Choose an important situation in which you experience debilitative emotions that interfere with your ability to communicate effectively. With the help of a partner or class group, use the steps in Section 9.4.4 to reappraise the rationality of your beliefs. Report on how the reappraisal affects your communication in this important situation.

Data From Section 9.4.4:

Minimizing Debilitative Emotions Debilitative emotions are fostered by irrational thinking. Irrational thinking is when our mind wanders down a path of thought that links things together that are unrelated, or makes us only consider our options in a scenario as “black and white” when there are many possible outcomes that may occur. Irrational thinking can lead to overgeneralizing about the emotions that we are feeling or about the interactions that caused the emotions. In order to overcome debilitating emotions, there are four steps to help minimize them, in order to reduce how much impact they are having over us, so that we can instead manage them effectively both in the moment and in the long term.

Step 1: Monitor Emotional Reactions What is happening internally at the moment? We should try to name the emotion we are feeling. It is important to be able to gauge the intensity and severity of the emotion we are feeling. By naming the emotion, we are better able to gain self-awareness of what that emotion is doing to us both physically and emotionally. Does the emotion change over time or does it stay the same? Does it get more intense or does it seem to fade? Are there certain people, places, things, phrases, etc. that bring the emotion back or make the emotion worse? Looking at the example that we provided earlier, if you are aware that you are working with a coworker whom you typically don’t get along with, it will be important for you to be aware that you get more easily agitated with them. Maybe you will shorten conversations with them or try to stay busy in areas where they aren’t so that you can avoid communication that might make you internalize that annoyance. This allows you to focus on communicating with customers and actively putting a smile on your face in order to hopefully help change your mood internally as well.

Step 2: Note the Activating Event What caused this emotion to develop inside of me? Does it relate to the setting I am in? The types of people I am communicating with or interacting with specific people? Or maybe its specific topics of conversation that tend to make this debilitative emotion “rise to the surface.” One of the authors shares a personal example:

I have a difficult relationship with my mother that extends back the majority of my life. There are many times when I can remember getting extremely angry in conversations with her, where I have left crying or close to crying because of what was said. When I try to look back at all the times those types of incidents have happened, I might be able to identify what the activating event is that creates these extreme and long-lasting emotions. Once I can make the connection that the topic of conversation around weight or physical features tends to push me into debilitating emotions very quickly, I can then be aware of when those interactions might come up with my mother in order to have a greater sense of control on how I handle them, or if I need to avoid them all together.

Step 3: Record Self-Talk Recording our self-talk is an important part of being able to change the internal dialogue and take back control of the way in which we allow that emotion to take up space internally. Going back to the workplace example: If you allow yourself to get aggravated with your co-worker, you might start to hate your job as a whole. While you don’t work with this co-worker all the time, you are letting the interactions that you have with them impact your overall experience of the workplace. This might begin to impact your self-concept of your work ethic and your interactions with customers overall. Repeating the internal dialogue of “I hate this place” might perpetuate conflict with customers or co-workers that you don’t want to occur. For the author's example, she may feel that she wouldn’t get into these arguments with my mother if she lost weight, or if her body looked different in some way, or if she exercised more. She may believe that it is her fault these arguments occur because of the way that she looks.

Step 4: Dispute Irrational Beliefs This leads us to the final step in minimizing debilitative emotions, which is to dispute irrational beliefs. You are not a “bad person” because you don’t get along with all of your co-workers, nor is our author's physical size or shape responsible for the relationship with her mother. When we start to monitor and take specific note of the self-talk that the debilitative emotions are making us feel, we can start to see how irrational those debilitative emotions truly are. Being able to see the logic—or the lack of logic—in our own thought patterns allows us to see that the emotion is taking over control of what we know is true and real. Even being able to read the self-talk that we used as examples earlier showcases the disconnect the thoughts have in response to the interaction that is causing these emotions. That does not mean those emotions are not valid—all emotions are valid —however, in those moments, our emotions are controlling us instead of us controlling our emotions.

Being able to get to a point where we can identify our own irrational beliefs is not always as easy as it sounds, and it is much easier when written into four steps than it is to practice in real-life examples—especially attempting to do it in the moment when the emotions are controlling us. But the idea is to challenge our internal dialogue by asking questions, and as with most things in life, practicing this technique makes us better able to see, recognize, and take back control of these emotions over time.

The four steps in minimizing debilitative emotions are challenging to complete, and require a lot of time, practice, and patience to work through. It is important to remember that becoming a more competent communicator takes time, and “perfection” does not exist. Once we feel we are at a place where we are continuously remembering to monitor our emotional reactions and to note the events that tend to activate certain debilitative emotions, where we are more aware of our self-talk and how to pinpoint the thoughts and beliefs that are interfering with our lives, we can begin to work on changing our self-talk.

There are many ways we can approach changing our self-talk, but some of the most common advice stems from treating ourselves like we would treat a friend, based on the cognitive behavioral theory (CBT) through self-compassion. Self-compassion essentially means that we are being kind to ourselves—understanding that we are all learning and growing, and with growth comes making mistakes. It is also important to remember that we are all critical of ourselves from time to time, and sometimes our mind does trick us into believing things that are not true about ourselves. Trying to catch negative self-talk in the moment, and either stopping it completely or challenging it, is an important way to stop debilitative emotions from spiraling and allow more facilitative emotions to come forward.