Mental health issues are a lot more common than they used to be. There are many obvious reasons for that, such as screentime, synthetic chemicals in everyone’s diets, and financial and economic problems prohibiting many, if not most people, from doing many of the things they imagined themselves being able to do by a particular stage in life. However, there are also other reasons for this, which are not as immediately apparent because they are either indirect causes (such as lacking good friendships) or because the people experiencing them don’t consciously notice them (as in negative thought patterns). That might not be as big of an issue if it were only a few people experiencing these things. But with the internet being in everyone’s pocket 24/7 and humanity being a lot more leveled and homogenized by technology than in the past, many people don’t have anyone in their life who isn’t also unknowingly experiencing the same thing. So they don’t have anyone to point it out to them. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy exists to address some of these invisible mental health issues.
What Is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy?
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is a non-chemical approach to many common mental health conditions. As mentioned, there are many positive lifestyle changes you can make to improve your mental and physical health (pro tip: they’re connected). But there are also these invisible issues that the person suffering isn’t aware of. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy involves a mental health professional uncovering and untangling these invisible issues with a patient. You might think that just sounds like old-school talk therapy, but there is actually an important difference: the intention.
In talk therapy, the intention is generally to make the patient feel safe and comfortable enough to unload their personal baggage to a degree they might not otherwise be comfortable with. There are certain techniques and approaches that a mental health professional can effectively use to get the patient to open up and let things out, but it’s mostly just a specific kind of talking. In Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, the intention is to pinpoint and name the specific point at which a patient’s mind veers from healthy, positive thought patterns into unhealthy, negative thought patterns and then to unravel that “original” negative thought so that a new positive one can be reprogrammed into the place it used to occupy.
Identify Your Negative Thought Patterns
When your mind begins to go off-track and think unrealistically negative thoughts, this is referred to as a “cognitive distortion.” As the name implies, cognitive distortions are thoughts that are not in accord with objective reality, and they are the beginning of negative thought patterns. To help therapists and patients alike, a standard list of cognitive distortions has been developed over the years since CBT became a thing. You’ll notice that some of them may overlap, and that’s because it is not uncommon for someone to experience 2 or 3 cognitive distortions simultaneously. However, it is helpful to narrow down as much as possible which ones you are experiencing and determine why exactly you’re experiencing them at this specific moment. This is how you identify the experiences or emotions that trigger specific cognitive distortions and initiate negative thought patterns. It sounds a lot harder than it really is, and once you start working with a mental health professional, you’ll quickly get the hang of it.
Trace The Line of Negative Thoughts
Like I said, a cognitive distortion is ultimately the origin point of a negative thought pattern. However, the first cognitive distortion you consciously identify may or may not be the first one you’ve experienced. It could be the 2nd, or it could be the 7th. So it’s helpful to trace your thought history back from the first distortion you identify to find out if there is another one that occurred before it. It may not be the trunk of the negative thought pattern tree; it might only be a branch. For the rest of this explanation, I’ll be describing a negative thought pattern as a tree with branches and a trunk.
Identify The Source (Trunk) If You Can
So you’ve identified and named the most recent cognitive distortion you’ve experienced and then traced your thought history backward from there to discover and name two additional cognitive distortions that occurred before that. Great! For this article, let’s say that’s as far back as this particular negative thought pattern goes and that the base of the trunk of this tree is that third cognitive distortion you found.
Realistically, there will probably be more beneath all this if you’ve been dealing with mental health issues for a while, and there are probably more trees in your negativity forest than just this one. But it’s ok to start small with just one and proceed at a comfortable pace from there. Now that you have named the first distortion that became the trunk of this tree, you can recall the event that occurred and/or the emotion you experienced that initially triggered you to have that cognitive distortion. This is a subconscious process as it’s happening, so usually, these experiential triggers are ones rooted in our past that we don’t even know we have until we do this exercise.
Counter Cognitive Distortion(s) With Reason
At this stage, you’ve got a firm understanding of how this tree began and unfolded, as well as which experiential trigger(s) caused your mind to automatically launch into a negative thought pattern. You’ve also come to understand that you’ve probably been habitually and subconsciously launching into this negative thought pattern via the same cognitive distortion for years every time you’ve experienced that trigger. Just like Pavlov’s dog, you’ve unconsciously learned or been trained to automatically launch into a particular behavior whenever you experience a particular stimulus.
This is good news because now that you understand the problem, you can address it effectively. In CBT, we do this by first negating the cognitive distortion, which is not difficult since, as the term suggests, it is an unrealistic (distorted) thought that does not reflect or accurately represent reality. Then, we simply replace the distorted thought with a more positive one that does accurately describe reality. For example, if the distortion is the thought “I never do anything right!” (filtering), we can replace it with the obvious “I sometimes make wrong choices, but I usually make the correct ones and that’s why I’m not currently serving multiple life sentences without the possibility of parole.”
Don’t Be Afraid to Ask For Help
While you can do some of this on your own, bear in mind that you are the patient, and patients are not normally expected to perform surgery on themselves. Granted, this isn’t exactly surgery, but the point is that you don’t need to feel like you have to do everything all by yourself. Also, in addition to the benefit of having an outside perspective to point out things you don’t notice yourself because you’re the one experiencing them, a mental health professional will also have more experience dealing with these things. And on top of that, they’ll also have other tools and techniques I haven’t mentioned in this article, which can help speed up your progress even more.
