50 and Flawed: How I’m Ditching My Baggage to Build a Better Future

My study has never seemed so distant, as it does this morning. As I sit here and look over the articles I have written over the past year, and further over the past six years, I am left contemplating the future. It is funny how looking ahead ends up having us reflect upon the past. This year was the year I turned fifty and with that has brought me to a new place in my life. I feel that I am at the edge of the map, I am at the end of the known world and what lies before me is uncharted. Behind me are all of my life’s choices that have gotten me to this point and I am left wondering what that means going forward. I also wonder if who I was is who I will be, going forward.

The one lesson that has been kicking me in the ass all year long, but I have refused to acknowledge, is that my past modalities are no longer working for me. Quite frankly, I am slowly realizing that the way I have chosen to interact with the world has never really worked and I have been lucky to get to the place I am at this very moment. Maybe it is finally time to scrap those ideals for something new. Let’s take a look at 50 and Flawed: How I’m Ditching My Baggage to Build a Better Future.

1. From “It’s Not My Fault” to CBT: Breaking Free From Negative Thinking
2. How your upbringing can shape your thinking
   1. 10 common distorted thinking patterns
3. Taking Control of Your Thoughts and Your Life
4. To the future

From “It’s Not My Fault” to CBT: Breaking Free From Negative Thinking

Growing up in the 80s, there was a school of thought that was starting to gain ground. No matter what happened to you, there was this belief that you were not at fault for the outcome. Through the 1980s and 90s, we saw a massive shift in blame going to outside sources. If your child was overweight, it wasn’t your fault, instead it was the fault of fast food restaurants, soft drink makers, and such. This is an overgeneralization, but you get the point. Thankfully, it wasn’t the only school of thought that was gaining ground. This theory was also called the neutralization theory and gave individuals the ability to deflect the personal responsibility of their actions onto other people or situations. 

During the 1960s and 70s, mental health was growing in leaps and bounds and one area where there was immense growth was in the field of cognitive distortions. Cognitive Distortion is when someone develops negative thinking patterns that are not based in fact or reality. This sounds an awful lot like the “It’s not my fault” theory. Psychiatrist, Aaron Beck was the pioneer in research into cognitive distortions and led to developing a treatment that would later be known as Cognitive Behavior Therapy. If you arent familiar, cognitive behavior therapy, or CBT, is a type of psychotherapy where professionals teach clients how to overcome their individual reactions (emotional, physiological, or behavioral) to any situation, that may influence their interpretations of the actual situation. 

Whew, what does that mean? 

In the barest of terms CBT teaches you how to not be controlled by the lessons you have learned. How many times has something gone wrong and your immediate response was, “Why me?” Or maybe you are at work and someone questions you about a situation and immediately you take offense and that they are out for your job. These are the types of situations that CBT teaches you how to handle better.

CBT teaches that a person’s interpretations of the situation may not be based in fact but in our emotions and reactions. It is a way to overcome those lines of thinking for better outcomes.

How your upbringing can shape your thinking

Over the last six years of running this blog, I have touched on my childhood quite a bit. The TL:DR here is that I grew up in a household with an angry father. He was an explosively angry person. Time and again, his anger caused many outbursts. 

I have very vivid memories of some of the anger fueled outbursts and the damage they caused. Tools would be hurled through glass windows. Items would be broken in fits of rage, and a litany of insults would be hurled at my mother and us. Any emotion other than anger was avoided. I remember getting hurt as a kid and crying, as kids do, and being told to shut up and be a man or that a real man can ignore the pain. Or, who can forget the most overused statement from childhood, “keep crying and I will give you something to cry about.” Each of these interactions taught me to hide my emotions, to push them down deep inside and ignore them and that they were not my fault but the fault of the situation. 

If you want to know how that has affected me in my adulthood, ask my boyfriend about our arguments. I am not on the same level of physical anger issues, but I have adopted the “it’s not my fault this happened” mentality. It is all too easy for me to drop into escalated vocal patterns or quick outbursts, instead of a measured approach to things. As I have become more thoughtful in what is causing these issues, I have noticed parallels in CBT and those distorted thinking patterns. There are 10 common distorted thinking patterns that most people fall into. Let’s take a look.

