The Power of Your Thoughts
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is a well known evidence-based approach used to help people overcome and successfully treat a variety of mental health concerns.
This approach addresses how our thoughts impact our emotions and behaviors. Just like the outline below, our thoughts create a chain reaction and sometimes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Event --> Thought (Perception) --> Emotion --> Behavior
When an event occurs, we have a perception of this event. Our perception leads to a thought, which can either be helpful or unhelpful. The thought leads us to feel an emotion and the emotion leads to an action or behavior.
Here is an example:
Event: your partner sends you a text saying “hey can we talk tonight”.
Perception/Thought: Your automatic thought is “what have I done” “what could they be mad about”. You perceive that talking is a negative thing.
Emotion: Based on your thoughts, you feel anxious during the day. You spend time thinking about all the reasons they *could* be mad at you. (Thought) “Are they going to bring up how much money I spent this weekend”.
Behavior: Due to your heightened anxiety, you snap at your partner over something small. Your partner responds “Is everything okay”?To beat your partner to the punch, you say “fine you want to have a talk” then you proceed to defend yourself. You say to your partner “You spend way too much money on outings” “I deserve to have some new things”.
This is an example of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Your thought and perception ultimately led you to start a fight, which is what you were anxious about in the first place.
Does this scenario sound familiar?
So how do we change this?
Changing our thoughts takes time, self-awareness, and hard work.
Here are some tips:
Build your self-awareness: notice and ask yourself “what am I thinking about this event”
Practice checking in with yourself: “what have my thoughts been” “what emotion am I feeling”
Label your thoughts: are your thoughts helpful or unhelpful (distorted)
Write it out: draw the picture above and fill in the labels with your experience
Learning and building CBT skills is most effective with the guidance and outside feedback from a mental health professional. At Cooper Counseling Center, we work together to explore how thinking patterns play out in your life to help change destructive behaviors or disruptive thoughts. We identify examples specific to your experiences that may uncover deep core beliefs such as “I am not good enough” or “I am not loveable”. With guidance and processing, you develop skills to manage and heal your thoughts and build your self-awareness to implement these skills independently in the future.