Dispute This!
How Disputation Strategy Intuitively Helps Me Deal With My Massive Social Anxiety
I once had to go to an event at the Criterion Theatre in Bar Harbor, Maine. The Criterion is this super cool, art deco theater with a ton of history. I was the vice president of the board. I loved all the staff. I even loved everyone on the board though there were some crotchety members, but when I arrived at the theater, I looked inside at the people milling about, gasped, and ducked down the alley.
I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t go in there. No way. May palms tingled and hands shook. Heat rose into my cheeks.
I was not going to do it.
“But why?” I asked myself. “What am I so scared of?”
It’s something I’ve asked myself a million times before. There’s rarely a good answer. And there wasn’t a good answer this time either.
There was absolutely no reason why I couldn’t go into that theater lobby. I knew everyone. Everyone was lovely. Still, this moment of panic hit me.
I called my husband, Shaun. He said, “Don’t be ridiculous.”
Not terribly helpful, but I chose not to be ridiculous. I always choose not to be ridiculous (except when it comes to karaoke or downhill skiing) because I talk myself through it. I argue with myself into doing the things that make me anxious.
The closest thing I can compare my feelings to is stage fright. It’s like half of me is incredibly excited to go on stage, but the other half is terrified. And in my head, it’s a battle. This battle happens when I have to give speeches, zoom classes, make phone calls, go on trips, visit friends’ houses, when there are people coming to my own house. Everything.
I tell myself:
Carrie, you’re being silly. What’s the worst that can happen?
Carrie, these are your friends.
Carrie, there are potato products in there. Are you going to give up free food?
Carrie, you are having a self-defeating thought. Why? There is no rational reason why.
Carrie, go in. You’ll be fine. And if it sucks, just leave. Give it five minutes.
The thing is that (almost always) the moment I step into a theater or party or my friend gets to the house, it’s all gone. The anxiety just poofs away.
Those feelings wouldn’t go away if I didn’t intuitively use a muddled up form of disputation theory on myself. That’s because I’ve been really lucky and intuitively talk my way through it. When I do this, it’s actually one of the few times my thoughts are in words in my brain. I’m the kind of person who thinks in images or bursts of connections. It’s hard to explain.
So what is disputation?
According to verywellmind
“Disputation is the process through which you question your irrational thoughts and take a step back to dispute them. In order for you to change your behaviors and lessen your social anxiety, you need to identify the irrational constructs in your thoughts and then actively work to correct them yourself. This is a strategy that can help you continually combat your anxiety.”
And there are two forms. Again from VeryWellMind, it delves into how therapists use disputation in therapy:
“The Two Forms of Disputation
In cognitive disputation, your therapist will ask you questions challenging the logic of your responses. This can be an emotional experience and unsettling. It can cause you to reinterpret long-held beliefs and perceptions.
In imaginal disputation, your therapist will encourage you to use imagery to examine different aspects of situations that upset you. By imagining different angles in a given situation, you can change how you reflect on a situation and adjust your responses accordingly.”
Negative Self Talk
A lot of us writers say a lot of negative things about ourselves and our work:
I suck.
I’m not good enough.
My story is so flat.
I’m stupid.
I’m ugly.
Everyone hates me.
Everyone hates my story.
So, the challenge becomes to recognize:
How unhealthy this is.
How it hurts our self-esteem.
How it keeps us from being as amazing and shiny as we actually are.
What works for some of us writers (and other humans) is to write how those thoughts were bulls8*t.
Example:
I am dumb.
Actually, I graduated my MFA program with the highest honors.
That sort of thing.
In an article for the HealthyPlace, Martha Lueck writes:
“Writing about how my thoughts were not true helped a little bit, but it did not change my desire to be better. So I disputed my thoughts even further by thinking about their worth. I wrote the following disputations.
Even though I would like to be smarter, it is not necessary. I am a hard worker and an enthusiastic learner. Those attributes are enough.
Even though I would like to look really pretty, it is not the most important thing. My character can help me stand out.
Even though I would like to have accomplished more things in my life by now, my life is a work in progress. I continue to learn and grow every day.”
Arthur Brooks writes that pessimism distorts our reality and definitely impacts our ability to live happiness and suggests for us all to
“Confront pessimism with facts. Pessimism is frequently hyperbolic and alarming, while facts disarm pessimism and help us to be objective about our circumstances. Through disputation, we also recognize that bad things are tedious but temporary.”
And that’s another technique that I use.
Even when I was giving birth to my daughter, I kept telling everyone in the hospital, “It’s okay. It’s not going to last forever. The pain will AGHSHGHGH—end.”
And I do this a lot when I get sad or anxious. I think about all the other times that I’ve been super down and how eventually that emotion worked its way through me.
So one of my mantras is basically that nothing is forever.
This seems like a potentially bad mantra when you’re having a great day or a great life, but it actually helps me to really dig in and enjoy the happiness when it’s occurring.
Life is full of change. It’s a good thing to remember because it can buoy you up during the hard times and help you be grateful during the good.
Brooks says,
“While our negativity bias often leads us into pessimism, it can also lead us to unproductive behaviors like laziness, binging on creature comforts, and trying to escape from our problems.
You might wonder why we have a hard time resisting these temptations.
In the way that pessimism distorts our view of reality, emotions like sadness and loneliness impair our executive function, provoking impulse decisions to indulge in comfort.
There is a solution called the opposite signal strategy.
If we have goals to raise our happiness, become better in our work or overcome our fears, our limbic system will sometimes work against these goals. It is exactly in that moment when we need to reverse course and send our brain the opposite signal.
This brings us in control of our instincts and helps us to reshape our behavior rather than allowing our limbic system to hijack our goals and send us off track.”
Pretty cool, right? Let me know if you want me to talk about opposite signal strategy sometime.
A cool exercise from Lueck (you should check out the link where this is from):
STORIES AND LINKS FROM THIS LAST WEEK!
Our paid subscriber post about how feeling into others makes you happy. It sounds creepy, but it’s really about empathy and has some great links!
Our podcast about cheerleading mutants and wondering if we are ones?
REFERENCES AND ROUND-UP, YOU CAN LEARN MORE ABOUT THINGS! How cool is that?
https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-disputation-3024547#citation-1
Ioana Alina Cristea, Stefan S, David O, Mogoase C, Anca Dobrean. REBT in the Treatment of Anxiety Disorders in Children and Adults. Springer; 2016. doi:10.1007%2F978-3-319-18419-7
Lueck, M. (2019, July 7). How to Use Thought Disputation to Improve Self-Esteem, HealthyPlace. Retrieved on 2022, August 6 from https://www.healthyplace.com/blogs/toughtimes/2019/7/how-to-use-thought-disputation-to-improve-self-esteem
I can totally relate to the whole anxiety/stage fright thing. And I frequently dispute my irrational thoughts when it comes to social anxiety or anxiety about my health. I never considered applying it to things other than those anxieties though, so I needed this right now. I’m working to enjoy writing again and make it not feel like work I hate, and I think using disputation strategies might be helpful with that.