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Dealing with your Thoughts - Cognitive Distortion Part 3 | Daily Reminders
In part 3 of Cognitive Distortion, Sh. Omar Husain covers 4 more concepts: emotional reasoning, 'if' statements, labeling, and personalization/blame.
Transcript
This transcript was auto-generated using AI and may contain misspellings. Bismillahirrahmanirrahim. We continue with our last segment in our mini-series of Cognitive Distortions. Today we'll cover number 7 through 10. Number 7 is something called emotional reasoning. Emotional reasoning means that you assume your negative emotions reflect the way things are, even though that's not the reality. So for example, you will say something like, I feel hopeless, therefore I must really be hopeless. Why is that connection being made? When it comes to losing hope, Allah says, لَا تَيْأَسُوا مِن رَوْحِ اللَّهِ إِلَّا الْقَوْمُ الْكَافِرُونَ It's a very powerful ayah. Allah says that do not lose hope in the mercy of Allah. Only those who lose hope in the mercy of Allah are those that reject the message, those that disbelieve. Very powerful verse. So just because we may seem like we are in a hopeless situation, it does not mean that we actually are in a hopeless situation. In other instances, maybe when we say something like, Well I feel really guilty after committing a wrongdoing, therefore I am a terrible, disgusting person. You know when we feel guilty after doing something wrong, this is a sign of iman. This is why the Prophet ﷺ said, وَالنَّدْمُوا تَوْبًا That having regret in itself is actually a sign of repentance. Literally it is repentance. Because if we don't feel any regret, then there is nothing to repent about. So we are human beings, we are going to make mistakes, but the key is that we don't say, I committed a mistake. Yes, of course we feel bad, we are not trying to intentionally commit mistakes or sins, but we say, I feel guilty about it. Now I am going to return back to Allah. This is exactly what Allah wants from us. So this is number seven. The next is should statements or if statements. As one of my teammates used to say,
would've, should've, could've, didn't. You know when we would lose a match or something like that, and we would say, Oh if I had only done that, or I should've hit the shot when I had the chance, he would say, would've, should've, could've, and you didn't. In other words, making excuses. So the Prophet ﷺ, he told us to be careful of this word لو, if. Now not unequivocally, but the general meaning is that if, if we use this word if, it opens the door to shaytan. How does it do that? Because we will start second guessing things, and rejecting the divine decree, the qadr of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. We say, if I had gotten this job, I would not have been in the position I'm in with my current job. Well, what if you got that other job and it was worse? How do you know Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala didn't give you better now? How do you know your condition is not better now? If I had married this person, how do you know how their life turned out? How do you know that would've been the best? So it's just a never-ending spiral. It leads to a lot of guilt, frustration, and it's just not a healthy behavior to have. So we want to avoid using statements like if or should. If we all invested in Apple before the iPhone came out, we'd all be millionaires. Everybody is an expert after the fact. Instead, he said, salallahu alayhi wa sallam, قَدْرَ اللَّهُ وَمَا شَاءَ فَعَلَ أَوْ مَا شَاءَ كَانَ That this is what Allah has decreed, and what He wills happens, or has occurred. So we want to stay away from saying should statements or using the word if in this same type of context. The next distortion is what's called labeling. Labeling is an extreme form of all-or-nothing thinking. So instead of saying, like, I committed a sin, we attach a negative label to ourself and say things like, I am a pathetic person, right?
Or I'm just a failure in life because I made a mistake. Why are we making this labeling to ourselves? Now, what's even more important for us to remember, or as important, is when we start labeling others. You see, this is one of the reasons we can't have healthy discussions with each other. Because we are too busy labeling. Instead of focusing on the subject or the topic that we're discussing, people do what? They get to personal attacks. So we'll say, that person is not trustworthy. Just throwing a label and generalizing it, and then people around start to believe that, and that's very dangerous. So we want to be very careful of labeling. The final cognitive distortion that I'm going to speak about is what's called personalization and blame. Personalization occurs when you hold yourself personally responsible for something where you did not entirely have that event under your control. So in other words, we blame ourselves when we didn't have full control. Let me give you an example, which is a very serious example. Domestic violence. So someone, and generally speaking it's the wife, is physically abused, right? And she will say things like, well, I deserved it. Or, I'm a bad person because I didn't do this. That's what happened, right? Now, we don't understand the intricacies or what was happening in the relationship. What we can say is, to physically abuse someone is unacceptable in Islam. But, this person starts personalizing and blaming themselves, even though that is not their responsibility. It was someone else who had control, and this is a very serious thing to consider. So please, if you're in a situation like this, do not blame yourself.
Now, some people actually do the opposite of this, meaning that when they had a chance to take responsibility for something, they don't. And they just blame others for their circumstances. So, they may complain, for example, about their children. They say, my children are not obedient. They never listen. They're not respectful to me as their parent, but they never look at their own inadequacies. They never look at their own deficiencies or their own shortcomings. Instead, they're always focusing and shifting the blame to others. So, personalization and blaming, it's bad when we have control of something and when we don't have control of something. So, these are the few of the distortions. Insha'Allah, in the next video, we'll kind of sum everything up to how to take a healthy approach to dealing with these distortions. ...
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