Expecting life to treat you well because you are a good person is like expecting an angry bull not to charge because you are a vegetarian.
—Shari R. Barr
In the previous two chapters, we explained how acceptance, willingness, and detachment can help you counterbalance the pull of reactive mind. If you get drawn into following the advice of reactive mind, you are likely to end up engaging in emotional and behavioral avoidance strategies that feed depression. If, instead, you practice just being open, curious, and detached, you will activate and gain access to wise mind. This will allow you to approach and take care of those inevitable challenging moments in life that we all must face.
In this chapter, we will show you how reactive mind can draw you out of your accepting, willing, detached stance and back into a pattern of emotional or behavioral avoidance. We will examine two tricky features of reactive mind:
Reactive mind is wired with an innate drive to make sense of the world and how we fit into it.
Reactive mind wants to inject its sense of moral order about how things should operate in the world.
The first tricky feature helps create the appearance of order and predictability that humans seem to crave. Seemingly without prompting, we develop explanations for specific things we do or don’t do on a daily basis: why we didn’t go to church last week, why we yelled at the kids this morning, why we’re not going to work today, and so on. This is a prime function of reactive mind; its job is to identify cause-and-effect relationships that might impact our survival, such as calculating the speed of an oncoming car in relation to your current position as you cross the street in front of it.
In ACT, we use the term reason giving to describe this very important function of reactive mind. But, as we’ve pointed out again and again, the reactive mind doesn’t know when, where, or how to stop using this linear, analytic approach. It wants to break everything down into a cause-and-effect relationship—even your behavior, your personality, your self-concept, your personal history, and so on. So the big problem here is that you have to rely on this feature of reactive mind to function in the external world, but you can’t trust it to help you function in the world between your ears.
The second tricky feature of reactive mind is the tendency to apply morally charged categorical labels such as good or bad, right or wrong, fair or unfair, and so on. In chapter 7 we talked about the importance of being nonjudgmental about what shows up in awareness. The challenge in being nonjudgmental is that reactive mind believes that its main job—besides generating cause-and-effect explanations—is to evaluate events, situations, other people, and you along a moral continuum.
The ongoing processes of reason giving and moral evaluation are of tremendous importance in determining the quality of your life. When you fall prey to certain kinds of cause-and-effect evaluations combined with certain kinds of moral evaluations, your depression will be hard to control. When you buy into the content of reasons and moral judgments, it is difficult—if not impossible—to see mental processes for what they are: just antics of the reactive mind. Instead, you become attached to sticky thoughts.
In this chapter, you will take the fifth step in your campaign to transcend depression and reclaim your life: Learn to notice and be skeptical of the reasons your mind gives you so that you can put your energy into living nonjudgmentally—and with compassion for yourself and others—in the sanctuary of wise mind. We will teach you how to recognize the tricks of reactive mind that pull you out of a detached mode of awareness and cause you to suffer. We will examine reason giving in more detail so that you better understand the dangers of believing the analyses of reactive mine. We will examine four highly potent forms of moral judgments that reactive mind offers:
Right versus wrong
Good versus bad
Fair versus unfair
Responsibility versus blame
When you buy into these poisonous ways of categorizing the world, yourself included, you may act in ways that increase your depression and diminish your sense of vitality. The antidote for runaway reason giving and moral judgments is to just see them for what they are: not as Truth with a capital T. You can go into observer mode, accept without judgment what is currently showing on the TV screen of your mind, and let go of any need to follow reactive mind’s advice. At times like this, you’ll want to take the softer course of reconnecting with your values and behaving in a way that reflects positively on them. Each of these mindfulness-based actions will allow you to activate your wise mind so that you can just notice the antics of reactive mind and wait for whatever comes next. After all, life is one inner experience after another; we just have to wait for the next one.
As mentioned, reason giving involves the reactive mind’s attempt to establish a cause-and-effect relationship between two potentially linked factors. For example, suppose a man promised his wife that he’d pick her up after work and drive her home. For some reason, he forgets that he made this agreement and doesn’t show up. She’s pretty peeved about this and asks him why he didn’t show up. She’s asking him to generate a specific kind of cause-and-effect relationship: what happened that caused him to not show up. And the husband has a desire to provide a good reason: “I didn’t show up because I left my calendar at home and didn’t remember I was supposed to pick you up.” From an early age, we are trained to produce socially acceptable responses and to avoid using reasons that violate social norms (“I forgot” or “I thought about coming to pick you up, but I decided not to”). These are bad reasons, and you risk dire consequences if you use them.
