I recently have been learning some new weapon techniques in my martial arts class: double-nunchucks. Spinning those metal tubes quickly, often doing different things with the right and left side can be challenging! Indeed, I have perpetual bruises on my inner elbows. If you have ever hit your inner elbow by accident, you know how much it smarts. I’m trying to use a cognitive therapy strategy, called reappraisal, to learn from this experience. Reappraisal involves construing events in a different way. Instead of thinking, “Oh, for crying out loud, not again!” whenever I hit my elbow with the nunchucks, I try to think, “What can I learn from this? What am I doing, and how can I do it better?” The elbows are still sore, but I’m hitting them a lot less often, and I’m surprised that I’m actually catching on to the whole thing.
I think that this is a lot like dealing with feedback – critical, negative, constructive, and so on – from other people. If we think of negative feedback as awful, unwanted, undesirable, unhelpful, and so on, we’re unlikely to learn from it. This would be a lot like ignoring or denying the fact that I keep hitting my elbows and continuing to do the same thing over and over again. If I were to do that, I’d never improve, and eventually, I wouldn’t be able to move my arms. When someone says that we have done something wrong, expresses dissatisfaction with something we’ve done or said, or asks us to change our behaviour, it can be easy to become defensive and dismissive. It’s harder to look for the wisdom or truth in what the other person is saying and learn from the experience. I think that reappraising critical feedback as a learning experience can help us make the most of it and avoid the pitfalls of defensiveness or denial. In DBT, there’s a new skill in the interpersonal effectiveness section (Linehan, 2015) that can help with this: Recovering from invalidation. In short, this skill involves figuring out whether invalidation or critical feedback is valid and possibly useful versus invalid and less useful. If it’s valid, or even if there’s a grain of truth in there somewhere, the idea is to learn from it and make changes if needed. If there’s not much validity to it, then you might go down a different path: accept that you have received the feedback or have been invalidated, remember that invalidation is rarely a catastrophe, and then figure out what to do next. Even when negative feedback smarts, it can still be a helpful opportunity to learn, grow, and act skillfully. ~ Alexander L. Chapman, Ph.D., R.Psych.