Therapeutic Defusion Of Distorted Thoughts: What Is It And How Does It Work?
If people came from the factory with the mental capacity to not take too seriously everything that crosses our minds, if we understood more easily that not everything we think is what we live or are going to live, it is very likely that It would be much easier for us to accept and adapt better to our reality.
The truth is that, commonly, the opposite occurs. We humans get entangled with ruminations. We often develop thought patterns based on learned distorted beliefs that, in certain situations and for different people, they lead them into a vicious circle of excessive worries, recurring doubts, a lot of nervousness and anxiety disorders.
It is common for people to come to our consultations, those of professional psychotherapists, who are very attached to thoughts that they consider define them: that make them perceive themselves as useless, incompetent, even inferior. People who experience a kind of unproductive mental numbness, with which they end up identifying and suffering.
When we evaluate these people, with such intrusive thoughts, we consider that a cognitive fusion has occurred in them, that is, a total attachment to one or more distorted thoughts. These people find it difficult to observe these thoughts as different from themselves; They are completely absorbed in a looping mental chatter.
In these cases, managing to create a gap between the person and their self-harming thoughts is essential. Cognitive defusion, within the framework of acceptance and commitment therapies and contextual therapies, and even in the cognitive restructuring combination of cognitive-behavioral therapies, has been demonstrating its effectiveness to observe with perspective and confront counterproductive and distressing thoughts.
Cognitive defusion is a process through which we can learn not to take thoughts in an imperious way, at face value, to reduce the force of those words with which, sometimes, we beat ourselves over and over again Therapeutic defusion facilitates the understanding that distorted thoughts are not our real experience, no matter how much they are capable of making us feel sadness, anxiety, shame, embarrassment or jealousy.
Language can lead us to judge ourselves harshly, to devalue ourselves and to make us believe that what we think defines us as people. When this happens to someone, especially if they hold inflexible beliefs, they usually develop avoidance behaviors whose objective is to try to get those negative ideas out of our heads that cause us so much discomfort.
Said like that, it would seem like something very appropriate, positive and useful. Particularly, if we start from the belief that avoidant efforts alleviate psychological suffering. However, beyond the avoidance strategies with which we try not to feel fear, sadness, etc., and which barely provide us with temporary relief, this avoidance has more to do with the perseverance of the problem than with its resolution.
In this sense, Cognitive defusion, without denying that changes in thoughts are beneficial, proposes the abandonment of unproductive avoidance efforts based on the acceptance of those counterproductive thoughts and learning the differences between what is thought and direct experience, breaking that fusion between thought and person. Diffusion is a process that must be explained and implemented with therapeutic sessions; it requires time for whoever goes through this process to adequately perceive the distinction between “him/her” and her experiences.
How does cognitive defusion work?
There are different techniques through which we can put into practice the cognitive defusion or learning necessary to discern between what we think about something and what really is or happens. Since these techniques may seem strange or strange to our clients, it is best to explain them by presenting them in the appropriate context.
Remember, if you are a psychotherapist, or understand if you are not, that this phenomenon of defusion is contrary to a lifetime in which we have internalized the belief that the words, with which we form our thoughts, accurately explain our life experience. , they capture the absolute truth, they define us. Fortunately, there are many ways to identify, in therapy, these thoughts as thoughts and how thoughts do not capture the whole truth of a person’s direct experience
Techniques such as “Look at” versus “Look through,” introduced by clinical psychologist Chris McCurry, offer a very concrete way to present defusion, using physical props such as bug-eye glasses or tinted glasses. (patient and therapist position themselves) it is possible to distance oneself, to see the problem from an observer’s perspective (the glasses are of anxiety, sadness, dependency, etc.); It is understood that the content of self-referential thoughts does not define us as people.
Identifying thoughts as a product of the mind, using techniques of metaphorical linguistic convention, allows the defusion of problematic thoughts. Metaphors allow the release of the unproductive mental numbness, which we talked about at the beginning, because they favor breaking with the literality of avoidance thoughts. You will easily understand the similarity that “fighting with anxiety is like running desperately to get out of a quagmire”; It is very ineffective
Since it is easy for our mind to make negative evaluations of almost everything, of our experiences, of other people, of the world in general, the evaluation-description technique is (among others) very appropriate for the defusion of ruminative and intrusive thoughts. . Basically, it is about the client perceiving the solidity of direct experience, through descriptive language as opposed to evaluations based on learned and inflexible beliefs that usually lie behind problematic thoughts.