Think of reason giving as a vehicle for both explaining and justifying your actions (and those of others) to yourself and to others. And, as we have mentioned, reason giving always originates in your reactive mind and therefore is very hard to detach from when the situation is emotionally challenging. However, as we say in ACT: Just because you think it doesn’t mean it’s real. Although your reactive mind is able to generate explanations for events and interactions in your life, that doesn’t mean those explanations are necessarily accurate!
Sense making, as the term suggests, is the mental process we use to both organize and make sense of the world around us. Sense making originates in the language system of reactive mind and thus is heavily based in linear cause-and-effect thinking. It helps explain why you do what you do, why others do what they do, and why life events unfold as they do. Sense making is used to explain why you like Coke instead of Pepsi (“My parents shoved Pepsi down my throat as a youngster and now I can’t stand it”); all the way up the ladder of complexity to the grand narrative of your life (“I was neglected and abused by my parents, so now I can’t trust anyone”). Regardless of the level of sense making, it always operates in the same basic way: an event, situation, outcome, or interaction is explained using an analytical, cause-and-effect reason-giving framework in which one element functions as the cause and another element functions as the effect.
It turns out that the inner world of a person experiencing symptoms of depression is filled with this type of sense-making activity. The problem is that sense making tends to suggest that there’s one specific cause (“I’m depressed because my job sucks”), when in reality there might be many other explanations that are just as plausible (“I’m depressed because I’ve stopped exercising, because I’m living on junk food, because I’m not dealing with my problems with my daughter”). In many life situations that involve personal pain, sense making can lead you down the wrong alley. Certain types of cause-and-effect explanations you may come up with, such as citing past events to explain your depression (“I’m depressed because my father constantly criticized me”), leave you with no way out. Since you can’t change or undo your personal history, this type of explanation, if you buy into it, leaves you with very few avenues for overcoming your depression.
Examining reason giving and sense making from a neuroscience perspective will make it apparent how fragile and flawed reactive mind’s explanations and justifications really are. The ability to generate and evaluate complex causal relationships is a distinctive feature of human intelligence. It involves an enormously complex array of mental operations that differ widely based upon the type of causal reasoning involved.
A new model of causal reasoning, cognitive simulation theory, holds that the brain contains neural pathways that automatically create mental simulations of analogous physical forces that can cause small to big outcomes in the external world (Wolff and Barbey 2015). Thus, the brain will treat something big and powerful on an emotional scale exactly like a big and powerful physical force.
For example, if you have experienced an emotionally devastating event, such as physical or sexual abuse, your brain will automatically tend to attribute more “causal force” to this event when you create a personal cause-and-effect narrative. The paradox is, whereas physical cause-and-effect relationships are automatically determined by the laws of physics, the same is not true for cause-and-effect relationships in our mental world. If a car hits a tree, the weight, speed, and direction of the car will precisely determine the force of the impact; the mathematics governing this event will never change. But one victim of childhood sexual abuse might fail to finish high school, engage in child abuse, and spend a lifetime battling drug and alcohol addiction; whereas another victim might get a college degree, become a prominent member of the community, and be a role model as a parent. In short, the mathematics of human events, along with their causal impacts across time, are far less linear and predictable.
Another downside of causal simulations being applied to past or present inner experiences is that, once a specific cause acquires enough “force,” it overwhelms the contributions of other causes, which subsequently get dropped from the mental simulation because they are not salient. For example, in the same car wreck example, head or tail wind speed would influence the mathematical formula determining the force of the collision, but in such a small way as to be practically meaningless. Similarly, depression might be treated as such an overwhelming cause that other meaningful causes simply drop out of the equation. This is why people with depression tend to use depression as the “causal force” to explain a wide range of depressive behaviors. Depression is a powerful emotional experience, and it can be pointed in any direction to explain why we do or don’t behave in a particular way. It can be the cause of why you didn’t go to work, why you stayed in your bedroom rather than spending time with your children or life partner, why you don’t like to spend time with friends, and so on. As this process of causal analysis sequentially unfolds, you are likely to feel more and more powerless to do anything about this behemoth. If depression can indeed cause this many things to happen in life, it must be a force well beyond your capacity to reverse.
