Episode #101

Perception Psychology & CBT

Perception is relative to each individual. But the way you perceive a situation can have a profound impact on your thoughts, feelings, and resulting actions.

Is it possible to change your perception, especially after the fact?

How can you use CBT to adjust your perception of an event or experience to regain your inner peace?

Join me, Dr Julie Osborn, as I share with you some powerful CBT tools to help you adjust your perception.

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Full Episode Transcript

Hi, welcome to My CBT Podcast! This is Dr. Julie. I'm a Doctor of Psychology and a licensed clinical social worker specializing in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. I'm here to bring the power of CBT into your own life.

I hope everybody's doing well and wanted to just talk for a couple of minutes before we get into our topic for today. I'm still reeling from my interview with Dr. Dennis Greenberger for my last podcast. That was a full circle moment for me, you guys, to think about 25 years ago is when I was introduced to CBT, introduced to it by Dr. Greenberger, who was my first person that was training me. And to think all these years later, I had the opportunity to interview him. I felt like Oprah, who got the one interview nobody else could get, because he reminded me a couple of times, he rarely, rarely does interviews. So I was so grateful that he allowed me to come into his space. He was so forthcoming and shared such great things and even some personal ways that he practiced his gratitude. And it was so personable. And you guys can tell just from listening to him why he's such a great teacher and a friend and just very, very kind man.

So that was just super exciting for me. I hope you guys enjoyed the interview as well. That was really cool. Really great moment for me. I think it was just great knowing more of the history of CBT and all about mind over mood and all of the reasons that I love teaching this to you guys. And I think it makes such a difference in all of our lives. So I wanted to share that. And again, I wanted to thank all of you to continuing listening to my podcast and sharing with friends or family or anyone you feel that would be helpful. My intention right from the beginning, from number one podcast, was to get this out to as many people as possible because I know it can be so helpful, and I know that is so true based on all of the emails that I've received from all of you guys over the last three years. And just so grateful that it's made such a difference. It made such a difference. And grateful you take the time to write to me. It takes time and take some effort and take some thought to sit down and really share.

So based on that, I want to share with you two emails I received from the same person, someone from Canada. And I'm just going to hold his name to myself just for confidentiality. But the first one he wrote to me and he just said,

“Hey,

I just wanted to send out a message about how much I love your stuff. The podcast has been so helpful. And now I just discovered your helpful resource page on your website, which is loaded with amazing tools. Thank you so much for everything. Keep it up, please.”

He later wrote me one more that I really loved reading and I wanted to share with you guys. So it says,

“Hey, Dr. Julie,

I'm a listener of your wonderful podcast and I just love it so much. Today, I went for a bike ride with a friend around Stanley Park here in Vancouver, British Columbia. We rode along and talked of life and love, and when we broke off from each other, I put on your podcast on being present. It was like two angels coming up beside me and lifting me up as I listen to you speak of the beauty and magic of being present. There I was hovering along with my angels, taking everything around me and seeing things that reminded me of the people that I love, feeling the cool air brush up against my cheeks, my body, my heart, and mind, very much in sync. It's like a muscle being present, right? I need to work it to try not to drift off into the ego that's filled with fear and anxiety. I want to be there all the time. Thanks again for sharing all these great pieces of work that helps so much.”

So that was just a beautiful, beautiful email where he was really able to share being present and how he took all that in and how that was helpful. Again, thanks for reaching out. Like I said, I always respond back to all you guys when I get your emails or questions. I always looking for suggestions so I can talk about things that are meaningful to you guys where you feel like you need some help. It does make a difference and I wanted to share that with you.

