It’s 6:45 a.m., and you overslept the alarm. You wake up with a jolt knowing that you’re starting the day behind. You feel the pressure and concern knowing you won’t get everything done and make it to work on time, even though you skip the morning’s priviledges such as breakfast. As you complete each morning task, you’re well aware that every minute spent on these tasks means you will be a minute later getting to work. You start to imagine the looks on your colleagues’ faces as you arrive late; you also imagine the uncomfortable conversation your supervisor will have with you about your tardiness. The pressure builds. Your irritation grows. Now that you’re ready to leave the house to get to work. You look for your keys. They aren’t where you remember that you put them. You call out to other people in the house. “WHERE DID YOU PUT MY KEYS?! I’m late and I don’t have time for this!” Imagine the frustration and anger you feel in that moment. You know that you put your keys in this one place. The other person(s) in the house answers, “I haven’t touched your keys. I remember you put left them in the kitchen.” You dart to the kitchen and lo’ and behold, there they are. You suddenly remember that you didn’t put them where you usually put them at the end of the day. Your anger leaves and is replaced with relief now that you can leave for work to face the music. Look at all the emotions experienced in a short period of time, shock, pressure, dread, anxiety, irritation, anger, and relief. I don’t know about you, but even writing out this narrative provokes anxiety and relief, anxiety over having lived this experience, and relief that I’m only writing about this.
On any given day, we will have numerous perceptions about what is happening, along with corresponding emotions. We perceive, we feel, and we act. Now this is a very simple view of experience. Much nuance influences each of those factors. What has happened in the past impacts, influences, predicts how we perceive in the present. Behavioral expert Ed Hammer Ed.D. used to say, “Emotions are communication.” He taught his students and mentees, that the purpose of emotions is to communicate about what we perceive and experience. In other words, our emotions offer color to experience. However, as we noted in the above story we can have emotions that are not based in reality, but we feel them in reality. Unfortunately, as human beings we experience this disparity far more often than we would like, want, or accept. Think of your emotions like your skin. Your skin tells you what is soft, rough, wet, dry, painful, and pleasurable. We live life trusting what we feel through our skin. Have you ever touched something that felt like one thing, but your eyes told you that wasn’t true? Sure, we all have. Because this happens so rarely, we tend to remember those times. For instance, I touch something that feels wet, but I can see that it is indeed dry. It’s kind of freaky, right? But we know that this is an outlier experience, and we go on in life implicitly trusting our skin to communicate our experience to us. Our emotions also communicate. But, we live life implicitly trusting our perceptions and emotions as being firmly rooted in reality and therefore absolutely true. However, emotions don’t share the same confidence rate as our skin does. Trouble lies ahead.
Sure we are going to see and feel throughout our day. However, how we interpret and feel emotions about our experience can vary, or may be patently false. So what now? What do I do with the knowledge that I can’t implicitly trust my thoughts and feelings? This idea as a monolith can feel overwhelming. Let’s take a beat, and think this through. Think of the old saying, “Don’t believe everything you read.”That is to say, decide for yourself what is true, false, mostly true, or mostly false. Moreover, that cliche instructs us to think critically about what we read. Why can’t we do the same for our own assumptions, perceptions, interpretations, suppositions, thoughts, and feelings? For sure there are some experiences where we can trust our perceptions and feelings. And surely other situations where we don’t enjoy the same confidence. Some perceptions may be razor sharp in work situations, but challenged in close interpersonal relationships, which when you think about it, isn’t uncommon. We tend to take things less personally at work than we do at home. Well, in this example, how is it that we take things more personally at home than at work? That answer is simple. We don’t exercise the same expectations at work as we do at home. You can have two very similar experiences in different places and have wildly different reactions. The only difference is expectation: one expectation for one thing in one place and a different expectation in a different place. Albert Ellis once said, “The road to hell is paved with asinine expectations.”Let’s entertain the idea that we are often inaccurate with how we think and feel. All too often, we commit Type I errors in thought and feeling. What is a Type I error? It is interpreting or perceiving something as a negative when there is nothing really wrong, or it may be a positive (loose day-to-day definition). So what am I trying to say, that I shouldn’t trust myself ever? What I am working to share is that we be open to the possibility and or probability that we may not be INITIALLY accurate regarding what we think, feel, perceive.
Think of this truth of life as a freeing experience. When we accept this truth of life—that we are not always accurate or correct in our feelings— We can now choose for ourselves how we think, feel, perceive. So the logical next question is, “How can I choose for myself how I think, feel, perceive?” We can accomplish this using a “Challenge Question.”What is a Challenge Question? A Challenge Question is a question posed to whatever I’m thinking, feeling, perceiving with the goal of gaining greater accuracy to objectivity or reality. Many, dare I say most people tend to be negatively biased. For example in common language we inflate the negative as “the worst.” The logical Challenge Question here is, “Is it, really?” Is it really the worst?” Let’s assume for a moment that I think something is the worst. Well, my emotions will correspond to the perception, even if I know I am exaggerating. Our emotions don’t always pick up well on hints. So, if I am exaggerating a negative, I am going to feel more negatively about that situation; maybe not as negatively as I would feel if I knew for sure that situation was indeed the worst. But our emotions will skew more negatively, even when in jest or exaggeration. The Challenge Question offers us greater clarity in our negative experiences. Or to challenge our assumptions, interpretations, or meanings we make. “Did they intend on being mean? Am I hearing this wrong? Is there another way of looking at this situation, or interaction?” In many negative experiences and in many of our initial reactions, there are purposes and functions at play here. To keep it simple, the purpose or function of our initial reactions to things, situations, interactions that we interpret as negative is protective in nature. But we don’t have to act on our initial reaction. We can use a Challenge Question to gain greater understanding of the situation and ask ourselves what we want from the situation. For the purposes of this article, we will use Challenge Questions whenever we have a negative thought, feeling, perception. “Is this as bad as I am thinking it is?” “Is there another way of looking at this situation?”These are two basic Challenge Questions we may use to experience more accurately. Ultimately it is easy to argue for using Challenge Questions when experiencing negative situations because the world and life already have objective and reality-based challenges or difficulties. And if I tend to inflate my negative reactions to those objective difficulties and subjective concerns, then it is incredibly easy to feel overwhelmed and over-burdened. Thus we expend more energy and frustration tolerance where it isn’t necessary. Save your energy and tolerance for what truly requires them.
I think of Challenge Questions like Michelangelo’s Statue of David. Someone once asked Michelangelo how he was able to create such a work of art, such a masterpiece. He simply said that he didn’t create anything, he just removed the unnecessary parts. Challenge Questions allow us to remove the unnecessary bits of life so that we can gain a greater and freer experience handling life’s challenges, or being more open to positive experiences. Essentially, let’s not have to be right, but embrace getting it right. Which affords more choice and freedom from the negative: “Have you seen my keys? “Where did my keys wander off to?” Or…..
“WHERE DID YOU PUT MY KEYS?!
Joel T. Meyer, MA, LCPC