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Selective abstraction is a distortion of thinking that makes a person feel that everything negative is more relevant and more present in situations than what is positive. It’s not an intentional thing, it just becomes an automatic way of processing reality. It is very likely that the person has adopted this way of thinking for “educational heritage” and has never stopped to question it.
When people live in environments where they are constantly focusing on the negative things about each person or situation, they get used to thinking that this type of analysis is the right one. In addition, this perspective is gradually becoming fixed in the brain, and therefore it cannot detect the cracks that actually exist in your thinking.
It may even be that you have incorporated certain justifications for thinking this way. Perhaps you think that staying only in the negative will run less risk of feeling frustrated about not reaching a goal, or discovering other people’s mistakes or emptiness. You may also think that seeing the negative is a more analytical and critical attitude, because you don’t have to mess with the good things.
Selective abstraction in everyday life
People who have this distortion of thinking are often upset. It’s common for them to have a catalog of what they don’t tolerate or what they feel angry about. They can’t stand the lack of punctuality, they tolerate anything but lying, they get very upset about the fact that people are conformists and things like that. In turn, they feel indignant and even attacked by the mistakes of others. This, moreover, can be a way of thinking that makes them proud.
Selective abstraction not only has to do with the outside world, it also ends up applying to itself. This results in those people who we say “are watching another movie”. In other words, they are those who tend to imagine the outcome of every situation as something terrible or, in any case, negative for them.
This can be an example: the boyfriend takes a while to get to his girlfriend. She starts to despair and imagines that maybe it’s a way he has to convey that he is no longer as interested in the relationship as before.
She ends up thinking that he is an inconsiderate, selfish man, and besides, that he doesn’t like her, as in her mind she told herself many times. When he arrives, what he does is just launch all these accusations, without considering that his delay was due to a traffic accident, something that completely escapes her boyfriend’s will.
Another example, applied to work, is when someone has carefully prepared a presentation and it turns out to be a success. However, some of the participants make some criticism about a detail of the presentation. Thus, the presenter eliminates the feeling of triumph and only this criticism is stored in his memory, which he will relive over and over again in the next few days.
He leaves thinking that maybe other people had criticisms too, but that the only one who expressed it out loud was the one who formulated the criticism. He even thinks that maybe all his efforts were in vain, because the presentation did not meet his expectations, which at all times were conditioned to fulfilling the expectations of others.
Fighting selective abstraction
Keeping the mind in the register of selective abstraction invariably leads to states of frustration and boredom. It is not something that enriches life in any way, not even a kind of thinking that should be cultivated. On the contrary: what is advised is to eradicate this mechanism from the mind itself in order to have a fuller life. But how can I do this?
As with all mechanical behavior, the first thing to do is to become aware that you are stuck with it. It is good to ask the following question: how much weight do I give to the negative aspects of people or situations? I somehow think the negative is something that deserves more attention than the positive?
Once the existence of this selective abstraction in thought is recognized, the next step is to carry out a process of self-observation to detect whether this happens to everything and everyone or whether it appears only under certain circumstances. This vigilant attitude will allow you to see what triggers the distortion. It is more likely to find that the mechanism arises in circumstances that cause insecurity.
When that time comes when you can say to yourself, “Listen, you’re just seeing the downside,” then we’re ready to take the next step. Why not try to see the bright side, the bright side?
Try to turn it into a permanent exercise, almost like another mechanism: every negative evaluation you make of something or someone, you immediately need to counter it with a positive evaluation. “I found this defect, now the task is to find a virtue”. Then you will be on your way to overcoming the terrible weight of selective abstraction thinking.