The automatic nature of mental simulations of cause and effect leads to another problem: The simulation is only as accurate as the information that is used to construct it. Here we run into a well-known problem in depression called cognitive bias. Cognitive bias occurs when some information is readily retrieved from memory but other equally relevant information is left out. This results in simulations that are overloaded, or biased, in nature. They will look exactly like a regular simulation, but they will be inaccurate.
How does this happen at the level of neural circuitry? It turns out there is great diversity in the areas of brain recruited to process emotionally salient simulations, depending upon the emotional tone of the task. When individuals create cause-and-effect relationships using evidence that is consistent with an emotional state, a network of brain regions widely associated with learning and memory is activated, including the caudate nucleus and the parahippocampal gyrus. So, if you are sad and begin thinking about all the sad things that have happened in your life, and try to estimate the causal impact they have had upon you, your reactive mind’s simulator will automatically tend to screen in sad events and screen out happy events.
By contrast, evaluating information that is inconsistent with a preexisting emotional state recruits areas of the brain associated with error detection and conflict resolution, including the anterior cingulate cortex, posterior cingulate, and the precuneus (Fugelsang and Dunbar 2004). Interestingly, these areas of the brain are also core components of the executive control network. Thus, activation of the ECN is required to override the automatic and inherent bias produced in emotionally loaded simulations. As you will recall from chapters 4 and 6, these are the same neural networks of the brain that are energized and strengthened by mindfulness practice.
This pattern of differing neural activation explains why depressed individuals fall into sustained patterns of biased, self-defeating reason giving. This process is referred to as the depressive skew (Alloy et al. 2006). Simply put, the neural pathways responsible for running simulations that are consistent with depressed mood are habitually used and dominant compared with the pathways that run mood-inconsistent simulations. Thus, depressed people tend to develop reasons that attribute responsibility for positive (mood inconsistent) outcomes to luck, chance, or the actions of others. In contrast, they attribute responsibility for negative (mood consistent) outcomes to their own flaws, personal inadequacies, or lack of effort. The brain circuitry that supports this biased cause-and-effect reasoning involves the retrieval of biased and filtered memories, and previously generated reasons used to “explain” similar events in the immediate past. On the flip side, the neural circuitry and brain regions involved in generating reasons that short-circuit the depressive skew reside in the ECN.
By now, you might be wondering whether you can believe anything your reactive mind tells you. As we’ve said before, you can’t live without your reactive mind or the simulations it produces at will. It will help you analyze and solve all kinds of cause-and-effect problems in your external world. You just have to understand when your reactive mind can help you and when it will not serve your best interests.
Generally, when you try to analyze yourself in any emotionally meaningful way, reactive mind’s simulator is going to fail you, particularly if you are depressed. When you try to analyze yourself, a disproportionate amount of your reason giving will be self-focused and negative. Your reactive mind will say things like, “I didn’t get the job I wanted because I’m not as smart as the other applicants” or “No one talked to me at the party because I’m not a very interesting person.” In the past, you might have tried to argue with reactive mind’s reasons, probably to no avail. The process of reason giving is hardwired to be structurally flawed and illogical when it comes to emotionally meaningful events in your life. You are not going to be able to change that feature of your mind.
Instead, we want you to take a deep breath, get into observer mode, and just accept that your reactive mind is giving you a bunch of reasons right now—and you can choose to not participate. You have better things to do—valuable things to do. Just hold that half-knowing smile that activates your wise mind.
There are times when what appears to be an obvious cause-and-effect relationship is, in fact, an illusion. One good example is sunrise and sunset. To the mind, it looks like the sunrise is caused by the sun moving up and emerging above the eastern horizon, and the sunset is caused by the sun descending below the western horizon. For centuries, people assumed this to be true and believed that the sun (as well as the moon and stars) orbited around Earth. This is, of course, an illusion. In reality, the apparent motion of celestial objects is caused by the Earth rotating on its axis and orbiting the sun. And on a cosmic scale, the entire solar system is moving through space at an unimaginable speed. However, we directly perceive none of this because our frame of reference is limited.
