Choosing one’s attitude

Mental health therapists use fancy terms sometimes, I suppose to remind people that we’re educated. One term my patients hear me use fairly often is “maladaptive assumption.”

Let me break that term down into bite-size chunks. Something that’s “mal-adaptive” is doing a bad job of helping us adapt (“mal” is a prefix that usually means “bad,” as in “malnourished”). We spend much of our lives adapting to circumstances — even as far back as the moment of birth — so if we don’t adapt well, we likely become miserable.

An “assumption,” at least in this context, is a belief about the way things ought to be. I have an assumption, for instance, that people who make promises ought to keep them.

A maladaptive assumption is a belief about the way things should be that does not fit the way things are. It leaves us with a choice whether to continue believing things should be a certain way or adapting our beliefs to fit the way they are. This is tricky, because many of our beliefs are non-negotiable convictions.

But some assumptions can change. For instance, the assumption that “everyone should be nice to me” is maladaptive because that’s just not going to happen. So, I can either be miserable all the time because some people are not nice or I can change my assumption to something like “I should be nice to other people, but I can’t control whether they are nice to me.”

The Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, who spent World War II in a Nazi concentration camp, said this: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing — the last of the human freedoms: to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” If you are miserable in your circumstances, perhaps you can decrease your misery just a little by thinking differently about it.

Granted, that’s hard work, but it can be done. If you have problems with this, give us a call at 622-3580. Perhaps we can help.