How Cognitive Therapy and Nonviolent Communication Can Improve our Daily Life

Watch out for your parasite stories

Have you ever found yourself wondering why you overreacted to a trivial thing? Why others can be so calm in social circumstances that give you anxiety?

The answer lies in the stories we tell ourselves. Stories we are not even aware of telling them.

We do not live in an objective world, we live in stories. Stories we told to ourselves, stories our parents or our teachers told us, stories that our culture keeps repeating and reinforcing day by day.

These stories work like computer programs. Any “data” or “facts” in our lives are run through them. Sometimes these programs are viruses, hacking our healthy responses and causing harm to us and to others.

Maybe we waved at a friend and he did not react. Or maybe we found out that your group of friends had a wonderful party last week and they did not invite us. All of a sudden you feel hurt, anxious… angry.

What we don't realize is that before that emotion arose, there were some thoughts there. A story we told to ourselves:

“They don't like me. It is something wrong with me. No one cares about me”… Or something like this.

We can turn those stories outward: “They are so mean/ungrateful/cruel.”

When we found ourselves caught in intense rage for trivial things, chances are that is one of these parasite stories running our internal world.

I keep remembering this story whenever I am found myself inexplicably emotional:

I once was taught a remarkable lesson while working with students in a correctional school for children in Wisconsin. On two successive days I was hit on the nose in remarkably similar ways. The first time, I received a sharp blow across the nose from an elbow while interceding in a fight between two students. I was so enraged it was all I could do to keep myself from hitting back. (On the streets of Detroit where I grew up, it took far less than an elbow in the nose to provoke me to rage.) The second day: similar situation, same nose — and thus more physical pain — but not a bit of anger!

Reflecting deeply that evening on this experience, I recognized how I had labelled the first child in my mind as a “spoiled brat.” That image was in my head before his elbow ever caught my nose, and when it did, it was no longer simply an elbow hitting my nose. It was: “That obnoxious brat has no right to do this!” I had another judgment about the second child; I saw him as a “pathetic creature.”

Since I had a tendency to worry about this child, even though my nose was hurting and bleeding much more severely, the second day I felt no rage at all. I could not have received a more powerful lesson to help me see that it’s not what the other person does, but the images and interpretations in my own head that produce my anger. (Marshall Rosenberg — Nonviolent Communication — a Language of Life).

Same trigger, different reactions. Similar situations, completely different outcomes.

The difference is in the thoughts that run in the background.

There is an entire field of psychology dedicated role of thoughts in cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT).

The part that I like the most about CBT is the emphasis on the fact that we do not react to what is happening but to our interpretation of what happened. It is not events that bother us. It is our thinking, the stories we tell ourselves that make us feel the way we feel.

This is the power of a story: it can move us to anger in a split second without even knowing why. Or it can keep us calm even in the middle of a storm.

These stories, our judgmental thoughts are so fast that they are hard to spot, we are not aware of them. It seems like there is no thinking there, just trigger and reaction, cause and effect.

What is easy, is to spot is the feeling.

We all sense when we are afraid, mad, or sad. And this can be the beginning. We can start by noticing our reaction and then pause. Slowing down. Asking what is happening. Questioning our thinking.

Or, if it is too late for that, questioning what happened. Why we were so triggered. And making a conscious decision that next time when we feel furious or anxious we will slow down.

There are many places where Cognitive Therapy and Nonviolent Communication met: The first one is that both of them are using the power of observation.

Observations Observations are what we see or hear that we identify as the stimulus to our reactions. Our aim is to describe what we are reacting to concretely, specifically, and neutrally, much as a video camera might capture the moment. This helps create a shared reality with the other person. When we are able to describe what we see or hear in observation language without mixing in evaluation, we raise the likelihood that the person listening to us will hear this first step without immediately wanting to respond and will be more willing to hear our feelings and needs. Source, Basic of Nonviolent communication)

We might need a lot of practice. But the good news is that, in time, we will learn to associate these destructive feelings with a warning sign. It will be easier and easier to say “wait a minute, what is happening here?”

This is a short video about the positive effects of questioning our thoughts.

I love it. I am already practicing reframing. The power of this technique is truly amazing.

I hope you will give it a try.

You might be surprised by what you find. This can be a game-changer. For you and for all the ones you interact with.

Thank you for reading until the end.

I hope you will find my article useful. If you want to read more, have a look at my series of articles about one of my life-long dreams: living in an intentional community. The journey I had, the mistakes I did, and the lessons I had.

The most exciting part of my journey on Medium is that I’ve found inspiration for a science-fiction novel, featuring The Silver Woman, an AI who can dream, her mentor, The Dancing Tree a wise Lakota woman, Dr. Spock, an older AI who can use or disable his feelings as he wishes, Zwenistein, the youngest AI who wants to find the mathematical equation to prove God`s Existence and many more exciting characters.

If you want to know more about Tantra, here is a list of my articles about it.

And last, but not least, here are the most important lessons about writing on Medium. My fool-proof formulas on coming up with new ideas every day and the things I wish I’d know when I started writing here: