Elements of a Curriculum on the Psychology of Living 6: Irrational Thinking & Negative Emotion

Introduction to the series

How is it that children spend a thousand hours a school year in classrooms, but over the course of a dozen years come away with having learned so little about themselves -- practical knowledge about the psychology of being human.

The following series of blog entries explores the elements of a curriculum on the psychology of living, with the aim of providing children a toolkit for understanding themselves and their relations at a deep level.

There is nothing novel in these ideas; none belong to me. They are, I believe, generally accepted concepts from cognitive, social and clinical/counseling psychology, and deserve to be as much a part of the pedagogy of schooling as math facts and decoding skills.

I've shared these ideas with students and parents in recent years, typically in the context of a parent-student conference, or in response to unnecessary dramas associated with managing a classroom of two dozen or so diverse children.

The entries are not referenced, but the concepts can be found in an entry-level psychology text. The bibliography may be developed at a later date.

Imagine that we are studying life on Earth through a very large telescope from a distant world. What patterns might we observe in the lives of humans? What might we conclude about the nature and organization of their minds, their so-called psychology?

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As with the others in this theme, the ideas here can be simply stated, but deserve a lifetime of reflection and practical application.

We are conditioned, programmed beings, creatures of habit, responding to the environment in patterned ways. It is what we are, fully. We are fantastically complex and interactive food processing machines, designed to ingest and metabolize food of three types (hamburgers, air and impressions), allowing us to think, feel, move, and function physically.

We are subject to negative emotions, which recur like little (or not so little) subprograms, wasting tremendous energy, parasitic, like holes in the boat, robbing us of force, leaving us depleted. We have no right to them. They are habits, and destructive bad habits. There is no justification for them.

Negative emotions speak to us. They are irrational:

I will never be successful.


I can't do anything right.


People will never change.


No matter how much I change it doesn't make any difference; others don't recognize the changes.


There is no reason to have hope for the future; my past negative experiences tell it all.


If people can critique my changed behavior, then how can I ever be "good enough"?


No matter how much I change it is never enough.


Life should be simpler.


Life should be fair.


Life should be easy.


There is so much wrong in life how can I ever expect anything good to come my way?


There is too much to do to change my life for the better. It's too hard.


Why can't others change? Why does it have to be me that changes first?


Why can't life be easier on me?


My parents are the reason I am the way I am; nothing will ever change that.


People are only nice to me to see what they can get from me.


I've been treated badly in the past, so why should I expect anything different in the future?


If people loved and supported me, they wouldn't criticize or correct me.


It's always the same: extend my hand in friendship and get it slapped in return.


No matter how good a person I try to be, I always get screwed in the end.


I am what I am and nothing will ever change.


I believe that children deserve to know about, discuss, and explore the phenomena of negative states, irrational beliefs, their consequence, and tools for gaining separation. As a teacher of eleven and twelve years olds, my students are at a point in their cognitive and social development, at the cusp of adolescence, when the time is perfect to explore negative states, both generally, and in the context of our lives. When I've brought it up in the classroom, the room typically falls silent, what for me is an indication that the ideas resonate. As humans we are subject to negative states, and as teachers (including both parents and classroom teachers) we have an obligation to enlighten our students, in so far as we understand the phenomena ourselves.