Questions to Ask Your Destructive Thoughts to Keep Them from Running Your Life

We all have a specific, unique way of viewing ourselves, others, and the world around us based on our biology and life experiences.  If you’ve dealt with anxiety or depression, your thought patterns probably have some level of distortion. Often the thoughts you have discourage you from completing daily tasks that seemed so simple before depression or anxiety hit.  Emotions arise from the thoughts you have about events, as different interpretations of an event can lead to vastly different emotional responses.

It’s easier to notice symptoms of overwhelming emotions, lack of motivation, and changes to behavior than it is to notice the thoughts driving them.  But key to experiencing relief from anxiety and depression is to recognize your thought patterns behind those emotional and behavioral shifts. 

Recognizing Distorted Thought Patterns

If you’ve been having destructive thinking patterns, you may not know it.  Have you ever been to a circus or carnival where there was a fun house with oddly shaped mirrors?  Looking at yourself in one of those mirrors makes your body look tall and thin, short and stout, or perhaps even swirled.  Now imagine if those were the only mirrors you had in your home, and one day you visited a friend who had a plain, flat mirror.  Looking into that mirror, you would likely think, “What’s wrong with this mirror?  Why is it showing me like that?” You’ve never realized that the mirrors you’ve been looking at your whole life haven’t shown you reality.

When we have negative beliefs about ourself, others, or the world, they form a lens (much like this distorted, fun house mirror) through which we interpret everything.  We skew whatever circumstance we’re in, interaction we have, or problem we face as directly related to this destructive thought.  There are several categories of these destructive thought patterns.

Also, these thoughts are usually several layers deep.  Let’s say you see a friend while you’re out for a walk and she doesn’t acknowledge you.  Your first, automatic thought might be something like, “Is she mad at me?”  This is quickly followed by a chorus of other thoughts (“I wonder if I’ve offended her somehow.  Is she upset I didn’t invite her to that get-together last week?  I haven’t been calling her often enough.”) which ends in a deeper, core belief (“I’m a bad friend”).

As you reflect on this thought pattern, you may also have a negative thought pattern about these thoughts.  When you notice yourself thinking about yourself negatively or interpreting situations in negative ways, you might think, “Why do I always do this?  I get myself so worked up over little things and then it ruins my whole day.  I’m such an idiot.”

Questioning Your Thoughts

Once you’re aware of these thoughts and can recognize how they’re hurting you more than they’re helping you, you have the opportunity to shift the narrative.  Consider the questions below as tools to help you change the way you think about yourself, others, or the world.

How true is this thought?

Often our thoughts have some grain of truth in them, even if we’ve blown it out of proportion to the stressor.  However, destructive thought patterns often are more negative than accurate. 

For example, take the thought “I’m a bad person” that comes because you raised your voice at your children in the heat of an angry moment.  It is true that you raised your voice, and that isn’t in alignment with your values of parenting.  But magnifying this one mistake to pass  judgment on who you are as a whole is intensifying the thought beyond what is true.

What evidence supports this thought?  What evidence goes against this thought?

This question builds off the previous one to offer evidence to support (or deny) the “truth” of your thought in the context of the situation.  Consider this as putting your thoughts on trial.  You’re parsing out the evidence you have in front of you objectively, taking emotions or bias out of the picture.  This often influences what you see as reality in the situation. 

Is this thought helping me or hurting me?

When you have this thought, how does it make you feel?  What does it make you want to do?  Ruminating or focusing all your attention on negative thought patterns is destructive to your mental health.  If you notice your thought patterns lead you to retreat from relationships, feel exhausted or overwhelmed, engage in self-destructive behaviors, feed into addiction, overeat or oversleep, or cope in ways that ultimately hurt you, this might be a thought pattern worth changing.

While sometimes it may feel as though you don’t have control over your thinking patterns, using these questions is a great way to shift those thoughts.  Consider: how is this thought affecting me negatively?  How might shifting my perspective on this situation affect me differently? 

What would I say to my best friend if they told me they were having this thought?

We are our own worst critics.  In most cases, we would never speak to our friends the way that we speak to ourselves.  Use this question to evaluate whether you’re being too harsh on yourself or whether your limited perspective on the situation might be influencing your reaction.

Think of an encouraging mentor or friend in your life.  What would they say to you about this thought?

Picture sitting across from this person and imagine their face as they hear you share those thoughts with them.  How would they look at you?  Would there be judgment or compassion in their eyes?  How might they respond?  Similar to the last question, imagining speaking these thoughts aloud with others changes the way you hear them.