There are many illusory relationships in the world between the ears—a world full of symbolic activity that’s constantly ebbing and flowing. As the human brain has evolved, it has expanded its ability to extend reason giving to areas of living where simple cause-and-effect explanations don’t work very well. For example, if you go to a party and become extremely self-conscious to the point of choosing to leave early, you might develop a reasoning sequence along these lines: “The party caused me to be even more depressed; therefore, to prevent being depressed even further, I need to avoid going to all parties.”
The tricky thing is that this cause-and-effect statement could be an illusion, just like the sunset or sunrise. There could be a multitude of other causal factors at work to produce this experience. Some could be fairly straightforward, like lack of sleep, too much coffee, or seeing an accident on your way to the party. Others might be more complex. Maybe you were afraid you might run into your ex, or maybe this was the first office party you attended at a new job and you were desperate to make a good impression. Though a list of possible factors could become quite lengthy, notice that reason giving (going to a party leads to depression) implies that there’s one main causal agent. This presents a very serious problem: When the reactive mind is bent on finding a simple reason for a complicated situation, the odds of that explanation being accurate and useful are pretty slim.
In ACT, we believe that reason giving is a learned mental skill that’s necessary for social order. Being able to justify your behavior is a fundamental part of your role as a social animal. For example, if one kid hits another kid in a kindergarten class, the teacher will ask, “Why did you hit Johnny?” If the kid can give a socially approved reason for why he did what he did, such as, “I hit Johnny because he took my crayons,” he will get a much better response from the teacher than if he says something like “I hit Johnny because he’s short and I like hitting him.” This social training in reason giving begins early and continues throughout life. Suppose you miss a day of work and your boss asks you why you didn’t come in. You aren’t likely to say, “Because I wanted to spend the day in bed watching movies,” even if that’s the truth. You know you need to say something like “I was ill” or “My child was very sick with a temperature of 102 degrees.”
As you’ve learned, the reactive mind is capable of generating reasons for almost anything it comes across. As one ridiculous example, the sentence “The brown grocery bag caused me to drive off the road” could function as a reason why a person ran into a tree. The minute you read that explanation, your reactive mind begins to generate various ways that a brown grocery bag could cause a person to drive off the road. Maybe his or her windows were down, the bag caught the air, and it landed on the dashboard, blocking the driver’s view. Notice that as you read that explanation, your reactive mind created an image of the scenario and you may have felt quite satisfied with having been able to solve the puzzle. However, if we asked you to come up with three more scenarios explaining how a brown bag could cause a person to drive off the road, you could do that too.
Your reactive mind is designed to simulate all cause-and-effect relationships as if they were plausible. This is because the external world is full of cause-and-effect relationships, and to operate in that environment you need to have a system for constantly attending to and updating those relationships. There are often good ways to test cause-and-effect reasoning in the physical world. If you don’t believe that sunblock prevents sunburn, go outside and test the idea. However, there’s no good way to test this same kind of thinking when it’s applied to the world between your ears.
Let’s go back to the example of the kid who hit Johnny. His explanation basically boils down to “Johnny took my crayons, and this caused me to hit him.” When you really look at this, you can see that this is an absurd explanation. “Johnny took my crayons” didn’t actually, physically cause him to raise his hand and hit him, right? There might have been any number of other forces at work. He may have been tired and irritable. He might have been hungry. He might have just shared a toy with another kid, who refused to give it back. Dozens of things could have contributed to this simple act. But the child has learned, at some level, that a socially approved answer works best. As children, we quickly learn that giving an accurate account of our behavior isn’t nearly as important as coming up with a socially approved reason. This raises the very real possibility that the reasons you generate to explain or justify depressed behavior, a sad emotional state, loss of motivation, or social withdrawal are little more than vestiges of your social training as a child and adolescent.
Now let’s complicate the situation. If you’re that kid in trouble, to really get the teacher off your back you have to add a mental state that acts as the middleman between Johnny taking your crayons and you hitting Johnny. This mental state is anger. Once the teacher understands that you were angry about having your crayons taken, it doesn’t make hitting a permissible response, but it does provide your teacher with an explanation for why you did what you did. But check this out: Did anger really make the kid hit Johnny, or does it boil down to a choice?