Today I want to talk about what perception means and how that's connected to Cognate Behavioral Therapy. So there is a type of psychology called Perception Psychology. And just saying it simply, it is a sub field of cognitive psychology, and it studies how we interpret the information that our senses give us. So it's a system of observing and using the body's sensory organs to evaluate and give meaning to external stimuli. So as we interact with the physical world around us, our brains interpret this information to make sense of what we've observed. So that's just giving you a definition, not to get too techy here. But our brains process different types of sensory information all at the same time. So as we receive inputs from our environment, our brain converts that into perceptions of, say, flowers, or if it's food, an animal, or other things that we see regularly. Different senses are interconnected and have an impact on each other. An example is if you walk into your grandma's house and smell... I used to smell matzo bowl soup, actually, and that makes me think of her. Every time I smell that, I remember her. That's your sense of putting things together, just for an example. But what I want to share to understand is I look at it like the big umbrella over Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is perception, because what we know is that with Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, it's not the situation specifically that's causing you to have negative moods, but it's your perception of the situation.

So it's one step bigger that we want to look at. So I know I talk to you guys all the time about, what's the situation that caused you to have these negative moods and then to be able to identify the thoughts that created the negative moods? We want to know what your hot thoughts are, right? Thoughts that aren't 100 percent true, and then to be able to challenge those thoughts with evidence to have more balanced and alternative thinking to feel better and to decrease the negative moods. But let's talk about perception, right? Because two people can go through the exact same situation and have different perceptions. I can't tell you how many times I have met with families. They all lived together. They all went through the same experience. And sometimes I'm like, Did you guys really live in the same house together? Because your perception of what happened is so significantly different. It's just unbelievable. So that's something I still find really interesting. I can say that's probably true with I have a brother and sister, and we all have different perceptions based on the age you were. My parents were divorced, but obviously we're all different ages, so it all affected us a little differently based on where we were developmentally.

There's definitely factors, but overall, it's very interesting to see how people can go through the same experience and have different perceptions. I personally think it's nature and nurture. There's some people that come into this world, tend to be a little more anxious, even as a little kid, and some people walk through it a little easier for whatever reason. I don't have those answers for you, exactly, but I wanted to talk about this because I want you to start thinking about how you perceive things. So a great example I want to share was... And I had this light bulb moment working with a client this past week, and he was sharing, he has intrusive thoughts. So intrusive thoughts are part of OCD, obsessive compulsive disorder. I do have a podcast on that called It's Not Me, It's My OCD, if you want to listen to it. But intrusive thoughts are thoughts that are intrusive. We're not thinking about anything, but all of a sudden we have very disturbing thought. It could be violent, it could be sexual, it could be connected to religion. But it's upsetting. And we're like, Why am I thinking that? And it's very bothersome to a lot of people.

And it's important to understand what it is. A lot of people think there's something wrong with them because they're thinking these thoughts, but that's not what this case is. But let me get back to my story. He was sharing about that he gets intrusive thoughts of the scary monsters. And he said, I was thinking, what if I friended the monster instead? And all of a sudden I said, Oh, my gosh, that's just like the movie Monster's Inc. From Disney. Now, if you haven't seen it, I would recommend it's a great movie. But if you have, you know what I'm talking about is the premise of the movie was that the monsters went into little kids rooms at night to scare them. It's like monsters in the closet under your bed, the whole scary thing that a lot of kids have. They want to light on at night. They go into this one kid's room. Her name is Boo, and they try to scare her, and she just starts laughing. And she thinks it's the funniest thing ever. And she wants to hang out with the monster, and she wants to be friends with the monster.

And the louder he gets, the better she likes it. I say to my client, Wow, there is an example of someone's perception. She sees this monster and she thinks it's funny. So she's not scared. And then the movie goes on, you'll see that instead of monster scaring little kids, they end up wanting to make them laugh. You can watch the movie if you like, and you'll see what I'm talking about. But I never thought really about that movie as a good example, but it's perfect. We don't know why she thought the monsters were funny. Why wasn't she scared when other kids were? But the point is that was her perception when she saw those monsters. So for example, with OCD, the intrusive thoughts, when he was like, Oh, here's this monster. I'm going to befriend it. I can take that power back. I don't have to see it as scary. I can see it for what it is. And our perception of whatever happens to us is what determines if the situation is actually upsetting. So I'm sure you've been in that situation yourself where something was really upsetting and others maybe didn't react the same way.

