unsure of the reasons for her parents’ distress yet felt stressed by the tension in the air all evening. As her mother said afterwards, the shirt and light trousers were bad enough, but no-one, absolutely no-one, went to a dinner party in sandals.
Consider, however, what would have been happening had Susan been Japanese and taken John home to visit her Japanese parents. They would have felt stressed and mortified if he had worn shoes at all.
Many times when you feel stressed it is the result of things and events that are occurring in a way that does not fit in with your upbringing and expectations. If you can change these filters, change the way you view things, you can change your experience of stress.
Had Susan’s parents acknowledged that the man was more important than his clothes and had they assumed that their friends would have understood that what he wore was correct within John’s world and that he was not belittling them by dressing down, they need not have felt stressed and could have had a wonderful evening.
A western woman of conventional upbringing, used to covering her breasts at all times, could feel highly stressed when taken to a topless beach by her latest boyfriend. Yet had she been brought up in any one of many other cultures where it was perfectly natural for her to bare her breasts, such exposure could have seemed perfectly normal to her.
If events fall within your expectations of what is right, normal and safe, based on your culture and your upbringing, they probably don’t stress you. If they fall outside those expectations you probably do find them stressful.
Individual filters
The third type of filtering is done on an individual basis and there are at least three sub-filters in this group, namely, generalization, deletion and distortion.
Generalizing
The filters you apply through generalizing involve taking one experience that is bad and assuming that all such similar experiences will be bad. This then causes you to feel stressed.
Martha was a strong woman who helped her husband in the hardware store they owned. Her delight in the evenings was to take their large and strong labrador, Chappie, for a walk. When her city-bred sister, Jennifer, came to stay there was more work to be done so she asked Jennifer to walk the dog. All went well for the first week. Then on the eighth day Chappie found a smell that excited him and he took off with the lightly-built Jennifer clinging to his lead and desperately trying to keep up. Eventually she had to let go and returned home, after searching high and low, shaken and embarrassed, without him. Chappie, needless to say, was waiting quietly at the front door. From then on Jennifer refused to walk him at all saying: ‘He always runs away when I take him, I’m not strong enough to hold him.’
In this way she generalized from the one event that stressed her, ignoring the previous seven successful walks, to create a feeling of stress whenever she was faced with a large dog.
Jim was frequently called on to present material to the board of directors of the company for which he worked. All went well for his first year in the job. Then at one meeting he got confused by the questions being thrown at him and got his figures muddled up. In a lather of embarrassment he extricated himself as well as he could and went back to his office. From then on he felt thoroughly stressed and developed tension headaches during the days prior to a board meeting knowing that he ‘always got his figures muddled at board meetings’.
Deletion
Deletion is the second kind of individual filtering. In this you ignore certain things that happen and focus on others. You may ignore the good things and then feel stressed because you are aware of their absence.
Mrs G. had come to my office several times complaining of many health problems, all of which she attributed to stress, and largely to the stress of her marriage.
‘My husband no longer cares,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t care how I’m feeling and he thinks I’m stupid. He either ignores me or contradicts what I say and argues with me. I can’t cope with the children, he undermines my authority and I can’t keep going this way.’
Eventually I decided I needed to see them both together so she brought Mr G. in with her on her next visit. He sat in a chair beside her and rested his arm along the back of hers in a protective gesture. As he introduced himself he explained that he was worried about his wife’s health and willing to do anything he could to help.
For the first 10 minutes she spoke and I asked questions. Mr G. remained quiet but observed her and me closely with obvious concern for her showing on his face. Eventually Mrs G. said, ‘And I’ve had a headache every single day with the stress of it all.’
‘No, dear, you didn’t have a headache at the weekend, remember, we remarked on it.’
‘There you are,’ she said angrily, leaning towards me, ‘see what I mean, he doesn’t care and he contradicts me all the time.’
One look at Mr G.’s face showed his progression from happy optimism that she had been headache-free for the weekend to resignation at her outburst.
She had followed her habit of filtering out the care he was expressing by his body language and the 10 minutes during which he had listened to every word she said without a contradiction. Her filtering and her expectations were leading her to have the type of experience she expected to have. It was going to be another bad day.
Distortions
Distortions are probably the easiest type of filtering to describe. Your boss gives you a bunch of flowers, delighted with the work you have done and you think ‘what does he want from me now’. Or the children come home from school with a present for you and you wonder what crime they have committed. Perhaps you are invited to a party and think ‘they’ve only asked me because they feel they must’. Or perhaps you are not invited because they have only asked their friends who are interested in music. You’re not, and yet you choose to assume they don’t like you enough to want you.
There are more ways of distorting situations, remarks, looks and so forth than there are people. We all do it all the time; it is impossible not to. No-one can be totally objective; we are all biased by our past experiences.
Good and bad days 2
Think back to the good day and the bad day that started this section and we will see how filters could apply to them.
On the bad day you have woken up late, you’ve tripped getting out of bed, run the cold instead of the hot tap in the shower, burnt the toast and discovered the milk was sour. Expecting the rest of the day to be full of problems, you filtered out of your mind the green traffic lights through which you sailed and focused on the red ones that stopped you. You ignored the smiles on the faces of the happy people you met and focused on the people who were cross. You hurried past the friendly check-out girls in the first two shops and then were stressed when you were kept waiting by the slow girl in the shoe shop who was new at the job. The pleasant ‘good morning, have you time to come in for a coffee?’ from a usually quiet neighbour could have set you wondering what she wanted to complain about when all she wanted was to cheer you up a bit. You could then have gone home safe in the knowledge that the day had been as awful as you had known it would be from the start and spent the evening complaining of the stress you were under, saying: ‘I knew it was going to be a bad day from the start. All the traffic lights were red [generalization from a few], no-one smiled at me [deletion], the shop assistants were hopeless [deletion] and the neighbour probably wants me to baby-sit [distortion].’
On
