The ANTs Go Marching Two-by-Two

 Gun's Quote:

"You dumb, idiotic, retard."

-Me

It pains me to type the above quote. It was something I told myself for years. I would do something wrong and say the above statement to myself. I had no patience with myself. I couldn't accept the fact that in order to learn you had to make mistakes, and I felt like if I couldn't get it right the first time, every time, I was a failure.

The consequences of telling myself that statement for years on end, unchecked, led to the first breakdown. That was about eight years ago.

Long story short, I ended up calling a therapist group. The man who answered the phone was Bill. Bill and I set up our first appointment, and we have been seeing each other since. Today, we meet twice a month. Originally, we met at least once a week.

It was those therapy sessions where I learned about Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, or CBT for short. CBT is a practice where you change your thinking patterns. It is based on the core principle that psychological problems are based, in part, on unhealthy thinking and/or behavior. Basically, therapy was learning how to change the way that I thought about myself.

There are several different forms of CBT methods. The original treatment plan I started with (and remains helpful today) is called the ANT Method.

ANT stands for "Automatic Negative Thought." It is the practice by which you identify the negative thoughts that you have, write down the Cognitive Disorder behind the thought and then challenge the thought.

In practice, this turned in to a spreadsheet for me. (I may or may not have a slightly unhealthy affinity for Excel, but that's another topic...) I created three columns in a spreadsheet. The first column was the ANT. The second column was the "Cognitive Disorder," and the third column was my challenge to the ANT based upon the identified Cognitive Disorder.

The Cognitive Disorders were presented to me in the book Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy by Dr. David Burns, M.D. A brief description of the disorders Dr. Burns identifies are below:

1. All-or-Nothing Thinking: The concept that everything must be done perfectly because anything else is a failure.
2. Overgeneralization: Arbitrarily concluding that because something happened to you once, it must happen again. (Examples: Being turned down for a job, date, promotion, etc.)
3. Mental Filter: Filtering out anything positive and focusing exclusively on the negative.
4. Disqualifying the Positive: Transforming neutral or positive experiences in to negative ones by justifying that the positive or neutral experience is somehow invalid or untrue.
5. Jumping to Conclusions: Jumping to a negative conclusion that is not justified by the facts of the situation, or by no facts at all. An example of a conclusion with no facts at all would be something like "Fortune Telling" or "Mind Reading." You neither have any idea what the future holds, nor do you truly know what somebody else is thinking, but you make yourself think you do.
6. Magnification or Minimalization: Blowing things out of proportion or blowing off something important as unimportant.
7. Emotional Reasoning: Taking your emotions as evidence of truth. (I think or feel this way, therefore it must be true.)
8. Should Statements: Saying "I should do this" or "I must do that." (These statements cause you to feel pressured and resentful.)
9. Labeling and Mislabeling: Creating a negative self-imaged based upon your errors. "I'm a failure. If people knew the real me, they wouldn't like me. I am flawed."
10. Personalization: Assuming responsibility for a negative event when there is no basis for it being your fault.

Here is an example of what my spreadsheet looked like with the above quote:

• ANT: "I'm a dumb, idiotic retard."
• Cognitive Disorder: Labeling and Mislabeling
• Challenge: I have no diagnosed mental handicap, therefore the statement is false. All test scores, GPAs and academic metrics indicate that I'm in at least the 75th percentile of academic achievers, further proving the statement false. The facts clearly state that the ANT is false.

Note that I made no mention about the OFFENSIVENESS of the quote. Is it offensive? Without question. However, in challenging the thought, if I focus on what it is false, regardless of its offensive nature, I render the thought invalid, null and void. I don't need to focus on offensiveness; I need to focus on truth. Otherwise, I just argue with myself.

To-date, I have written down 56 ANTs in my spreadsheet. All of them, with the exception of two, (Work in progress...) have been challenged by identifying how I am thinking about them incorrectly and responding to them accordingly.

The ANT Method was the very foundation by which I started to heal the self-inflicted wounds I had been slinging upon myself for years.

I have trained myself to challenge my ANTs. I have also had to learn that having ANTs isn't a bad thing. We have hundreds of thousands of thoughts fly through our brains every day. People with Depression and Anxiety have a tendency of getting "hung up" on those thoughts, which is why the ANT Method is particularly helpful. Simply because I have an ANT doesn't make me "bad" or "wrong." I simply have to look at the ANT, show myself how the ANT is a Cognitive Disorder and then challenge it to remove its power over me.

To understand where I am at today, you have to know that the entire foundation of my therapy started here.

To understand how a motorcycle plays into this, you have to understand the ANTs. In actuality, the motorcycle journey really started right here. 

Next week, I'll start to explain why...

...and that's why it's a Gun's Quote!!