Positive counter statements, a mental health tool

[packbat]

A preface: nothing in this post is the fault of Edmund J. Bourne, PhD, author of The Anxiety & Phobia Workbook (fifth edition). That book introduced us to the concept, but we are not psychologists and our interpretations are our own.

That said, we hate most of the posts we can find on the World Wide Web on the technique, so we're writing our own. Hit us up in the comments if you have thoughts on our presentation of it. Content warning for discussion of self-loathing, albeit in a healing way.

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Sometimes your brain comes up with reasons for you to hate yourself. The goal of positive counter statements is to refute those reasons.

Just to be concrete about it: sometimes we hate who we used to be and we're ashamed of that - ashamed of hurting people for garbage reasons - and it really brings us down. And, y'know, that feels like the kind of thing a brain would latch onto in this way: there's undeniable truth there (this was Packbat hurting people, this is Packbat now, Packbat now can't do anything to fix it) and our brain builds its argument from there (Packbat should feel awful). It's like rhetoric: it's based on something, because otherwise it won't stick.

...but, y'know, there's a real jump in this logic, from the one point to the other. From truth to self-loathing. And there are other truths.

Yeah, this was Packbat hurting people ... but people change and get better - that's a normal thing. And we say "people" deliberately, because for us specifically, affirming other people is easy enough that it's a good way to logically imply affirming us as well. People change and get better, and we're a people, so if we want to say we don't get to change and get better, we have to defend saying that about everyone else. Including some of our dearest friends. We're not gonna defend that.

And yeah, hurting people is bad ... but the point of thinking about wrongs you did is knowing why you were like that and becoming something else. You can argue with that, but we won't, because we believe it. On the occasion burdening us today, we were bourgeois trash who had no respect for cultures unlike our own, and we let that disrespect do our thinking for us ... but if you think guilt and innocence is a matter of how respectable you are, then you're as big a fool as we aren't, any more. We know better than to rely on those feelings. And respectability is a trap.

And of course we can't fix it. Those pasts are distant from us now, and we don't know the people involved. Sometimes you break things, and it sucks, but you do the best you can in the aftermath. Helplessness can mess you up bad, but one narrow helplessness is not a complete lack of power. We can do things now, and it might not right the scales, but doing right isn't about getting a high score in the rightness coin-op arcade - you do it because it's important to. Maybe we can't get what we want, but we can do something, and that might be enough.

(And we didn't break everyone we hurt - we don't have that power. We were talking to one the other week who didn't even remember what we did.)

And I want to point out that none of these positive counter statements we highlighted are the double-negative of our negative self-talk. We aren't pointing at our self-loathing and saying, "Don't go there", we're pointing someplace better and saying, "Go here." We aren't helplessly trying to be not self-loathing, we have a plan to execute on.

I don't know how easy it is to do this. We draw on Tumblr wisdom, ideological principle, things said to us and things we said to others. We imagine advising someone else on similar matters. We affirm neurodivergence, trauma response, self-identification, self-philosophizing, and rebellion against injustices small and global. We remember that brains like to catastrophize (something bad = everything bad) and exaggerate (a handful of cruelties = pervasive evilness) and call that out. We find holes in the arguments and generalities violated. And we say something true, something we believe, that makes the toxins in our self-loathing untenable.

Truth is the key to it, I think. We do not change our feelings by force of will or mantra - we let ourselves feel whatever comes out, and what we change is how we think.

...and sometimes you need to tell yourself these things more than once. Thoughts form habits - it takes time and repetition for habits to shift.