If you are a Christian, you might also ask yourself: what would God say to you?  Use Scripture like 1 Corinthians 13:4-7 to connect to the love and compassion He has for you, and identify Bible verses that respond to the concern you’re feeling.  Connect to your identity in Christ as a source of hope and reassurance against negative beliefs about yourself. 

Where is this thought coming from?

As mentioned earlier, we learned our unique ways of interpreting events from our life experiences.  See if you can pinpoint where this negative message or thought pattern was hammered home for you.  Were they words communicated to you by someone from your past who has hurt you?  Even if the words were never communicated directly in this way, are they influenced by messages you’ve indirectly received about yourself or your worth?

How might my current circumstances be affecting my thoughts?

When we’re feeling hungry, angry, lonely, tired, bored, or a number of other distressing feelings, those can intensify our reaction to life events.  When our basic needs for relationship, nourishment, safety, and rest aren’t being met, we can become worn down and more susceptible to negative interpretations.  Have there been triggers in other areas of your life that might be intensifying these thoughts?  How has your self-care been – sleep, eating, social time, leisure time, work, etc.?  Are there stressors in your life that might be compounding your negative thought patterns? 

What is the least pathological explanation for what happened?  What is most realistic?

If you’ve ever dealt with depression, you know that depression can convince you to be absolutely certain about the truth of your negative interpretation of events.  In anxiety, worst case scenarios often feel like the only possible outcome.  Consider what alternative explanations might exist for the situation in which you find yourself and identify if those might be valid in any way. 

As an extension of this question, it may be helpful to ask yourself what the worst-case scenario is (probably what you’re already thinking), what the best-case scenario is, and what is most realistic.  What is most likely to happen is often the most realistic possibility, and it often exists between the two extremes of best-case and worst-case.

Through what core belief “lens” might I be viewing this thought?

In the film the Wizard of Oz, Dorothy and her friends visit the Emerald City and are asked to put on glasses before they enter.  With those glasses on, everything they see is in various shades of green!  But if they were to remove those green-tinted glasses, they would see the true colors of their surroundings for what they are.

Our core beliefs function in much the same way.  When we believe something at the core about who we are, we interpret all events that happen to us and around us through that lens.  If I believe I’m unloveable, I will interpret my spouse’s delay in responding to my text as evidence that they don’t love me.  Notice if any of your thoughts are colored by these core beliefs, and imagine what it might look like if you took those tinted glasses off.

A Christian Perspective on Personal Growth and Change: Review of How People Grow by Henry Cloud & John Townsend

In my work as a therapist, I am grateful for the daily opportunities I have to walk with clients through their most challenging seasons of life.  For some, these trials arise from circumstances that spiral out of control or past trauma that has influenced their response.   Or their struggles are caused by their own mistakes or actions, which is particularly true in the case of addiction.

When we face the challenges of addiction, tense marriages, attachment issues, trauma, depression, or anxiety, it’s easy to get caught up in hopelessness.  You may fear that nothing will ever change.  That’s usually what pushes people into therapy – understanding that you’re at the end of your rope.

Normally you’ll understand the what – what you would like to see change.  But the difficulty comes when you ask how: how do I experience freedom from this addictive pattern?  How do I cope with the loneliness that seems ever present?  How do I calm my mind when it’s keeping me up at night racing with anxiety?  How can I find hope in my marriage that feels like it’s on its last legs?

For Christians, these questions can be especially challenging, particularly if you’ve heard messages from the church that the solution to these issues is to “have more faith” or “trust God more.”  Some faith traditions are wary of psychology and therapy, saying that the Bible is all you need for a solution. While there’s always room to grow for every Christian in the areas of faith and trust, and the Bible contains much truth that can be encouraging and challenging, these messages can oversimplify or minimize the process of growth.  There are certainly more steps that can be taken in faith to address the question of how to change. 

How People Grow

Henry Cloud and John Townsend address the foundations of this how question in their book, How People Grow: What the Bible Reveals About Personal Growth.  They take a Christian, Biblical approach to understanding the mechanisms behind change.  They emphasize that spiritual growth and emotional/relational growth are essentially the same process.  In their words, they state that spiritual growth can and should affect your “real life.” 

This book integrates the concepts of Biblical theology and psychology together in a way that offers hope and help for those who feel lost in the quagmire of their current challenges.  They focus on specific components of theology that have a direct bearing on our daily lives or response to life’s struggles.

In reading this book, I found several of the principles helpful for bridging the gap between Christian teaching and concepts involved in counseling. At the end of each chapter, the authors offer reflection questions, both for personal growth and for growth as a leader.  If you challenge yourself to work through this book, I’d recommend journaling through these questions or discussing them with a group. You can also purchase their companion workbook to have more space for reflection.