Describing an event (like having your crayons stolen) or a state of mind (anger) is not the same as explaining what caused the behavior (hitting Johnny). Although he may have experienced anger when Johnny took his crayons, there isn’t a cause-and-effect relationship between either of those events and choosing to hit Johnny. A variety of responses were possible in that situation. Even as adults, we fall into the habit of using emotions as if they were physical forces compelling us to behave in some way. Instead of a young Johnny hitting his friend, it might be a grown-up Johnny who is so depressed that he doesn’t show up for work and doesn’t call in sick. When his supervisor asks for an explanation, Johnny is going to say, “I was too depressed to go to work.” His supervisor may in fact buy this explanation!
The take-home message is: Emotions don’t cause you to behave; you cause yourself to behave. Once you abandon your allegiance to this destructive form of reason giving, you will be able to choose your behaviors based on your values. You don’t have to let your sadness or anger make important life choices for you. You can make those choices, and sometimes you will have to work your way through not just one negative reason but a maze of them. Kevin’s story illustrates how complex and intertwined reason giving, social expectations, and emotional avoidance can become.
Kevin’s Story
Kevin, twenty-eight, lives alone with his dog in a sober living apartment. He has been separated from his significant other for almost one year. Kevin served in the military for a four-year period, during which time he barely escaped an IED attack that left two of his buddies dead. Kevin reasoned that they walked into the ambush because he missed something that could have prevented the attack.
Kevin began to abuse alcohol after his separation from the military two years ago. He and his high school sweetheart had planned to support each other in completing their college degrees, but Kevin dropped out a year ago because of stress. He blamed himself for not staying the course and encouraged his girlfriend to move back in with her parents and get her degree. Once alone, he drank more heavily and barely managed to pay his living expenses by washing dishes in his parent’s restaurant. His parents insisted that he seek help at a local veterans center and attend Alcoholics Anonymous.
After four months of sobriety, Kevin noticed his depression was getting worse, not better. Because he was alone a lot, he had plenty of time to think about his past and ruminate about his life situation. His mind worked day and night generating reasons to explain and justify his failures.
I can hardly get to work because I am so depressed.
I am depressed because I let my buddies and my girlfriend down.
I can’t clean my room because I’m too depressed.
I can’t see my ex-girlfriend because I’m too depressed.
Cause-and-effect explanations are often used to justify doing things that aren’t socially acceptable. Since depression often involves withdrawing from or avoiding socially expected actions, it’s likely that you, like Kevin, sometimes find yourself in a position where you need to justify why you did or didn’t do something that was expected of you.
Reason Giving in Your Life
This exercise invites you to identify reasons that impact your mood and your behavior. Read through the following statements, which are often used to explain our behavior when we are depressed. Which ones have you used to explain your actions (or lack of action)? Put a checkmark beside reasons you tend to use to explain or justify your behavior. Most of us tend to fall back on using the same few reasons over and over again because they fit many different situations. We call these go-to reasons. If you run into a go-to reason, write “go-to” beside it.
______I was too tired to go walking.
______I didn’t go to work because I was so depressed.
______I can’t deal with my kids because I’m too depressed.
______I have no motivation at all, so I just sit around.
______I stay by myself a lot because I would just feel worse if I were around people.
______I would eat better if my mood wasn’t so bad all the time.
______I can’t stop smoking because my mood just goes down the toilet.
______I don’t date because I’m still trying to get over my depression.
______I drink alcohol because I’m depressed.
______I won’t argue with my partner because I just get more depressed.
______I didn’t get together with my friends because I felt so lousy.
______I didn’t go to church because people there don’t understand what it’s like to be depressed.
Further Exploration. Do any of these statements ring a bell for you? You probably recognized several statements similar to those you’ve used to explain your depressed behavior. Did you run into go-to reasons—the ones you tend to use repeatedly in different situations? Don’t beat yourself up if you endorsed quite a few of these reasons. This is a natural part of depression—and you can do something about it! With patience and practice, you will get better and better at recognizing and detaching from reason giving when it serves no useful purpose in your life.
Moral reason giving is an especially potent feature of reactive mind. Moral reason giving helps us both explain and justify our responses according to an imaginary moral yardstick about how life should work. Assumptions about moral order in the universe are buried so deeply in our day-to-day language that we just believe them to be true. For example, let’s say that during a staff meeting your boss doesn’t give you any credit for your help in getting an important project done well and on time, even though you put in plenty of overtime to do so. This makes you feel victimized, and because of this you begin to act in a self-protective way at work so your boss won’t do it again. You might not volunteer for a new important project because you are angry at the way you’ve been treated. You might begin to look for a new job on the side or look to transfer to another department. As you overidentify with your moral reason giving, your behavior becomes increasingly organized around the assumption that your boss violated an unwritten rule of life.
