Have you ever been trapped in worry's webs? Worry has a crafty way of luring us in with something real, perhaps a thought of something painful in the past, like when we lost a job or a possibility of losing a current job. Yet, like a spider's trap, worry can catch us in a spinning circle of story.
Before long, we have written a play in our minds of supervisors talking negatively about us, getting a poor evaluation, failing on a major project, and losing our job—even if none of those things are happening. It can be tricky to differentiate this imagined reality from what is certain.
In inference-based cognitive therapy, the in-between place where we make these terrible assumptions is called "inferential confusion" (O'Connor and Aardema, 2012). We make inferences all the time based on what we can observe. For example, right now, although I know it is a remote possibility, the roof over my home could........