The speed of identifying cognitive distortions will increase with one’s exposure to the book and practice working with others to identify them. The more in-depth reading one has with the book, the more understanding one will have with what the distortions are and how to pick them out. The speed of distortion identification is relative to one’s studying of Burn’s material. The Philosophy Society weekly meetings are a great place for feedback and an opportunity to practice distortion identification. 

          The chapter leaves off with the principle of talking back one’s internal critic. This is inherently a philosophical activity where we use our critical thinking to reason through negative self-talk. Burns urges us to write down our negative self-talk and rational responses so that we make the thinking pattern objective and observable as written words. He says that it makes it much easier for us to internalize the learning process of dealing with the negative thinking patterns by writing it. It is better to talk back with one’s internal dialogue at least than doing nothing if writing in the moment is not possible. He believes setting aside 15 minutes a day is a good start to begin dealing with any negative thinking patterns that have accumulated. (67-9) 

          The second method he identifies to improve on one’s self-critical thoughts is mental biofeedback where one would use a clicker counter to record the negative thoughts throughout the day. (69) This method of systematic self-monitoring will bring greater self-awareness to the frequency of negative thinking and that in itself will help reduce the overall negative thinking over time. 

The third method (70) is to develop some coping strategies instead of allowing oneself to be depressed. Burns gives a dialogue of a woman, Nancy, who believes she is a bad mother because her son is doing poorly in school. (70-6) These dialogues are at the heart of what makes this book philosophical; we get to see the interchange and exchange of reasoning between Burns and his patients or the patients and themselves. The direct response to the statements within the dialogue offers relevant criticism to each of the problems in thinking that the person is suffering from. 

          Burns initially starts with the definition of what a ‘bad mother’ is and identifies this way of thinking as the labeling distortion. (73) The definition itself is unrealistic for she is imposing perfectionistic standards on herself and not able to meet those standards. She would label herself whenever her son made mistakes. Burns identified that she is accepting responsibility for the areas her son messes up but does not accept responsibility for the areas he succeeds in. She imposes her own double standard on herself for another person’s bad behaviour.

          The labeling itself reduces her ability to be productive and focus on ‘coping skills,’ which would be focusing attention on her parenting skills. Using attention and emotional energy on labeling oneself in a distorted way does not change anything in reality that would have an effect on the outcome that would produce the effect we are upset about. If Nancy is upset about issues in her relationship with her son, she will have greater success and effectiveness by attending to those issues instead of paralyzing herself through distorted thinking. Distorted thinking only makes one suffer whereas intelligent attention and action towards the phenomena relevant to the problem one is facing will produce observable results. “I can try to define the problem, and attack that problem, and work toward solving it.” (Burns 75) 

          Burns offers a table to help with this process: Automatic Thought vs Rational Response. (76) Here, the automatic thought is the self-criticism and the rational response is the self-defense. The labeling “prevented her from defining the real problem,  breaking it down into its specific parts, and applying appropriate solutions.” (Burns 78) Using the two column technique of identifying the self-criticism and producing a self-defense, gives power to the person suffering to not waste energy on distorted thinking. A label in this way is inaccurate because we are not a constant thing but involved in a constant process of change physically, and in our mental life with a flow of thoughts, feelings and behaviours. (79) 

          Thoughts and feelings do not represent our worth even though some are positive, the negative ones are not relevant to your value. Your value as a person is a constant phenomena that is not contingent on feelings or thoughts. Learning to respond to negative thinking is the best way to correct problems of self-esteem because it is the thinking pattern itself that is affecting it. (79)