How you explain life's events to yourself determines if you are an optimist or pessimist. For pessimists, those events are explained by Professor Seligman's three "p's" of pessimism.
PERMANENCE
Pessimists give up easily because they believe the situation is permanent. The bad events will continue and always be a part of their lives. An optimist believes the causes of bad events are temporary. Here's an example you may find in your own relationships:
PESSIMIST: "You never talk to me:" OPTIMIST: "You haven't talked to me lately."
When things go wrong, everyone experiences a momentary sense of failure. How quickly you bounce back is reflective of this dimension of permanence.
PERVASIVENESS
Some people let failure pervade every aspect of their lives. If you lose your job, your role as a wife or a daughter or a volunteer has not diminished one bit. Dr. Seligman says it comes down to this: universal versus specific explanations. "People who make universal explanations for their failures give up on everything when a failure strikes in one area. People who make specific explanations may become helpless in that one part of their lives yet march stalwartly on in the others."
PERSONALIZATION
Whom do you blame when something goes wrong? Those who internalize blame tend to have low self-esteem, feeling unloved or unworthy, while the opposite is true for those who place the blame outside themselves.
Becoming an optimist
This section will take you, step by step, toward being an optimist. The more optimistic you become, the more your mood will lift.
Becoming an optimist means learning a set of skills that help you to talk to yourself when you confront failure, a setback, or a tragedy. You'll do that by changing the way you explain events to yourself. Technically, Dr. Seligman calls it the ABCDE (Adversity, Belief, Consequence, Disputation, Energization) method. Here's an example of how to fight pessimistic thoughts by changing the way you explain bad events.
ADVERSITY
You've gotten up at the crack of dawn, made the beds, called two new clients, and are about to leave for work when your four-yearold flips his breakfast onto the floor. You totally lose it and scream at the little tyke, who gives you a look of bewilderment.
BELIEF
"I'm a lousy mother. I just can't do it all. I'm providing a miserable example of how to behave and can't even be nice to my own children. My children will grow up to be hostile people who deal with the world through the prism of anger and frustration. They'll never amount to much of anything:"
CONSEQUENCE "I'm depressed."
DISPUTATION
A good way to dispute any charge is to imagine that your worst enemy said that to you. You wouldn't believe that you were a lousy mother and would argue the point SO, ARGUE! Like a lawyer launching an attack on a hostile witness, prepare the following arguments to counter your pessimistic thought.
- Make your belief factually incorrect with evidence. Look at all the evidence showing you that in fact you're not a lousy mother - you take good care of your children, get them to school on time, read to them ... you just had a bad moment.
- Decatastrophise the implications of the situation. OK, You yelled. Just how bad is that? Does that mean your child won't graduate from Harvard or will become an ax murderer? Yelling once is just not a catastrophe.
- Search for alternative explanations for your behavior. Focus on the causes that are changeable, specific, and nonpersonal. For instance, you were up all night with a new baby and just felt a little cranky. That's a long way from being a bad mother.
- Look at the usefulness of your belief. How useful or productive is it for you to think you're a lousy mother? Does that really help you be a better mother? Often, it's simply better to get on with what you have to do, to distract yourself, than to dwell on destructive beliefs.
We will continue the road on, Being an Optimist, next when we look at Energization and Immunization.
Dr Leo Kady
Dr Leo Kady is a retired physician and researcher and relishes information in a variety of fields. Dr Kady is an editor for uPublish.info ... http://www.upublish.info . Please feel free to peruse more free psychological articles at uPublish.info
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