Your understandings of yourself and the world around you were acquired when you were a child. Some of these beliefs are no longer valid; some never were. Nevertheless, some of your core beliefs —especially the negative ones about yourself and what others think of you— are not only false but handicap your performance. The resulting impaired performance ends up confirming the negative self-appraisal. So once established, the pathogenic mechanism can maintain itself indefinitely.

In this section, you will use a tool that forces you to examine the causal chain from an antecedent event to your perverse emotional reaction from both the first-person perspective and from the observer's perspective.

In my office, clients describe crises from the first-person perspective ["I thought X" "I felt Y"] and I as the psychologist consider the information from the dispassionate, observer's perspective. My objective is to understand the causes of the client's reactions, not whether [s]he is "good enough," "right," etc.

Personal Research

During these sessions, clients describe the episode: the antecedent events, their thoughts and feelings during the episode, and how things played out. The external events and internal states are described from the first-person perspective of the actor. I perceive the sequence from the perspective of an outside observer. Neither of us has the complete picture and each of us can learn something from the other's perspective.

The client experienced the episode as though the events caused her to react as she did. Cause-and-effect looks different from the therapist's perspective, who says, "It is your interpretations of the events rather than the events themselves that caused your reactions."

To give you some exposure to the method of shifting back and forth between the two perspectives, consider the recurring pattern personified by Mimi's predicament:

 

 

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