Trauma: Your Lord Has Not Forsaken You
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Everything is Falling Apart | Trauma Ep. 6
Licensed therapist Sarah Sultan explains magnification and minimization, two cognitive distortions that result from going through a crisis, and suggests a practical tip on how to overcome that pattern of thinking.
Dive into Trauma: Your Lord Has Not Forsaken You to learn more.
Transcript
This transcript was auto-generated using AI and may contain misspellings. This is Sara Sultan here with Yaqeen Institute and today I'd like to speak with you a little bit about a thought that commonly plagues us when we go through difficult situations in our lives, especially during a sudden type of catastrophe. And that thought is, everything in my life is falling apart, it just seems like there's just nothing good left in my life. When we go through situations that are sudden and propose a sudden change in our lives, especially when it's a negative change, then being able to go with that and move forward from that is really difficult because our life seems unrealistic, unmanageable, unrecognizable, not familiar anymore. And we ourselves also feel like we've changed tremendously from it so we can almost not even recognize ourselves in this process. And what often happens is that when things change so suddenly, things seem so far out of our control and there are certain situations in our lives that we know we can't control. And when those kinds of things happen, we can really feel powerless, helpless, or hopeless. And these are all really natural responses in situations like that. And what happens is that our thoughts then start to take a negative turn, where we might start to see scary things on every corner, right? And we start to look for all of the negatives and all of the potential shortcomings in our lives and within ourselves. And this is a cognitive distortion called magnification and minimization. And cognitive distortions are simply unhealthy thought patterns that we tend to experience. And magnification minimization is one of the most common ones.
And even people in healthy times of their lives and even people with pretty healthy thinking patterns tend to experience this. Magnification is basically where it's like you put on glasses that start to make that kind of put in a zoom button in your life for all of the negative things, right? So you zoom into and you magnify all of the bad or negative things in your life. And minimization is the opposite, where it's like you're putting on glasses that minimize all of the positives in your life and in yourself, right? And in your relationships in general. And so what happens with this particular thought pattern is it leads us to a negative emotional impact. Even our physical health can suffer from this and also our spiritual health in terms of our relationship with Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la. When we magnify all of the things that are lacking in our lives or all of the negative situations that are in our lives and we minimize all of the blessings in our lives, then that's naturally going to impact the way that we think about Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la. So you might be experiencing thoughts like, I just can't handle this. It's just too much to deal with. Or Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la promised me ease, but all I see is hardship after hardship. What am I supposed to do with this, right? One of the things to be aware of when it comes to the cognitive distortion of magnification and minimization is that it leads to something called a self-defeating cycle, where when our thoughts are negative, it impacts our emotions negatively, which then impacts our actions and our behaviors negatively, which has negative consequences across the board. So for example, if we're thinking, why has Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la denied me blessings? Why has he decided to put me through all of these hardships and I have nothing good left in my life? That negative thought process will lead to the thought of, well, if no matter what I
do, nothing is going to change, then it leads to that feeling of helplessness and powerlessness, which naturally leads to the action of doing nothing. And so we stay in the same negative space, which leads us to isolate ourselves from people in our lives, which leads us to forego putting forth effort to improve our lives, and also starts to impact our ability to get closer to Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la because we just give up. Why are we going to make dua if we don't think that they're going to be fulfilled or they're going to do nothing? So one practical tip to try to change this thought process is an activity that I call pixel versus big picture. So if you imagine on your computer screen that you're looking at a picture of a scene, right? And you press the zoom button over and over and over and over again until you're just looking at one pixel on this picture, then it doesn't look like anything at all, right? You're just focusing in on one small, small component of it, and then now you've lost the big picture. You can't even, you can't see it at all. And what we do is then we zoom out and then we can see the big picture again. So try this in your life where what is the pixel that you're focusing in on in your life, that negative event, that negative part of your life that's just plaguing your thoughts over and over again, and now try to zoom out. And when you look at the big picture, what blessings do you have that are still in existence in your life? So if you move away from that pixel, all of the other pixels in your life start to make a picture that's a lot less magnification of the negatives and minimization of the positives, but something a lot more realistic. And that can be very helpful in trying to overcome this cognitive distortion. If you'd like to learn more about this cognitive distortion, the negative thought pattern of magnification and minimization and how it applies to your life, practical tips and more self-awareness to be able to overcome it, then make sure to check out the next installment of the Your Lord Has Not Forsaken You series on Yaqeen Institute's website.
Shazakum Allah khairan.
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