There are four basic categories of moral reason giving that play a major role in depression: right versus wrong, good versus bad, fair versus unfair, and responsibility versus blame. Whenever you sense the presence of any of these forms of reason giving, try to detach and take a posture of just holding your thoughts, without buying into them outright. Let’s take a look at each poison pill, and then we’ll explore some strategies to help you detect and short-circuit them.
The belief that something isn’t right implies that an injustice is being committed and someone is the victim of that injustice. There are some obvious examples of injustice, such as being physically or sexually abused. However, what’s right or wrong is far less obvious in many situations. A prime example of this is expectations about how other people should treat you. You have your own unique set of rules about what must happen for a relationship to be right, and the other person has his or her own unique set of rules too. Deciding that an offense has occurred when your rules about moral order are violated implies that your rules are the right ones.
When you swallow the poison pill of right versus wrong, you’re far more likely to act on your anger and desire for vengeance. Although you probably value being loving and respectful of others, right and wrong might lead you to say or do things that are mean and hurtful. The other side of this coin is that you’ll begin to see yourself as a victim. When you look at yourself in this way, you’re likely to withdraw, act in a passive way, and see the other person as having evil intentions. Be very careful when you see thoughts like “This isn’t right” or “I shouldn’t have to go through something like this.”
Good versus bad describe the qualities of an object or event in terms of how desirable it is. If you say you’re a “good person,” this means you evaluate all of your personal qualities as desirable. When you have an evaluation like “He’s a bad person,” you’re essentially saying that all of his qualities are very undesirable. One of the trickiest ways your reactive mind delivers this poison pill is through negatively charged words you might use to describe yourself or someone else: loser, defective, boring, untrustworthy, liar, hopeless, empty, unlovable, ugly, and so on.
The emotional pull of good and bad is strong, and we don’t want to associate with bad stuff (unlovable, loser, ugly) because it’s unhealthy to do so (another good–bad evaluation). We only want to associate with the good stuff (lovable, winner, attractive). The problem is, most of us don’t fit easily into one category. We are neither all good nor all bad, and there is a lot of gray as well. Oftentimes, the same personal quality that hurts us in one life situation might be a tremendous positive in another. Reactive mind has trouble accounting for how we fit into life contexts that frequently shift and realign.
The moral reasoning behind fair versus unfair has a special twist to it. Fair implies that you deserve a certain outcome based on who you are or something you’ve done. When something is evaluated as unfair, it means you’ve been arbitrarily punished or deprived of something you deserve. This particular type of reason giving can be a real impediment in situations that require you to act in a purposeful way. Taking the stance of being unfairly treated usually results in a person standing still and throwing a temper tantrum at life. Unfortunately, other people involved in the situation may and often do see it differently.
Some people who struggle with long-term depression often buy into moral reasoning that life hasn’t been fair to them. The problem is, just because you followed a certain set of rules about how to get a good life doesn’t mean you’ll have mostly positive feelings and experiences. Life doesn’t work that way. Life is not fair, nor is it unfair. What’s more, life doesn’t care whether you think it’s fair or not. The time and energy you spend under the influence of this poison pill would be better spent pursuing a valued life.
This type of moral reasoning invites you to assign responsibility for an unwanted outcome to the person who caused it. The need to assign responsibility tends to be strongest when negative life outcomes are present. To illustrate the dangerous side effects of this poison pill, let’s consider a depressed woman who is struggling with infertility. She thinks, “If I had taken better care of myself physically when I was younger, none of this would be happening.” In essence, she’s making herself responsible for medical problems that she has no possible control over.
This form of moral reasoning is toxic because it focuses your energy on determining who is responsible for what and downplays the fact that there are some things that just happen randomly and are beyond your control. When you are depressed, you might be tempted to hold yourself responsible (and to blame) for an event or life problem you have no control over: the unexpected death of a loved one, a divorce, a child’s drug problems, and so on. In reality, many things happen to us that we did not want and had no say in whatsoever.
