Threat Based Thinking

Understanding Threat Based Thinking

When people are happy they find it much easier to be able to connect with those around them. Being able to connect with others is a prerequisite to feeling a sense of belonging and satisfaction. This can be a difficult thing to achieve in modern times, because an adult's primary focus is on achievement. This can often make people believe that they have to focus on doing stuff in order to get a sense of well-being and self worth. Spending time with others enjoyably has to therefore be planned weeks in advance.

Another hindrance for being able to connect with others lays in the amount of distress someone may experience in their life. Constant stress and worry or low mood can make people withdraw or believe that even every day tasks are fires that urgently need to be extinguished.

A focus on achievement or a consistent sense of low mood, stress and / or worry can therefore hinder being able to connect with those around us. The chemicals related to well-being during the process of connecting are thus absent which means that people will be missing essential elements of an important stress mitigation process. Being able to connect can have an enormous soothing quality which is mainly achieved through face to face interaction.

Environment

The aforementioned tendencies mean that people often create environments that match these. This could mean that someone sets up a really busy work schedule, as being busy means that they don't feel bad or guilty. Next to this, staring at a screen and having that as a primary source of interaction with others is in no way a replacement of in-person connection.

It is therefore important that people create and manage their own environment in a way that allows them to make time to be able to connect with others. Ideally in a non task focused context. This could relate to doing enjoyable activities together such as football. Who is present is also important. If someone is very threat focused and constantly get's angry for example, then this too will act as hindrance from getting the most out of connecting.

Telephone Counselling

It helps to understand that threat based thinking is a concept often addressed in Compassion Focused Therapy (CFT). This form of CBT looks at something called the treat mode. The threat mode is a mode someone can be in when they see their environment as dangerous. When the mind is in the threat mode, it will start a survival strategy by thinking ahead a lot, focusing on the threatening end of the spectrum when projecting into the future, whilst also responding strongly to even neutral stimuli (getting anxiety symptoms when receiving a letter through the post). 

Because of this, people will do something called safety seeking strategies and safety behaviours. These are behaviours that keep a view alive. Someone who for example avoids checking their e-mails because of experiencing a sense of threat every time an e-mail arrives, may get a sense of well-being in the short term by doing so, but in the long term they confirm that checking e-mails is a threatening activity. This can often keep threat perceptions going. That's why avoidance is one of the things that is addressed often in online therapy for anxiety.

Some people would address other types of safety behaviours during telephone counselling sessions. These could be safety behaviours that represent the opposite of avoidance. Such as over-addressing things. The anxious student that immediately has to address every perceived issue whilst needing to be very certain about things can be an example. This is  the opposite of procrastination which is form of avoidance.

Finding suitable therapy near you is therefore very important. When a qualified professional can view your difficulties from the 'outside', they can find it easier to spot problematic patterns compared to the sufferer who is more subjectively involved. It does not matter whether you do in-person sessions or something like telephone counselling, the important thing is that the professional you look for is qualified and knowledgeable.