And you're like, How could that not bother you? And the way that their world has been or how they see things and their perception is different. So take a minute and think about, what are the things that I struggle with in my life, and what is my perception of that? So to add on that, which is something actually Dr. Greenberg spoke in the podcast with me, and he shared that his second favorite book is called Learned Optimism, and it's by Dr. Martin Seligman. It's on my transcription for my podcast, if you guys want to purchase it. I just got it myself. I'm familiar with him just from my schooling, but learned optimist and talks about people that are optimistic, people that are pessimistic. And it can be learned. Meaning that if you're more pessimistic, you want to be optimistic. But the point of it is that someone that's optimistic isn't just like, Oh, they're positive. They think things will be fine. But when things happen in their lives and they could be big things, and I shared this also with Dr. Greenberg as an example of like, when I had cancer, like, That was a big thing.

But I looked at it like, Okay, here's a challenge I have in my life. What do I need to do to get better, take care of myself, and move forward. So that's what learned optimism is about. That's about seeing your challenges in your life as challenges and moving forward. So when pessimistic might have that same diagnosis and just think, Oh, my God. I'm going to die. I'm going to be fearful the rest of my life. What if it comes back? I can't handle this. It's so terrible. And they stay stuck in that negative, which we know causes depression, anxiety, all of those things. So this is all connected regarding somebody that is optimistic and looks at challenges differently. That's their perception. That was my perception. I wasn't really thinking in these terms at the time, but my perception was like, Yeah, this sucks. This is horrible. I wish I wasn't going through this, but what do I need to do to get past it so that it's just something in my past and I can continue to live my life? So that's a biggie, but it can be lots of things, right? It's about breaking up in relationships, trying to find your happiness, getting sober, making decisions in your life about school.

What if you're in college and you realize I'm not even in a major I like, I want to do something different, or school isn't even for me, or whatever that is, or whatever you do struggle with, even if you struggle with depression and anxiety, if your perception is like, Okay, this is something I can work on and I can make it better. And I can use these tools that I'm learning, these cognitive behavioral tools that can help me get better and not be so anxious so that instead I'm not looking at my life like, I'm stuck with this and I'm always going to be anxious and how am I going to get through everything? So I've shared before, if you're struggling with anxiety, you want to get to where you believe that I can handle whatever comes my way versus, Oh my God, what's going to happen today and how am I going to handle it? So if someone's perception is that I can handle whatever comes my way, I don't have to wake up in the morning and worry about my day. I don't have to worry about what's coming up. I get up, I start my day, I take care of myself, whatever that looks like, get my day going.

And then when things hit me, when things happen, I handle them. That's my perception about my world and my ability. Or you can have the perception that the world is scary. I don't know what's going to happen today, and I don't know if I can even handle it. So I didn't want to go out the door. I don't want to start. I don't want to talk to people because my perception of myself is that I can't handle it, which is a perception. Your perceptions aren't 100 % true if they're feeding into your negative beliefs that are keeping you stuck. Again, it can be changed by challenging it and even understanding where did this perception even come from? Sometimes it's learned. An example of that would be that I've shared before that a lot of times, anxious parents have anxious kids. I know I was the same, believed that my parents knew what was going on, what they were doing. Their belief system was the belief system for me to have. And that if a parent is anxious and scared and doesn't want the kid to go out or experience new things that they're excited about, or allows them to explore the world, the child will also take in that, Oh, yeah, the world is a scary place.

