2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43
In general, negative spontaneous thoughts are normal. Each of us at least once in our life has come across the thoughts: "I am a failure", "I can not do anything normally" or "here I am stupid." These kinds of thoughts can arise when a person has made some stupid mistake, or even when an unpleasant accident just happened to him. Sometimes the emergence of such negative automatic thoughts is a consequence of our life experience (for example, due to the internalization of negative statements about us). The problem is how a person reacts to these thoughts.
Self-flagellation is an activity aimed at eliminating (changing) a situation. It is not constructive and leads to negative consequences in the psychological sphere of a person (for example, to the development of depressive states).
Due to the maintenance of this process by rumination, self-flagellation becomes a long-term state. This kind of thinking is not helpful. Instead, it becomes even more difficult for a person to successfully solve problems in their life.
In severe cases, due to intense negative experiences, a person may try to get rid of them by inflicting physical harm on themselves. The pain caused to oneself switches the attention of the sufferer and he breaks out of the cyclical ruminative thinking. That. internal torments are interrupted.
In addition to distraction from obsessive thoughts, during self-harm, mental intentions for violence (self-violence) are realized in physical acts, in the context of the formed need for self-punishment and execution of punishment (“to make it easier for me, I must punish myself. To punish myself, I must inflict harm ).
In addition to self-harm, coping can be the use of alcohol, drugs and psychoactive substances, destructive behavior.
Why does a person choose the second type of activity between constructive problem solving and self-flagellation? From the point of view of metacognitive theory, the answer lies in the styles and ways of our thinking, as well as in the strategy of attention management.
The process of choosing a style of thinking and managing attention depends on metacognitions. Considering self-flagellation as a cognitive-attentive pattern of response to thought-triggers (“I’m stupid,” “everyone hates me”), it is necessary to highlight the positive and negative metacognitive beliefs involved in the emergence of this pattern, as well as pushing to resort to it over and over again.
Positive meta-beliefs about self-flagellation suggest the need to resort to this pattern (“I need to think about this in order to understand what I did wrong”, “if I scold myself, I will not make that mistake next time”, “if I’m bad, it must be punished ).
Negative meta-beliefs suggest that thoughts and feelings are uncontrollable, dangerous, or important (“I’m not in control of my thoughts,” “the thought“I’m dumb”is important because if I am, I could make a big mistake”).
So, metacognitions are responsible for why one person reacts in such a way that it is beneficial for him, while the other, by his reaction, further increases the suffering. But the kinds and ways we actively think can be arbitrarily changed. And to make the process of thinking less automated think - "what do you really think?".
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