Addressing the How

The authors seek to answer the question, “How does a Christ-following person experience change?” Below are a few areas they point out as essential to facilitate change.

The Role of the Trinity

With three distinct chapters that address all three members of the Triune God, the authors remind us of the place of God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit in the process of healing.

• The Father God offers grace through revealing the law, which illustrates that we cannot be perfect and that we need Him and His grace.

• Jesus provides an example for life because He has experienced suffering, temptation, and pain in ways that allow him to relate more deeply to us.

• The Holy Spirit offers empowerment, guidance, strength, and wisdom to change within us through transforming our hearts.

Acceptance

In 12 Step groups, the most important, foundational step (Step One) requires accepting your own powerlessness.  We need to recognize that only when we are at the end of ourselves can we begin to change, truly accepting and experiencing God’s grace.  Experiencing those rock-bottom moments actually lead us to good, in that they point us toward God and away from prideful independence and attempting to fix ourselves on our own.

Acceptance involves recognizing our sin and knowing that we have been given a new standing before God.  If we can’t see our own failures and shortcomings, we can’t receive God’s grace through the love of Christ.  We need to accept the reality of our pain and our own role in it so we can experience hope. Yet because we are already loved by God, we do not need to prove ourselves or make ourselves good enough through sheer willpower.

Practicing acceptance is necessary for patience with the process of change.  We often try to rush change, wanting it to happen on our timeline and within our control.  But patience involves waiting on God’s timing for healing.  This doesn’t mean, however, that you are passive in the healing process: rather, you often take an active role of participating in what God is already doing. 

The Importance of Support

I appreciated the authors highlighting the reality that God often works through people to push along the process of change.  In relationships, we can experience grace in practice through forgiveness, and we can be encouraged and validated.  In grief or hurt, we often don’t feel we have courage or strength, but we can draw upon that of others to help us along.  Others can offer mentorship, modeling the life you desire, such as a 12 Step sponsor who is further along in the recovery process.  Choosing transparency and honesty with friends offers accountability and structure outside of your own faulty self-discipline.  Good friends can challenge you toward growth.

Find people in your life who can offer some or all of these components with a mindset of both truth and grace.  You need people who will encourage and build you up, but you also need people who can help you to grow in discipline.  If you’re part of a Bible study or small group, seek to make that group a context for growth.  Within recovery, social support like this is key to achieving sobriety and living a recovered life.

Guilt vs. Conviction

Have you ever been in a relationship with someone where you express feelings of hurt, but they feel so guilty about how they’ve wronged you that they shut down, become consumed by their grief, and then withdraw from relationship with you? Or perhaps you see yourself here.  This has the opposite effect of what the hurt partner truly desires: reconciliation and connection.

“If you have ever been in a relationship with someone who fails you and is overly concerned with how bad she feels as opposed to how she is affecting you, you understand how God feels.”

— Cloud & Townsend, How People Grow

Cloud and Townsend make an interesting argument that the feeling of guilt as we understand it tends to lead to more selfishness and hopelessness than it does to change.  It quickly becomes tied to shame, or negative beliefs about our identity.  This shame and self-pity leads us to feel bad about ourselves or the rejection we experience from others, keeping us caught in our own heads.  We miss the opportunity for grace here, that we are already forgiven for those mistakes.

They suggest, first, to recognize the areas where you tend toward guilt feelings.  These could be “shoulds”, family background and influence, cognitive distortions, harshness with self, or masking a deeper hurt or responsibility.  Then, instead of descending into a pit of shame or self-pity, imagine a response of grace and love from God in that area, knowing that He has already forgiven you and will do the work of transforming you if you let Him.

Taking Action

I appreciate the author’s choice to address some of the limiting messages that can be portrayed by churches by reminding us of the importance of taking action in response to these truths.  Reading the Bible is good, but without taking action in response to what is being taught, you cannot expect to see miracles of change.  James 1:22-25 says, “Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says. Anyone who listens to the word but does not do what it says is like someone who looks at his face in a mirror and, after looking at himself, goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like. But whoever looks intently into the perfect law that gives freedom, and continues in it—not forgetting what they have heard, but doing it—they will be blessed in what they do.” 

With the support of others, practice responses of obedience to the Holy Spirit’s leading.  Read Scripture and reflect on how it can influence your actions and lead you toward healing.  Recognize the ways God might be calling you to change your behavior.  Incorporating both reflection and action is an essential component of change.