Explore evidence-based articles and expert commentary on the factors influencing mental health. From cultural trends to psychological research, these insights help you understand the complex causes of emotional wellbeing and distress.
Cultural settings are those diverse contexts in which we live our lives.
There are many different cultural settings throughout the World with each having their own unique way of living and making sense of the reality that surounds them.
Although it is obvious that we all exist within the same reality….
The solution IS the problem describes how ‘safety-seeking’ or ‘avoidance behaviours’ that people commonly ‘create’ in order to make themselves feel ‘safe’ from their particular problem almost always creates more problems rather than making them feel ‘safer’.
This is a well known paradox – in other words, the ‘way’ that….
Having good coping skills can help you to ‘tolerate’ problems or difficult situations without them having any significant negative impact on your life, or on your ability to ‘function normally’.
People with effective coping skills may be described as having resilience to challenges.
The idea behind identity integration is to help people develop a consistent sense of self regardless of the contexts they find themselve in.
Over the last 15 years here at TranceForm I have encountered literally hundreds of clients who tell me that they only suffer their particular ‘problem’ in certain situations, for example….
Personalisation involves interpreting external events as though they are directly related to you or what you have done rather than being attributed to other factors.
The problem with personalising events is that it can lead to feelings of guilt and a tendency to get upset very easily as you see things as your fault.
Low frustration tolerance is the idea that when things become difficult or uncomfortable that they are somehow ‘intolerable’.
The problem with this thinking error is that you are less likely to tolerate discomfort even if by doing so you would obtain a benefit in the future.
To understand Imperative Thinking we can turn to Albert Ellis, founder of REBT, who emphasised that ‘demands’ lie at the very heart of emotional problems.
The thoughts and beliefs that contain words such as ‘must’, ‘need’, ‘should, ‘ought-to’ and ‘got-to’ can be problematic as they are rigid and inflexible leading to poor adaptation to reality.
The act of labelling and categorising experiences into specific groups is a common human trait done with the aim of simplifying the complexity of life around us.
Human beings tend to have a habit of ‘labelling’ people or things in a way that is very general and not very useful.
Overgeneralising is what we do when we come to a ‘global’ conclusion about something from one or a small number of events.
A key indicator that we are using this thinking error is in the language we use.