our anxiety.

So just some things to think about, you know, try to create some awareness when and catch yourself when you are engaging in these cognitive distortions. And that's the first step toward creating change. I hope this video was helpful. Stay tuned next Friday for some more content and have a great weekend.