10 common distorted thinking patterns

1. Polarized thinking – If you look at a situation and only see a good or a bad outcome, then you are falling into this category. It is sometimes seen as the “all or nothing”or simply the “black and white” mode of thinking
2. Overgeneralization – This is when you reach a conclusion about one situation but then reach that same conclusion for other situations. Here is an example from my past. I have never been good at math. This conclusion came to me when I didn’t do well in algebra. I couldn’t understand the assignment, so it must mean that I am bad at math. The truth is that most of my life, I never really gave the attention to studying math the way I did other topics. So it is easier to say I am bad at math and use that as the reason why I dont do well on math tests. This thought pattern can be associated with post-traumatic stress disorder. 
3. Catastrophizing – This is when you think that bad things will happen when you start to undertake a new situation. Making predictions of what the outcome will be without having evidence to back up those claims. Let’s say you are talking with your partner and it starts to escalate to a disagreement. You automatically think the relationship is over because in the past, arguments led to you breaking up with your previous partners. From there you believe you will be alone the rest of your life and that you will be miserable, because people cant understand you.  This could be due to experiencing trauma in your childhood, such as parents who argue then end up getting divorced.
4. Personalization – This is the process of taking things personally when they are not connected to you. A meeting takes place at work, but you weren’t invited. You feel you were not included because the people involved are planning on getting you fired. This is personalization.
5. Mind reading – If you assume you know what someone is thinking, without proof, or if you think others are thinking negative thoughts about you, this is mind reading. It can even fall to the line of “I know what you’re thinking” or “what you mean is…” It is a way of absolving yourself of guilt or responsibility and instead blaming others. 
6. Mental filtering – This is the process of ignoring the positives and only focusing on the negatives of a situation. Think of it as focusing on perceived negative aspects of yourself or a situation. A big one is self body shaming. These are the kind of thoughts that can lead to thoughts of suicide.
7. Discounting the positive – This sounds a lot like mental filtering, the biggest difference here is that you never focus on anything that could be positive, only the negative. These are the people who attribute positive things to sheer luck or an accident and not that they put in the work to achieve that outcome
8. “Should” statements – This is when you constantly think about what you “should” have said or “ought” to have done. This only perpetuates the negative thought process. Many of these can stem from past experiences where you were shamed for an action or a thought, often from your own family.
9. Emotional reasoning – Emotional reasoning is the false belief that your emotions are fact and that the way you feel about a situation is an indicator of reality. This removes fact and rational evidence from any situation and skews it based on your personal feelings. Very similar to Personalization.
10. Labeling – Labeling is the means of classifying yourself, others, or situations in a negative way following a situation that did not turn out the way you wanted. An example of this type is a person who calls themselves a failure because they failed a grade in school and therefore cannot possibly amount to anything good. Or you say someone is worthless because they didnt do something they promised to do. This gives you the ability to berate yourself over and over again or to underestimate someone based on a specific situation. 

If this list was a test of how I have interacted in my life, then the lowest score I would receive would be an 80%. But what I have started to realize is that these modalities can be changed, if you put in the work.

Taking Control of Your Thoughts and Your Life

Are you feeling lost in all of this? No worries, let me get you back on track. The point I am getting to here is that for a lot of my life I have been acting on autopilot. I have let the negative emotions I have collected throughout a lifetime to be the guiding force in my interactions going forward. I have seen the negative parts before ever considering a positive ones. Those old emotions only work to continue the same line of thinking I have always had. 

When I was diagnosed with cirrhosis, I had to make a decision. I could sit and wallow in my pity, thinking why did this have to happen to me and not make any changes. Or, I could look at where I am and how I can get better going forward. I can’t change my diagnosis but I can change how it will affect me, going forward. These are the thought patterns I need to employ in other areas of my life. When an argument pops up, instead of reacting with the old emotions, try to think about what is causing that emotion – why are you feeling this way? Did those same thought patterns make the situation better in the past? What is the benefit of continuing down the same path again?

Yes, my father wouldn’t have won any Father of the Year awards but those are his problems, his issues. I am not him, this is my chance to grow from it and be a better person to myself and those I love. My past doesn’t have to influence my future, negatively. I can use it for growth and how not to react.

To the future

This turning of 50 has become a pivotal point. It’s a chance to rewrite the narrative, to shed the baggage of the past and step into a future built on my own terms. This isn’t about erasing the past, but rather understanding its influence and making a conscious choice to move forward with a new perspective. It’s time to ditch the “It’s Not My Fault” mentality and to find a new path forward. This journey of self-discovery might be scary, but I’m ready to trade in my autopilot for a life filled with intention and growth. Because who says 50 and flawed can’t be fabulous?

What about your, are there modalities in your life that you have learned are outdated? Perhaps you are wanting to find a new way of dealing with life’s daily struggles. Or maybe you have moved beyond these things that held you back? Let me know in the comments below. You never know, your journey could be what sets another person on their first steps fo transformation. Thanks for being with us.