I need to be nervous. So that belief, that perception of the world was learned. And I always say, Anything you learned, you can unlearn and learn something new. So I don't know if you have to figure out where you got it from. You might want to. It might be interesting to you. You might want to see a therapist and figure that out that might help you change it, or might just help you make sense of it, and then say, How do I want to be? Because we have the ability to change the way we think. We have the ability to change the way we believe. And we have so many tools to get there. And maybe it's not just, I'm going to change my thoughts and I'm going to be able to deal with this. It might be, I need to look a little bigger than just that and say, What's getting in the way of me really breaking through? Yeah, all these tools really help. But maybe this one situation in my life, I keep getting stuck. I keep getting stuck and I'm getting frustrated. And maybe it's based on, again, how I perceive myself, which is all connected to your core beliefs.

I have a really good podcast on core beliefs also, if you want to listen to that to understand at your core these belief systems that we have. And I believe they're all connected with how you perceive the world and yourself and others. So our perceptions will change throughout our lifetime by having new experiences, by meeting new people, by learning things about the world. Maybe we didn't know before, and we look at it differently. And perceptions can even be small. I want to say when you understand someone's situation, you're like, Oh, you're not as judgmental a lot of times. I always share a story about if you go into work and one of your coworkers is walking by you and you say, Hey, good morning, and they don't even respond, so your perception is, Oh, that was rude. I'm not going to reach out to them anymore and say hi. They're not a very good friend, a coworker. That was really negative. And then five minutes later, that person comes up to you and says, Oh, my God, Julie, I'm so sorry I didn't respond when you said hi. I just had a terrible car accident on the way here.

I'm just overwhelmed and I'm just not focused. And then my perception is like, Oh, my God. What can I do to help? So it's these little things that happen to us every day. If someone's driving too slow in front of us, we think they don't care. Maybe you know what? They just had a crisis in their life. Maybe they just lost somebody and they're just not even focusing very well. I think we've all had the moments where we've driven somewhere and I'm like, I don't even know how I got here because I'm just so distracted. It's these little things during the day that we perceive that affect how we think, how we feel, and how we behave. So if somebody's driving too slow, it might get pissed off at them and start honking the horn or drive by fast or give them a rude look. When we drive by them, we don't know what they're going through, what's going on. And we want to be mindful of that because in reality, it's affecting me. I'm the one irritated now. I'm the one probably not driving as safe as I need to be. I'm not as focused as I need to be.

Just based on my perception, which is based on how I'm thinking, my belief system and all the things I just walked you through. I hope this is starting to make sense. I think it's a really important element in our lives for us to be aware of. Our perception also, like I said, when I mentioned earlier with our senses, is smell, taste, feel, all those different things that we've experienced in our lives create these perceptions of, I ate this one particular fish. I hated it. I didn't touch in any fish ever again. That's a perception. That's an experience you had. So it's all these little things, and not all of them you need to change. But I'm just talking to you guys today about the things that are affecting your life negatively and holding you back from living the life that you deserve and the life that you want. So when you're doing your thought records, I think something you could add to them is saying, do I have a perception here that's causing me to hold back from really trying something new, hold back from really getting out there in the world again, maybe starting to date again, if that's something you're looking for, or making new friends.

It's really about making yourself vulnerable, I think, which is scary, but also your perception may feed into that. You might feel vulnerable just because you perceive that things aren't going to go well because of past experiences. So it's something to explore for yourself. If you're in therapy, bring this up with your therapist. If you want to say, I want to talk more about this, understand where all of this might be coming from. And changing my perception is going to, I think, having knowledge, changing your perception is going to be having new experiences and being willing to be open to them and seeing what happens. Remember, the beauty of our world, you guys, is we get to start over every moment. So if we try something and it doesn't work well, instead of creating a new perception, a new belief in your life that gets in the way, just say, Okay, how can I do this differently so maybe it'll work out better? Now I'm more prepared. Now I've learned. Now I understand the way that I'm thinking about the situation, so let me try again. We can always start over. Always start over. I talked to people about, if you're trying to eat healthier, even if you messed up at breakfast, you get to start over at lunch.

