Benefits and Costs

I was speaking with a client this week when he brought up how he couldn't understand some of his past actions, stating that they showed he was stupid and useless. This led a discussion around the value of using Cost Benefit Analysis to help put actions into prespective.

My point to him was that we all do things that in hindsight seem pretty stupid, but that at the time we made the decision to go forward with that action, we honestly thought it would benefit us. This could be something like a person with an alcohol abuse problem deciding to take a drink because they can't sleep due to nightmares about old traumas, so they try to "numb out" and get some rest.

A problem with our decision making is that we often act on actions that only provide short term benefits without considering the longer term consequences. Recognizing that when we suffer from enough pain (physical or psychological), we'll do almost anything to diminish it, we need to make ourselves more contemplative of both the short and long term consequences of actions. We also need to remember that consequences can be both positive or negative.

A prop that can help with this is to take a blank sheet of paper, fold it in half, than write out the benefits on one side and the consequences (good and bad) on the other. After you have listed everything you can think of, go back and label the items listed as having either short term (ST) or long term (LT) benefits/consequences. When this is done, you can rereview the list and see whether an action is a healthy or an unhealthy one.

If you can review your past with the understanding that you didn't make choices because you were 'stupid' or 'useless', but because you thought it was beneficial for you to do it, then you can hopefully find some self forgiveness and also learn to do better in the future with using Cost Benefit Analysis to make the best choice under the circumstances.