Hello, friends! While working for my clinical social work licensure, I have felt inspired recently to talk about CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy) in a simple, easy to learn way that I feel everyone can benefit from.
This is just a basic breakdown of CBT and how you can use some strategies at home and practice on changing your negative thoughts to more positive ones. While this is a simple technique you can do on your own, for the best results, consult a therapist or counselor if you feel like this would really help you overcome and regulate symptoms of anxiety, self-esteem, depression, and other illnesses.
Now, this isn't to say that you will feel completely relieved of symptoms after practicing this CBT technique, but it is a good way to understand your patterns of thinking and work on changing them.
CBT focuses on your current train of thought. Chances are, most of us have experienced some type of hardship or trauma as a child or young adult. And although we may react in ways due to how we were conditioned or raised, it is important to know that we are constantly learning, and we can unlearn and change the way we think.
It has been evidenced that when an uncomfortable or unpleasant situation occurs, an immediate thought is followed, BEFORE a negative feeling.
This is important because most don't realize that when something negative happens, it is the thought that comes first and not the feeling.
For example; you are in line for a theme park ride and almost to the very front. You can see people entering and exiting the roller-coaster and you are so, so close to getting on, but then someone cuts in front of you. What comes first? The feeling of anger/annoyance? Or a thought such as "Are you kidding me?!” Most assume it must be the feeling, but it's not. Because of your automatic thought, you are now angry and frustrated. But if we can control the thought to be something more like "Okay I don't know the whole situation, maybe they are with someone else and had stepped out to use the bathroom" or "Before I get angry, I'll just politely confront them", rather than exploding with anger or being completely frustrated. We don't have to let our feelings control us. This is something that I personally can work on, as I'm sure most of us can.
You can change how you feel by changing your thoughts. Thoughts control feelings.
CBT uses the ABC model. It stands for:
A: Activating event
B: Belief or thought
C: Consequence or feeling
By doing this exercise; it helps us uncover our automatic thoughts. Now of course, it would be unrealistic to think that this exercise will pop into your head as a real event is occurring, because most of the time we act on impulse and we act in the ways we know how to simply act. But this can help you, over time, change your automatic thoughts.
I've left a worksheet at the bottom here for you to save and work on. Make as many copies as you want! And remember; feel empowered that you are the master of all of your emotions. No one ever has the right to make you feel less than who you are.
~ Sam
