Hi, I'm Dr.Tracy Marks, a psychiatrist, and I make mental health education videos. Today I'm talking about
emotional programming, what it looks like and what
it does to your thinking. Your early life experiences
with your parents, siblings, and other people in your life, leave an imprint on you that carries over into your adult life. No one's life is perfect because
we're all imperfect people and make mistakes. We say the wrong things, don't do enough of the
right things, et cetera. So the imprint that you're left with is a mixture of positive
and negative experiences. If you have enough positive experiences to fill your emotional cup, you can process the negative experiences and compartmentalize them in a way that they don't dictate every
aspect of your adult life. The negative experiences have their place. It's not like you can't remember them, but you're able to shake
them off and keep moving. If the sum total of your
experiences were negative, or you had some early
traumatic experiences that disrupted your emotional development, your imprint becomes
predominantly negative and affects the way that you
interact in the present day. So when instead of having an emotional cup that's full most of the
time, or is easy to refill, you have a hole in the bottom of your cup and you can't keep it full
and it keeps getting depleted. So how does this affect your thoughts and outlook on the world? You develop what's
called maladaptive schema in dialectical behavior therapy terms, but I'm gonna call it
negative emotional programming that creates these distorted
stories that you tell yourself. These stories keep
building and strengthening when your emotional cup gets depleted and you're working hard
to fill it back up. So here are six types of negative stories that you can come to believe
and let guide your behavior. Number one is the abandonment story. This tends to develop
from early experiences with people who were cold,
distant, or critical. And likewise, you tend to end up in relationships
with a similar dynamic, with people who are
treating you similarly. With this story, you say things like people
don't really care about me. No matter how good things
seem, it never lasts. I'm destined to end up alone. I worry about people I care
about leaving or dying. Ways to deconstruct and think through this is to ask yourself, do you have unrealistic expectations of how relationships should be? In what ways could you
practice being vulnerable so that you can open yourself up to experiencing more joy in relationships? How can you focus on developing more trust in a relationship? Because of your early experience, your reflexive reaction is to close down and protect yourself from being hurt. So to work past that, you have to allow yourself
to be more vulnerable. And what does that look like? I talk about being more
emotionally vulnerable in relationships in this
video on using conversation to create intimacy and combat loneliness. Next is the dependent story. You can develop this story
from early experiences of being overprotected in
a way that didn't allow you to take appropriate risks
and learn from your mistakes. If you were blocked from
making your own decisions and not being allowed to fall down, you don't learn how to stand
back up and be resilient. So you can say things like, I
can't cope with being alone. I can't trust my own judgment. I need someone to take care
of me and to make me happy. Life is too overwhelming
to cope with on my own. To deconstruct this, ask yourself, what are some small ways that
you can challenge yourself to do something outside
of your company zone? How can you gradually build
taking on more responsibilities? What can you do to enjoy
your solitude more? You need to learn to be more
comfortable with yourself so that you can be able to sooth yourself and break away from this
pattern of being too dependent on someone else to meet your needs. Number three is the unworthy story. You can develop this kind of thinking if you felt the standards
you had to meet were so high that you could never measure up. Or if you felt constantly
criticized or compared to others. Some of the things that you
may say to yourself are; I'm flawed. I'm unlovable.
