How to Dispute Irrational Beliefs (Without Arguing)

hi i'm martial of uncommon knowledge and welcome to how to dispute irrational beliefs without breaking rapport with your client [Music] once upon a time a beautiful princess sat at the edge of a clear ornate pool in her palace grounds now as she leaned over the pool to gaze at her reflection her priceless bejeweled crown tumbled from her head and into the water with a loud splash now at the sound of her all is lost scream her royal attendance rushed to her from all sides in order to see what the problem was and when they heard that her crown had fallen into the pool they all frantically jumped one after the other into the ball themselves thrashing about in search of the precious object now of course all this effort did nothing but churn the water and swirl up a lot of mud and rotten debris from the bottom of the pool and all the while the princess was screaming and shouting and cursing at her attendance to find her precious crown and of course the water grew incredibly murky and the crown disappeared from view completely and the princess and her attendants were completely panicked now at this point who should come upon the chaotic scene but the palace storyteller a bent and bowed old man with twinkling eyes and with one glance he took in the chaos and rather than join the maelstrom and jump into the pool with them he sat calmly down at the princess's side and immediately launched into a riveting tale of times gone by and his sonarous voice wove such a fascinating tapestry of love and adventure that the aides climbed out of the pool to sit down nearby and listen rapidly as though they were hypnotized by this story and the princess herself stopped shrieking and for a time forgot all about the lost crown by the time the storyteller came to the end of the elaborate tail everyone and everything even the mud in the pool had settled down and so the storyteller reached into the pool once again still and clear and easily plucked out the now plainly visible crown now it's an interesting story and it can be all too human to jump in too fast to fish out the meaning behind something including a story for instance it's not always immediately clear why someone is taking longer than usual to reply to our email or why they made a certain comment or why they didn't seem to greet us in the morning and so forth it's easy to jump in too quickly and stir up the mud of our imagination and assume that we know what something must mean and when an event is ambiguous a meaning vacuum occurs that can be far less comfortable for us to tolerate than the clarity that we prefer in life some people much like the royal storyteller can calmly sit with a meaning vacuum and wait for clarity to come along at its own time they may even accept it's possible they'll never truly understand what happened in a certain situation but when we prematurely stamp meaning onto an event we lose a golden opportunity to truly understand it now what does this have to do with our therapy or counseling clients and the point here is that rushing to muddy the meaning of something causes people all kinds of problems in life emotion as you know triggers the imagination which isn't a bad thing in itself but problems can develop if we get into the habit of automatically believing that what we imagine is the whole truth rather than just one possible interpretation of reality and that can mean that we can jump to conclusions which are um very bad for us people overwhelmed by strong emotions such as depression anxiety or anger or jealousy tend to rush to fill any information gap with negative meaning and then believe that assumed meaning is an unshakable truth they believe or they may believe that an emailed response is slow to appear because the other person is angry with them for example or instantly interpret an unclear comment as some kind of criticism so rather than letting the meaning vacuum exist for a while they fill the meaning vacuum with the contents of their imagination and then believe that to be true and of course this way of thinking just makes our clients feel worse there's a real art to developing the capacity to wait and relax with waiting for meaning to become clear in its own time to be cool in the real sense of the word so here are three tips to help your clients learn to relax with and wait for clarity rather than always having to rush to judgment so number one you can begin to cast subtle doubt if your client tells you that her friends have started avoiding her since she became depressed because she's such terrible company then rather than risk breaking rapport by forcefully disputing this belief you can gently ask evidence seeking questions such as have you have any of your friends actually told you this okay that you're bad company and that's why they don't want to see you or have you overheard your friends talking about you in this way or have you asked them why they haven't been seeing you or you might suggest could it be that that's the depression talking or do you have any actual proof and evidence that this is why you haven't seen so much of your friends recently okay of course their belief might be correct but it might not be that's the point or even more subtly you might nod your head empathetically while someone is talking to you about their life and problems but if they start saying how everybody at work hates me stop nodding at that point