You don't want to look at the whole day's over. My whole week is screwed up. The optimism is like, Okay, this happened. I'm not happy about it, or I wish I handled things differently. What am I going to do now so I can move forward? And every time you're able to do that, you build up your confidence in yourself. And the more confidence you have in yourself in handling things and knowing that I can identify what I'm feeling and identify my thoughts and I actually know what to do with them and I can change them because I've been practicing with my CBT tools and I'm really incorporating them into my life. And when you practice them enough, they will become automatic. Then I can keep going forward. There's always going to be things in our lives that are challenging, that are painful, sad, grief. There's always going to be something. We don't know what that is, but we know that we can be ready for it and we can handle it. And that, again, things are going to change in this world that I'm going to look at things differently. And hopefully it's going to be for the best, right?

I hope I'd be like, You know what? I didn't really know that. That makes sense to me now. I'm going to perceive this in a different way just from that little bit of knowledge. We need to take time to be curious with each other, ask questions, understand, Why did you say that to me?, or Why did you do that? Because I was uncomfortable with it. And maybe they need to make an amendment, or maybe it's because what they thought, what was best for them. Or maybe sometimes they think that's what I wanted. And I'm like, No, that's not what I wanted. But that was their perception of it. And I think we've seen this a lot in the last few years, how everybody perceived COVID. Some people were very scared of it. Some people were like, Okay, what do we need to do to handle it? Then a lot of people perceived how some people felt they were forced to take the vaccination. So people's perceptions were like, Thank God I have it. Everybody should take it. So I'm saying these are just some examples I'm giving you that your perception of situations determine your behavior.

So if there is something, again, that's getting in the way, or maybe others share with you, like when you do this is really a problem for me to take some time, a little soul searching and saying, Okay, is my perception getting in the way? Obviously, what are my thoughts about this that are also creating how I feel and affecting my behavior and my physical reactions? Again, the greatest example I love right now I'm using is boo, seeing the monsters and just giggling and laughing and making the monsters really change how they see things because they're like, What is going on? I'm normally a very scary monster. I'm able to be the best in the group or whatever. Then they saw, Oh, things can be different and things can be better. They learned that lesson from the little girl's perception and how she saw them. So to leave you with one last thing about that is, when people tell you that you are lovable, you're likable, you're important, you're deserving, that's how they see you. And instead of just saying, No, that's not true. Think about how and why do they see me that way? Maybe ask them, Why do you think that I'm likable?

Or Why do you think I'm deserving? And being able to take in other people's perceptions might help you change the ones about yourself as well. It's just at least a starting point to get moving in that direction and to be able to be more mindful and aware of how you see yourself in the world and others. Because that affects us on a daily basis with the choices that we make, whether we're honoring ourselves, having good self care. It all comes down to how we perceive things. So I hope I got you thinking. I hope this was helpful. I love when people share things with me. My client this week gave me an aha moment of like, Oh, this is a great way to explain this. We're always learning. So I'm always grateful learning from you guys. And I hope you're learning from me with the CBT. It's definitely a give and take here. And that's what's so beautiful about it. And I'm excited that I always get to learn. And I'm excited that I'm always going to be learning. I would be sad, I think, if I thought this is it and I know everything, which there's no way that's true.

But then, oh, there's nothing else going to happen or learn. It's exciting to know I'm going to grow because there's always room for progress, right? Progress, not perfection. So that's it for today. Again, I hope this was helpful for you.

If you have a question for me, I'd love to answer it. You can email me at mycbtpodcast@gmail.com.

You can follow me on Instagram under MyCBTPodcast.

I'm on Facebook under Dr. Julie Osborn.

And my website, which you can contact me through as well, is MyCognitiveBehavioralTherapy.com. And as my listener that shared that email, I have a lot of tools on my website as well that you might be interested in and some different videos. So keep those emails coming.

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Stay safe, and remember to make decisions based on what's best for you, not how you feel.