CBT: The Devil's Advocate

This post is part of a series of posts exploring Cognitive Behavioural Therapy [CBT] techniques, their application, and my experiences with them.  All posts in this series begin with the tag 'CBT' so you can use the search feature of this blog to read the other posts.

Sticking with demonic metaphors, The Devil's Advocate is a trope in fiction where an author will create a character that gives the "Devil" a voice, this isn't usually a literal depiction of the Devil from Abrahamic Religions but rather the representation of a counter point, or the adversary in a given situation.  This particular CBT technique borrows from that literary trope and employs it as a means of encouraging introspection that is critical rather than being lead by cognitive bias, although it's worth pointing out before going further that it's never truly possible to be objective and truly unbiased when you are judging yourself and analysing your own thoughts and feelings no matter how indifferent and objective you may think you're being, with that said we can continue.

When anxiety over situations occurs it is often the fear of the unknown that is the cause, there is an association between the situation and a potential result that is perceived as unwanted and this association is then determined to be the most likely outcome because the others are unknown and uncontemplated due to our aversion to contradicting the ego.  In order to combat this you need to map out other potential results in order to sow doubt and dilute the concentration that is placed negative result we perceive as the most likely.  This involves looking at our circumstance from differing points of view and considering those that factor in the possibility that we are wrong.  In its most basic terms there is always a good guy and a bad guy in narrative fiction and characters always believe that they are the good guy, every hero is a villain to the other side.  It's important to recognise that no matter how convinced we may be in any situation of any belief, there always remains the possibility that we are wrong, even if all evidence we have points towards the conclusions we have drawn.

For example, if you have a fear of social situations because you feel that people will not like you and that they will react negatively in those situations then it is important to recognise the situation, the expected result, and the evidence that we have considered that lead us to this conclusion and then go beyond these predications and consider alternate explanations firstly to contradict the evidence, which in turn will sow doubt at the conclusion, and hopefully alter the expectation.  In this case the situation is a potential social gathering, and the expected result is a negative reaction that other people won't like you and then act in a given way.  The evidence you might have in this situation is prior experience of efforts to engage socially that did not end well.  The assumptions as to why those prior situations ended the way they did must first be challenged and alternate explanations should be offered.  For instance, failure to form connections at prior social interactions might not have been because the people did not like you but because they weren't interested in the things you spoke to them about, or that you didn't have anything in common with them, or that they were nervous and unable to put aside their own anxieties in order to engage, or that they weren't in the right frame of mind to be sociable because of something they were going through.  The important thing to achieve here is to consider alternative explanations for the evidence you have gathered even if those explanations might not seem likely or even plausible at first. 

Once you manage to offer alternative explanations for the evidence you had built up then you can draw alternative conclusions in hypothetical scenarios where your explanations for those pieces of evidence were actually true, again at this point plausibility and likelihood aren't relevant, you just have to play out the scene with characters that have different motivations to those that you expect.  With those alternative conclusions in hand you can then consider them in tandem with your initial conclusion to alleviate the feeling of predestined failure.  With each conclusion in hand including your initial conclusion which may still seem the most likely, you then play out each hypothetical situation by successively asking what would happen next, pursuing each narrative to an end point.  When you reach the end of each narrative you can if you wish, replay the narrative making alternative choices along the way developing different strategies.  The ultimate goal of this technique is to minimise the uncertainty element by playing out as many scenarios as you can think of until you reach a point where your initial conclusion in context isn't as daunting as you first thought.

I over-think things.  This is an understatement.  If you know me you will laugh when I say this because you will know I'm not exaggerating when I make this simple assertion.  This technique isn't one that I needed to learn about in this context because it is something that I have done for years, and considering the traumatic experiences I have been through and the fact this developed naturally as a coping mechanism I can entirely understand the logic behind it but I would not say it was healthy at all, although time and again now as I explore CBT the same conclusion I keep drawing is that CBT gives you temporary permission to engage in behaviours that would normally be discouraged as a means to overcome short term problems.  It's not healthy in the long run to over-think things as that in itself can lead to anxiety and can make it difficult to cope with certain situations.  I guess in that regard the fact that CBT is used as a bridge not as a destination implies that behaviours such as this are fine when used in moderation and when appropriate but relying on them long term is not ideal which I can completely accept from experience.

You won't be surprised to know this technique is the one I found easiest to use but not surprisingly it didn't help me all that much in coping with my situation, I believe that is primarily due to the fact this was a default behaviour for me and that employing it did not involve any disruption of the thought processes that lead me to this point in the first place - or to put it another way you can't solve a problem with the same mindset that created it. 

Would I recommend this technique?  That's a very difficult question to answer, on the one hand this is something I have done for many years and it has worked for me, it has got me through some very difficult situations and it has brought me a great degree of success, on the other hand it also helped contribute to the situation I found myself in because it lead to ingrained responses that were relied upon as optimal strategies as they were proven to have worked in the past.  I would perhaps say that this technique can be incredibly useful if and only if you add the caveat that it shouldn't be relied upon to create universal solutions or generic solutions to similar problems, be mindful of the strategies it produces and know the limits of their effectiveness.