Name: Why Do Bad Things Only Happen To Me? | Trauma Ep. 1
Uploaded: 2019-03-13T15:38:19.000Z
Channel: Najwa Awad
Description: In the first episode of Trauma: Your Lord Has Not Forsaken You, Dr. Najwa Awad explains the distortion of filtering, its affects, and a tool to work against it. Read “Why Do Bad Things Always Happen to Me? Breaking the Cycles of Negativity“.

<a href="https://yaqeeninstitute.org/series/trauma/">Trauma: Your Lord Has Not Forsaken You</a><p style="text-align: left;">Read &quot;<a href="https://yaqeeninstitute.org/najwa-awad/why-do-bad-things-always-happen-to-me-breaking-the-cycles-of-negativity/">Why Do Bad Things Always Happen to Me? Breaking the Cycles of Negativity</a>&quot;.</p>

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A psychological and spiritual perspective on enduring emotional pain and suffering. This topic explores healing mechanisms found within Islamic traditions and modern psychology.

Trauma

Your Lord Has Not Forsaken You | Trauma Series Introduction

Why Do Bad Things Only Happen To Me? | Trauma Ep. 1

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I Should've Gotten Over It by Now | Trauma Ep. 2

Why Bother Living if the Future is Filled with Pain? | Trauma Ep. 3

How Can I Ever Trust Again? | Trauma Ep. 4

Why Does Allah Hate Me So Much? | Trauma Ep. 5

Addressing the Topic of Trauma and Faith - Sh. Omar Suleiman | ISNACON 2019

The Impact of Trauma on Faith - Sarah Sultan | ISNACON 2019

The Duha Approach: A New Model to Treat Trauma - Najwa Awad | ISNACON 2019

How Islam Addresses Grief - Dr. Altaf Husain | ISNACON 2019

Everything is Falling Apart | Trauma Ep. 6

The Impact of Grief on Faith - Sarah Sultan | ISNACON 2019

Understanding Traumatic Grief - Najwa Awad | ISNACON 2019

I Must Have Done Something Wrong - Is It My Fault? | Trauma Ep. 7

How Can I Ever Get Past This? | Trauma Ep. 8

Why is Everyone's Life Better than Mine? | Trauma Ep. 9

3 Reasons Why You Think the World Is Against You

Healing the Community | MASCON 2019

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Najwa Awad

Written by licensed therapists Najwa Awad, LSCW-C and Sarah Sultan, LPC, LMHC, this series of articles and videos seeks to address trauma through The Duha Approach, a comprehensive and Islamically sound approach to treating trauma from a spiritual, mental, emotional, and physical perspective. Each article and video in the series will address one of the ten most common types of cognitive distortions, or unhealthy ways of thinking, linked to common faith-based questions that may arise after having experienced adversity. The primary purpose of this series is to provide a refuge and healing for those who have silently endured trauma, perhaps not fully understanding what is happening to them and not knowing how or where to get help. The articles will work through depressive feelings, worries, and doubts that may impact faith while helping promote growth and healing.

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Trauma: Your Lord Has Not Forsaken You

 Assalamualaikum, Najwa here from Yaqeen Institute. Welcome to episode 1 from our series, Your  Lord Has Not Forsaken You, the Impact of Trauma on Faith. Today we're going to be talking  about filtering. When bad things seem to be happening back to back, and it's just one  trial after another, you might be bogged down with pain and feel like you're in a big storm  and just can't seem to get out. As one bad thing happens after another, you might start  to wonder, is there something wrong with me? Why do bad things only happen to me? How is  it possible that so many trials can happen to me and not other people? When you begin  to have these questions, then in your mind you start to build up these assumptions or  unhealthy ways of thinking and then eventually biases about how the world works. When you  are internalizing these negative things that happen to you, then you begin to look at the  world in the same light. So for example, when you start to get caught into negative thinking  and thinking that everything around you is not good, you'll begin to overlook some of  the positives in your life. So for example, say you were thinking, why is everyone out  to get me? Why does everyone hate me? If someone buys you coffee in the morning and your child  hugs you on the way out, you will actually overlook those things. But when you are crossing  the street and someone says something really mean to you, you'll hone in on those things.  Filtering is like a coffee filter. All the things go inside, but only the negative comes  out. And over time, it really begins to impact mood, it begins to impact productivity, because  everything around you just seems to be negative. So one of the really destructive things that  filtering does is it builds up these self-fulfilling prophecies. And self-fulfilling prophecies,  they not only can be done to us by other people, but we can also do them to others. So say  for example, you are a woman who has low self-esteem. So you built in this filter that I'm worthless,  there's nothing good about me. What happens over time is that you might start to act in  that way. And so what happens is other people around you will begin to act on you in that  way. And then you say to yourself, well, I was not worthless. I was worthless this whole  time. And so it becomes this whole self-fulfilling prophecy in which your thoughts and your feelings  actually turn out to be what's going to happen to you. So this can be done in a good way,  but it also can be done in a negative way. There was a landmark study done in the 1960s  in which teachers were told that certain students in their class were ready to bloom. They did  IQ tests in the beginning of the year. And at the end of the year, they did the same  test as well. And they found that those people who were ready to bloom, which actually were  just randomly picked, the students that were randomly selected as ready to bloom actually  significantly did higher on their IQ tests. And that's all because the teacher had a different  perception of them and nurtured them in a way which helped them bloom.  So one way to gain insight into filtering is to take a step back and reflect. Instead  of looking at how is the world imposing itself on me, how am I imposing my views, my feelings  onto the world? And when you take yourself out of being a more passive participant and  more of an active person in your life, you will find that you have more power than you  think. And although bad things can happen over and over, when you start to come from  a place of empowerment and say, I do have power over my environment, I do have the ability  to make my own decisions. And even if things are not good, I can change them. I can turn  bad things into good things. When you do that, then it doesn't feel like, why are all these  bad things happening to me? It's more like, how can I take these events in my life that  are neutral and how can I turn them into something better? How can I impose myself on the world  and make it a better place?  One tool that you can find in our article is something called through the Prophet's  eyes. When you're feeling negative and that everything around you just feels really terrible,  one exercise to do in your head is you can close your eyes and reflect. If he, Sarrasum,  was sitting in front of me, what blessings would he say that I had that he doesn't? If  you think about it, he had so many traumatic events in his life. He was in poverty. He  didn't have food to eat. He was persecuted. So when you look at it from that framework,  what blessings, even through small blessings, do you have that he doesn't? And when you  look at it from that perspective, you will reflect and you will see that maybe there  are more positive things in your life than you would have thought.  For more insights, tools, and tips on the cognitive distortion filtering, check out  the chapter, Why do bad things only happen to me?

Trauma: Your Lord Has Not Forsaken You

Najwa Awad

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