We may also find ourselves blaming someone else for our problems, and this, too, may be a trap. Whatever wrongs are done to us, we don’t want to tie up too much of our energy hating the offender. Forgiveness actually benefits the harmed person more than the offender. You can’t protect yourself from many things in life. It’s all about how you work with the moral reasoning in your own mind; you can choose freedom from rigid reason giving. Remember the half-smile, and you are on your way.
Now let’s turn to a series of exercises designed to help you learn to both recognize and detach from reasons. The goal is to simply hold reasons, seen as reasons, without buying into them. These exercises include practices that help you learn to play with reasons and notice poison pills at play in your life—without getting hooked by them.
Play with Reasons
Remember that, for the most part, reasons aren’t accurate explanations of events and why they occur; they’re just mental events. This means that none of what you write in this exercise is actually true, scientifically speaking; it will not be an accurate cause-and-effect analysis that includes all possible factors. However, you will learn something about the workability of different types of reasons. Since all reasons are arbitrarily constructed, those that produce unworkable outcomes in your life are poor reasons. Conversely, those that produce positive results are workable reasons!
This exercise gives you the chance to entertain the possibility that you’re falling prey to the depressive skew of your reactive mind during important moments in your life. The first step is to choose three life situations that are bothering you right now—anything you’ve done that needs a reason, such as missing work, avoiding intimacy, avoiding a social opportunity, or harming your health by eating, drinking, or smoking too much. Briefly describe each situation in the left-hand column.
Now, in the middle column describe the most depressive reasons possible to account for why each problem is in your life right now. Then go to the right-hand column and describe the least depressive, most extremely positive perspective. The idea here is not to be accurate. Instead, it is to challenge your mind to be more flexible and creative in generating reasons.
Play with Reasons Worksheet
Further Exploration. What did you notice as you went through this exercise? Was it easier to come up with and write out the self-blaming reasons? How did you do with generating extremely positive reasons? Did you notice that you felt differently when you went the depressive route versus the positive route? This is one way to play with reasons. When you notice the depressive skew showing up, go for a crazy-positive alternative. Push the positivity level to the point where you have to smile. This will help you strengthen the neural circuitry that both detects and counteracts memory and processing biases in the brain.
Poison Pills
In this exercise, you’ll identify a couple of your hot-button situations. You’ll look at how these may be fueled by moral reasoning that might lead you into an unworkable stance. Before you start, take a look at the example from Kevin’s record in the first row of the table.
Then, in the left-hand column, describe one of your target situations—an event or interaction that really sets you off emotionally. Pause, take a moment to step back, and watch your mind begin evaluating the situation. Just watch, and then decide which of the poison pills might be at play in your response to this situation: right versus wrong, good versus bad, fair versus unfair, or responsibility versus blame. Then, write the poison pill that applies in the middle column (do not swallow it). In the right-hand column, write out whatever moral reasoning your reactive mind hands you as you hang out with the poison pill. Then pause and smile at yourself. Go ahead and do another hot-button situation now if you like.
Poison Pills Worksheet
Further Exploration. How did you do at detecting poison pills in your life? Most of us have been walking around with these moral reasons at the ready for many years. If you keep on the lookout and repeat this exercise regularly, you can become a poison pill cop. Pull that poison pill over and cite it for speeding. Use this approach when hot-button situations come up in your day-to-day life. Remember the steps: notice reasons (cause and effect), name them, and, above all, continue to act in ways that are consistent with your values, not with your reactive mind’s biased reasons (and your depression). Push yourself to come up with ridiculously positive reasons from time to time!
Reason giving functions to explain and justify your actions or lack of action, but reasons are not the same as causes.
Depression is characterized by biased information that leads to overly simplified, inaccurate explanations of depressed behaviors.
Your evaluative mind weaves moral reason giving into the fabric of everything you experience—things, people, and events. And it makes assumptions about how life works seem like indisputable truths.
Depressed individuals tend to use reasons that portray depression or lack of motivation as the cause of their problems.
Your depression does not cause you to do anything; you are in control of your actions, or lack of action, regardless of your mood.
Learning to notice reasons is the first step in learning to detach from them.
You can see your reason-giving mind for what it is, use it when it pays to do so, and act in ways that build a life worth living!
