Balanced Recall
Filtering is one of several maladaptive thought patterns that we can find ourselves in the throes of while experiencing high levels of emotion and moodiness. We become especially prone to this distortion during episodes of depression, anxiety, or other mood disorders. It is often the stepping stone to other distortions (polarized thinking as an example).
From my perspective, filtering is primarily attentional. It involves being attentive to one detail, giving that data point a disproportional amount of weight or meaning, and excluding everything else connected to that event. We often do it unknowingly with little to no consequence.
How was work today?
It was terrible; I ended up making a mistake and got a 15-minute lecture from the boss.
And so eight hours is reduced to a few minutes, but you know little things add up. Filtering can begin to make our days, weeks and even our lives feel full of bad experiences. This is especially true and problematic when experiencing a behavioral health issue. In this context, filtering can be pervasive and, many times, the main culprit. For example, someone with social anxiety may believe they are awkward, strange, or incapable of conversations with others. The evidence behind this conclusion involves seconds connecting to seconds across canyons of evidence pointing to a different truth that is often neglected. These seconds lead to high levels of anxiety that then, in reality, actually lead to behaviors that can come across as socially problematic — sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Reversing that kind of phenomena is probable; it may not take as long as you think but not the point of this piece. I’m going to focus more on how to challenge thinking than changing behavior.
One example I can give is in connection to work surrounding grief and loss. Not always, but often enough memories a client has in relation to the loss of their loved one start and stop at the loss event. A client a year ago described it sort of like this,
I try not to have any memories. I’m worried that even good memories will make me sad and that it will always lead me to think about that day.
And in some ways, on its face, it kind of makes sense, right? But fighting off good memories leaves you, oftentimes, with only the intrusive and unwelcome thoughts of the painful experience. So one approach to this (in one model I use) is to float through everything — all the memories deliberately, slowly. Another involves pulling out photo albums and allowing the client to tell the whole story through pictures that prompt better memories that are often not thought about due to the loss.
We can apply this same practice to our day-to-day lives, less formally, of course. When you find yourself saying “Today was terrible” or “This was a shitty week,” consider playing through the event, day or week mindfully.
Notice what you hadn’t accounted for when you came to the initial conclusion (the time you spent with your kids, the phone call from a friend, the ice cream you treated yourself to the night before). Allow yourself to revisit the missed opportunities for gratitude, savor what you experienced automatically, mindlessly, and re-evaluate whether your initial judgment still feels reasonable.
And moving forward, consider practicing mindfulness across your day-to-day — task to task, moment to moment, so you don’t have to work as hard to remember.