okay this sends a minimal message that there might be some doubt about this but you haven't directly clashed against their belief system this sends an almost subliminal signal that there may be something here we can be less sure of notice that this is not about telling people they're wrong they may be right after all perhaps they are but the nature of an irrational belief is that it's not rational okay and if it's not rational then there are irrational reasons for having that belief which may mean that the belief is unwarranted so when you suspect that people are filling in a meaning gap without enough real evidence you can just start to cast a little doubt here and there number two ask them to generate other possible interpretations so if you text your friend or leave a message and they don't get back to you you could leap to the conclusion that they hate you and people actually do this so they can get back to me i've upset them or they don't like me anymore but is that the only conclusion you can draw okay or how about starting to generate multiple possible reasons okay some of them quite mundane and uninteresting reasons or less dramatic reasons you know maybe their phone battery is dead it's not a very exciting reason why they haven't got back to you but it's just as valid as anything else or uh they've left their phone phone at home perhaps okay or maybe they've lost their phone or maybe they just haven't checked their phone for a while or maybe they they've gone they're swimming you know who knows or at the gym or working out or uh maybe they forgot to get back to you they meant to get back to you and then got distracted and they forgot the better or maybe they're in a movie theater or maybe they're having a huge fight with someone and can't check other messages maybe they're worrying about something else maybe they're thinking about something else maybe they forgot to turn their ringer back on after work and they just didn't hear that they received a message okay who knows okay the point is who knows one thing's for sure you don't know until you know for sure there's simply not enough information to draw any conclusion but drawing unfounded conclusions from insufficient evidence is no way to conduct a psychological healthy life if a client gives you interpretations of events that are clearly damaging them you can help them train their brain into generating lots of different possible explanations okay it's not to say that any of these explanations are right or correct but they're just as likely to be as any other okay this gets their brain to free itself from its normal assumption and expectations and to develop the capacity to hold off until the facts make themselves known until the mud settles and we see what's really going on number three draw a distinction between believing and knowing so you believe i'm guessing that the earth travels around the sun and you've a pretty good reason to believe this but you know from personal experience that it hurts when you stub your toe against the door okay so one is a belief however however well founded the other is knowledge okay from experience two different ways of knowing some beliefs have more supporting evidence than others but knowledge has to do with direct experience and the trouble is that belief can easily masquerade as knowledge so we need to remember the difference you can talk to your clients about the difference between belief and knowledge and or you can just imply by the language you use that there is a difference okay so um for example okay you might say that or the client might say might say something like um i know she hates me now you know after this after what i said i just know she hates me now and you might say well what are the main reasons that you believe this okay sometimes disputing irrational beliefs hinges on the final word belief so rather than how do you know this you know one of the some of the main reasons you believe this so you framed it as a belief rather than immutable knowledge and because ultimately just like the storyteller who retrieved the crown from the bottom of the pool we all need to be able to wait patiently and let things calm down before we see the meaning of them sometimes and of course sometimes there are emergencies and sometimes we have to act fast but with these sort of emotional patterns then we can clearly see what there is and what if anything we should do about it so i hope you found that useful and if you did please hit like and subscribe and if you want to hear when my next video is published hit the notification bell below this video i'm mark tyrell of uncommon knowledge and if you'd like to subscribe to my email newsletter you can find it over at unc.com blog that's unk.com blog and thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: Mark Tyrrell

Views: 400,453

Keywords: disputing irrational beliefs, how to dispute irrational beliefs, how to dispute irrational thoughts, irrational beliefs, beliefs, counseling, psychology, mark tyrrell, uncommon practitioners, mental health, psychotherapy, psychology facts, irrational beliefs ellis, irrational beliefs examples, mark tyrrell uncommon knowledge, psychotherapy techniques, therapy tips, mark tyrrell therapy tips, mark tyrrell tips, tips for psychotherapy, storytelling, therapeutic story, irrational

Id: NzhZ2_ySIzY

Length: 12min 19sec (739 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 20 2021