Before I get into this month’s article, I would like to thank the people that have called and given positive feedback about the REBT articles. Your response has been appreciated by this counselor. The Irish have a saying that states, “If you are going down a road, and a wall springs up before you, and you are wearing a hat, throw your hat over the wall and then go get it.” In this session of REBT I will discuss the seven deadly sins of addiction that keep people sick and in and out of treatment.

The walls that I am speaking of in addiction are anger, rage, shame, guilt, anxiety, depression and fear. These thinking and feeling states, without being attacked, continue to cause mental and physical pain in intensity, frequency and duration.

These seven feelings, clients have learned, overlearned and continue to be bombarded wherever clients travel in their waking and sometimes sleeping hours. These seven feeling words elicit powerful feelings. Since clients keep using the same language, I challenge them to change their vocabulary.

For example, instead of shame, perhaps embarrassment or discredit, and instead of guilt, maybe regret or remorse. When we say depression, maybe sad or blue, and when we say anxiety, maybe uneasy or troubled and instead of anger/rage, maybe frustration, and instead of fear, perhaps scared or uneasy.

I want clients to manage these feeling states better, knowing it’s impossible to get rid of them completely. If anger/rage are in the 90 percent range, de-escalating these feelings, and possibly getting them into the 40 percent range, will help clients in a more manageable manner. I will often provide clients with Roget’s Thesaurus to discuss new feeling words and start to use them in their speaking and writing. An example, “I became very angry when Jamie took the last pork chop!” Anger could be replaced by “hot,” “upset” or “frustrated” that are lower in power than anger.

In addition to these seven feeling states are the 10 cognitive traps of cognitive distortion or irrational thinking. These start with:

A) All or nothing thinking. In other words, seeing things in black-white categories. REBT calls this demandingness, and if a situation is anything less than perfect, clients see it as a total failure. Example – relapse.

B) Overgeneralization, or seeing a single event as a never-ending pattern of defeat, by using words like “always” or “never” when thinking about it.

C) Mental filter: or picking out a single negative detail and dwelling on it exclusively. One word of criticism erases all the praise received.

D) Discounting the positive or rejecting positive experiences by stating they “don’t count.” Sometimes clients tell themselves if they do a good job, that anyone could have done it as well. Obviously this is because of low self-worth and low frustration tolerance.

E) Jumping to conclusions, or seeing things negatively when there are no facts to support your conclusions. Two variations are mind reading (clients arbitrarily conclude that someone is reacting negatively to them) and fortune telling or assuming and predicting that things will turn out badly, even though the facts don’t support this way of thinking.

F) Magnification or exaggerating the importance of problems and shortcomings, and minimizing one’s desirable qualities.

G) Emotional reasoning or assuming that one’s negative emotions reflect the way things really are, example, “I feel guilty, therefore I must be a rotten person.”

H) Absolute thinking or telling oneself that things must, ought to be the way one expects them to be. Many try to motivate themselves with “shoulds” and “shouldn’ts” as if they had to be punished before they could be expected to do anything.

I) Labelling or an extreme form of “all or nothing” thinking, or instead of saying “I made a mistake,” a negative label is attached to one’s self of “I’m a loser.”

J) Personalization and blame or telling yourself that you hold yourself personally responsible for events that aren’t under your control. Example, when I worked at the Halfway House in Buffalo, and the Bills lost the ’91 Super Bowl on “wide right” I had a client that went on a two week cocaine binge, because he maintained that if he were in the stadium in Tampa, that the kicker would have made the kick. The reality of his thinking was that he had never been to a Bills game, knew no one on the Bills team and because he was an avid Bills fan, Scott Norwood would have succeeded in making the kick. This is irrational thinking at a high level, because we did readmit him, put him on restriction for a month and his year in Caz Manor started over.

As you can now see, we do a lot of work in REBT on fundamental thinking and attacking irrational beliefs. Someone asked on a telephone call, “what do you do in the REBT group?” My response was “we sing REBT songs, use humor to de-escalate negativity, do role plays, give leads, bring in specific guests and try to impress that recovery can be fun, even though the “no pain-no gain” thinking pattern prevails.

Next up: The A,B,C,D,E format of REBT

ALSO: Mark down July 26 at 6 p.m. for the first REBT picnic at the Point. All I ask is you call 983-1592 if you are coming, so I know how much food to order.

Mike Tramuta has been a CASAC counselor for the past 38 years and has run the REBT group at Holy Trinity Parish Center from 7 to 8 p.m. on Thursday night. For more information, call 983-1592.