I'm damaged. I'm less than. Ways to deconstruct and
to think through this are to ask yourself, whose voices do you hear when you say these things to yourself? If you didn't hear someone say this, what scenario do you envision where you were left feeling this way? For example, a parent pushing
you to always do better, can leave you feeling like
you're not good enough. Once you recognize whose
voice this represents, think about how that voice
was really an expression of their own issues. So you have a flawed person
leaving an imprint on you of being flawed. Once you make that connection, you can start the process
of tearing down the facade. If you saw the movie, The Truman Show, it was about a man who
was raised on television in a television studio, and
his entire life was staged. That's how you can see the
negative emotional programming that you live with. The negative things that
you believe about yourself are based on other negative beliefs that someone else passed onto you. And by the way, this is not
always about your parents. Children can do a lot of
damage to other children. They can also perpetuate an insecurity that you have about yourself. The next story you can tell yourself is the disconnection story. This could develop from having
insecurities about yourself, not having your feelings validated, but it can also be a part
of your personality style just not to be very open with people. Behaviorally, this can
look like keeping yourself in an arms distance in relationships to avoid opening up to people. Or you can distance yourself
by focusing on people's flaws and exaggerating the differences
between you and them. Some of the things that
you say to yourself are; No one understands me. I rarely feel close to people. I feel like there's an invisible barrier between me and other people. As you try to deconstruct this story, think of ways that this
story helps protect you from being hurt by others. What small step can you take to feel more connected to people? And this is another example where improving the quality
of your conversations can help you feel more connected. Another thing to ask yourself is, do you tend to discount
similarities and exaggerate differences between yourself and others? In other words, are you the one pushing
people away by magnifying small differences and
making them deal breakers? The fifth story is the mistrust story. This story can develop
from a deep seated belief that there's no one looking
out for your best interest. And this can come from
a traumatic experience or even the neglect. In this case, the neglect doesn't have
to be from your parents leaving you on the front
doorstep without food. This can be from a selfish parent who's always disappointed
you or ignored you. Behaviourally, this can look
like having relationships where you question the person loyalty, or it can look like
repeated relationships, where you tolerate unacceptable
behavior from the person. And then these exploitative relationships reinforce your mistrust of people. Some of the things that
you say to yourself are; Most people will use or hurt you. You need to stay on guard
to protect yourself. People only do or think nice things when they wanna get something out of it. To deconstruct this story, think about how much pessimistic thinking plays into the story. Pessimistic thinking is
where your mind focuses on the negative and hardly
acknowledges the positive. Think about things that people have done that show that they are trustworthy that you overlooked or didn't acknowledge. It could be something very small, like following through on
something that they said that they would do or showing up on time. Also, are you reacting
to a present situation as if you were in the past? In other words, are you holding on the
things that someone else did assuming that everyone is
gonna do the same thing or treat you the same way? When you do that, you're not judging the current person on the merits of their behavior. The last story is the failure story. And there's lots of reasons you can believe this about yourself. You could have had a series
of failures or inadequacies that weren't balanced by an
appropriate level of validation. If you fail enough, you can start to believe
that you'll always fail. Behaviourally this can look
like passing on opportunities because you're afraid to fail, or you can create a
self-fulfilling prophecy by giving it a low effort
or sabotaging your efforts so that you do end up failing. Some of the things that you
can say to yourself are; There's no point in trying
because I'm just gonna fail. I never seem to get things right. What if people realize I'm not
as good as they think I am? Ways to deconstruct this kind of thinking is to think about what
you would say to a friend if they were in your situation. Would you tell them not to try? Or would you help your
friends see the benefit of giving it a chance? Another thing that you can think about is whose voice are you hearing? That voice may not have
said the same thing that you're saying to yourself, but the person may have
made you feel as though there was no point in
trusting you to do something because you don't do things very well or you never follow through with things. There's a difference
between being mediocre, when it comes to achievements, and having a basic belief that you're a failure at most things. If you have enough self esteem, you will be able to fail more than once without those failures
becoming your identity. Your reaction to failure
shapes your long-term outlook. If you tend to over-focus on
negative aspects of things or tend to have black and white thinking, you are more prone to
internalize the failures. Do any of these negative
stories resonate with you? You can can break past
your emotional programming. The first step is
recognizing these patterns and a useful way to work on
deconstructing the thoughts is to write down things in a journal. That also allows you to
get out your raw thoughts and then fine tune them later. An important thing to
remember here though is, emotional reasoning drives
many of these stories. Emotional reasoning is a thinking pattern called a cognitive distortion
where your mind tells you that your emotions reflect reality. Even though your emotions can
inform you about the situation and how you should respond,
they're not always reliable. Examples of emotional reasoning are; I feel scared so I must be in danger. Or I feel guilty so I must
have done something wrong. But sometimes these are
just free floating emotions that pop into your mind triggered
by an unconscious thought based on something from the past. If that's the case, you can misinterpret
your current situation based on an emotion that's unrelated. So another way to process
some of these negative stories is to engage in self-soothing activity so that you can generate
some positive emotions. The positive emotions may
help you stop ruminating on your negative story. A couple of examples of
coping statements are; My past doesn't define me. My emotion does not reflect my reality. Whatever happens, I'll handle it. There's a lot to this. Thanks
for making it this far. You probably need to re-watch this video to get more out of it. And I'll do a follow-up
video in the future on distraction techniques
and self-soothing activities and grounding techniques. Then you can use those tools to get even more out of this video. Stay tuned. See you next time.
