When someone experiences a negative emotion such as anxiety or depression, it is usually accompanied by a number of thoughts and self-talk called unhelpful patterns. They are patterns because they tend to become an automatic habit. It is something that happens out of one’s awareness, and overuse of these patterns in a person’s life can lead to a great deal of emotional distress. 

NLP has what we call meta models to categorise deletions, distortions, generalisations, etc., Categories of language that can be challenged linguistically. 

“People respond to events based on their internal pictures, sounds and feelings. They also collect these experiences into groups or categories that are labeled with words. The meta-model is a method for helping someone go from the information-poor word maps back to the specific sensory-based experiences they are based on. It is here in the information-rich specific experiences that useful changes can be made that will result in changes in behaviour.”

– Terry Elston “Knowing NLP” 

I’m choosing to use terms that we are all familiar with, to cover some recurring patterns:

All or nothing – If someone says: “If I can’t get this job, I won’t bother looking for another.”

Over generalisation – For example: “Everyone is against me.” This can be really unhelpful when we generalise by categorising people of a certain background, religion or ethnicity for example. 

Mind reading or second guessing – “She didn’t say hello to me. I think she doesn’t like me.” 

Filtering – “I’m not good enough to be successful”

Labelling or Mislabelling – “I’m rubbish at baking” 

Catastrophising – For example: “My wife left me. It’s the end of my life!” or “I’ll never be happy again!”.  

Minimising or pushing under the carpet – “I don’t want to think about what happened, let’s just forget about it.” – This can be detrimental if what happened is even slightly traumatic.

Emotional reasoning – Using our emotions as the truth and acting on that premise can be detrimental. “I’m so angry at him right now and I’m going to go over and tell him what I think”. We all recognise this pattern, don’t we? 

Personalisation – This is someone taking everything personally which might make life really unpleasant. “Is it about me?”, “Am I responsible?”, “It’s my fault”.

Fallacy of control – People thinking they have or should have control over others and things.

Fallacy of fairness – Those who believe that life is fair and therefore expect their own views of fairness to be the same for others. This might result in hurt and anger.

Fallacy of change – Someone who believes they can change people whether they want to change or not. We are only the conduit of change but not able to actually change others. We can only change ourselves. 

Always being right – This is self-explanatory: “It’s not me, it’s them”, “I’ve done nothing wrong so I have nothing to apologise for, he’s totally to blame”. If we think we are always right then there is no space for learning or improvement. The idea is to avoid this pattern without falling in the personalisation pattern. 

Should statements – We’re all guilty of overusing the word should (or ought to): “You should do something about this”, “I should start exercising”, “I should do this or that”. Should has no power but it holds us to ransom, and can make us feel bad for not doing things we think we ‘should’ do. ‘Should’ has no real energy to it, not like must. “I must start exercising” has got a movement in it, some energy. Can you tell/see the difference? 

Fortune telling – “I’m never going to be able to get a good job again!” 

Disqualify the positive – This is when someone sees or hears, experiences something positive but still finds and focusses on a negative aspect: “My boss praised me but he’s only doing it to keep me working really hard”.

All these examples get at the essence of this unhelpful thinking style – that the person views the situation as terrible, awful, dreadful and horrible. Sometimes unhelpful thoughts will also include other unhelpful thinking styles.  For example, predicting things and jumping to conclusions often accompany catastrophising. 

Let’s look at this final example. Have you ever written a text to someone and when you read it again, you realised it might be construed negatively by the recipient. You might then start thinking “I can’t believe I said that. They’re going to have such a poor opinion of me! They’re going to be angry and never talk to me again! I’ll have no friends after they’ve read my text!” This is predicting/fortune telling and catastrophising.

What do you think it would be like for someone with this style of thinking? The reality is that the mistake itself might be quite small, but when we catastrophise, things can get very ugly very quickly, and we can work ourselves up to a point where it all seems beyond our control. 

The following table can be used to help you identify those unhelpful patterns that arise in certain conditions or situations. Awareness is a step towards improvement. 

I’d be really interested in your comments and thoughts on this subject. Please add them to the box below. 

Take care. 

MK Elouar