Changing Negative Thinking - CBT worksheet

    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

What is a social worker? Cracking your assumptions.

Hello beautiful people! So if you have already read my "about me", you would know that I'm a social worker and graduated the University of South Florida last spring with my Masters degree. I'm currently working on getting my LCSW (Licensed Clinical Social Worker) and just sent in my application yesterday to become an intern! So that is very, very exciting.
I thought about making this post because being a social worker is obviously very important to me and maybe some readers out there are wondering about what it means to be one or if it's something they would want to do. So here ya go!

(Also, my shirt seen above with "I'm a social worker, what's your superpower?" is from a shop on Etsy. They have one for a nurse as well, or any other that you would like, I'm pretty sure the owner of the shop can customize it for you if you ask. Click here to go to the shop!)

Cracking assumptions

I've heard a lot of assumptions when people talk about social workers. The most popular being; "Oh, so you take away people's kids, right?" or "You'll never make any money", or "Wow... that's hard. It takes a special person to do that". If you think some of these assumptions sound a bit annoying to hear, you're right, lol. Let me try to break some of these assumptions for you. 

"You take away people's kids, right?"

• There are SO many different jobs and titles a social worker can have besides being a Child Protective Investigator. That was never the route I wanted to go while going into this because my mom was actually a CPI and her job exhausted her, trust me, I heard so many stories. There are so many different areas of work you can switch to, which also don't require any extra type of licensing. They may prefer you have experience with a specific population of people, but really it doesn't matter. You can be a forensic social worker, offering behavioral and psychological services to the criminal justice system while working in a court room or advocate for a woman who is in a abusive relationship, a Nicu social worker, empowering families during times of crisis that they didn't expect, you can work at the VA, giving resources to homeless veterans, a psychiatric social worker, working with teenagers with eating disorders or adults who have schizophrenia, you can work in a hospital as a discharge planner collecting resources to help others, a school social worker, helping kids resolve social, behavioral, and emotional problems at school and at home, a hospice social worker, addressing the needs of people with late-stage illnesses, you can work at a kids camp as a social worker, with kids who have behavioral problems, who act out or are autistic... there are seriously so many ways you can work as a social worker, which is one of the main reasons why I choose this job. It is so broad!

"You'll never make any money"

• Let's get into the juicyness of this next assumption. While yes, being a social worker isn't the highest paying job.. you'll never be totally rich, but you can definitely make good money. I personally think becoming an LCSW is the best decision you can make as a social worker. Higher pay and more opportunities. If you're curious, just google some jobs on indeed.com. If you're thinking of becoming a social worker but want to stop your education after you get your Bachelors... unfortunately, the pay is so much less than what you deserve. There are probably many jobs without needing a Bachelors, that you could get that pay more. But if it's what you love to do, who's business is it?  But let's face it, if you're in the "helping profession" we all still care about the money even if our main goal is helping others. I definitely recommend getting your Masters if you're thinking about going into social work.  Also, probably the best place you can work (money wise0 as a social worker is in the healthcare field; being in a clinical setting.

How to get licensed as an LCSW? (Licensed Clinical Social Worker)

• If you decide to go down the path of becoming an LCSW, you register as an intern first and it takes two years to get all of your supervised hours, once finding another LCSW who is licensed to supervise you. Keep in mind, this info is in the state of Florida (where I live) so it may be different depending on where you live. You need to be doing these hours in a clinical setting. It's only an hour a week max, 100 hours in total, and then you have to take a 4 hour timed test, at whatever point you would like. If you get lucky, you may score your first job somewhere that will pay for your supervised hours or find someone who will do it for free... or else the payments can be pretty expensive. But being an LCSW is pretty much basically being a therapist. It's much more marketable than going into mental health, as a counselor, and getting your LMHC. So if you want to get into the helping profession in some sort of way, by being a counselor, therapist, or what have you; honestly getting your LCSW is the best way to go.

"You're a social worker? That takes a special person to do that"

• My final, most heard assumption. I never truly know if this is a heart-felt compliment, and people don't know how they make it sound, or if it's really just people being rude and feeling more superior than you for whatever reason. Well, whatever it is, it annoys me, lol. (A lot of things annoy me but whatever). So, yes. It can be hard. But any job can be hard. Typical corporate jobs, working behind a desk, can be extremely stressful with deadlines. Being a doctor can be extremely stressful, I would assume, when you're on call for four days straight and have barely slept, or when you literally have someone's life in the palm of your hand. There's also definitely pressure on certain social work jobs. When my mom was working in child protection her caseload was ridiculous. She was also on call some nights and would have to leave in the middle of the night to pick up a child. Now, she works from home with an insurance company and gives people resources or chats with them if they're feeling sad because they just found out their husband is cheating on them. She's never on call and never has to leave the guest room of her house. Any job can be hard and it doesn't always have to be hard. You can always change things. Change your job or find outlets to release your stress, like practicing self-care, playing the piano, singing, going to yoga classes. The good thing about my job is when I clock out, I'm done. I don't take anything home with me. But you know what, the same thing used to happen to me on crazy nights as a server working in a sports bar. And anyways, I'm not always going to be at this job. I like to think everything happens for a reason, and maybe the next thing from here will be even better. I think it's all about balance and loving what you do at the end of the day. Because honestly, being a social worker is so, so rewarding. I wish there were more "special" people out there who wanted to become one. 

I just think it is important that, no matter what you do, no matter how much money you're making or how many hours you're working, that you truly love what you do. 
Have a great weekend.

Lots of love,
Sammi