Cognitive Behaioral Techniques? Huh?What are cognitive behavioral techniques? Well, you know how your mom used to tell you, 'You are what you eat.' Well, here's another one. 'You are what you think.' O.k, I can already hear a lot of you. "Oh oh, I'm in trouble." And you're right. You are. But this is just where Cognitive Behavioral therapy comes in. All day long we humans play tapes in our head. Word tapes. Commentary on everything we do. A woman walks onto a plane and thinks, "That guy is checking me out." Or she thinks, "Bet all these people think I'm fat." A guy goes in for a job interview and thinks, "This guy can smell my fear. He knows how bad I need this job." Or a guy paces in front of the phone, afraid to make the call. He thinks, "She'll never go out with me. She's hot and I'm a dork." Much of what we say to ourselves is horrible. If someone else said it, we'd never talk to that person again. But this is us, and we're great at being brutal to ourselves. Cognitive behavioral techniques (part of Cognitive Behavioral therapy) teaches us to talk to ourselves realistically. It allows us to see that a lot of what we tell ourselves is over-the-top, negative, and plain untrue. It teaches us that most people are so busy thinking about themselves that they don't think much about us. And if they do, they are usually not as harsh on us as we are on ourselves. In the tough critic category, we are champs. In short, cognitive behavioral techniques teach us to change how we think. So how does all this work? Learning to talk back to your automatic thoughts is the biggie. In his seminal work Feeling Good, David Burns talks about cognitive distortions such as "All or Nothing Thinking, Catastrophizing, and Jumping to Conclusions."
In my book If I Could Just Snap Out of It, Don't You Think I Would? I, too, talk about these techniques, although I give them different names. I start with the techinque I think is most important: talking back to your automatic thoughts. As I see it, there are five steps to the talking-back process. These five steps are: Recording your automatic thought, Talking-back to your thought, Asking, 'What is a more reasonable thing to say to myself?,' Asking 'What message am I trying to give myself?' and asking 'What do I want to do about my message?' After all these questions are answered (and I'm going to give you a thorough example from my book of how this works) people then create a detailed, two-week plan on how to accomplish the goal they have decided upon. The result: a sizable inroad into the treatment of depression.
Maria was a thirty five year old woman who gave me permission to use a likeness-dialogues from her automatic talk-back work. A likeness dialogue has all the pertinent information but changes any details that would jeopardize her confidentiality. This excerpt is taken directly from my book. Here's Maria, talking about herself. “I’m fat. I look like a pig. Here I am, Porky, going out on the town. All ready and set to be roasted. My body alone could feed all of downtown Seattle. Jeez, I’m disgusting. Thoughts of going to Aruba are a joke. I can’t fly on a plane. I can’t fit into a seat. ‘Here she comes, ladies and gentleman, Porky. Give her two seats, maybe three. What the hell, she’s got fat to spare.’ I’ll never get a date. No one would want to be seen with me. No wonder I’m single. My fat and I will die together. The perfect greasy pair. I hate myself“. Not very nice, huh? So let’s look at what she did with these thoughts. Here is Maria's talk-back to her thoughts. She is using the talk back form from my book. MARIA’S AUTOMATIC THOUGHT (her first) “I‘m fat.” MARIA’S TALK-BACK TO HER THOUGHT “How fat is fat? Am I three hundred pounds overweight? Am I five hundred pounds overweight? No, I am not.” MARIA’S MORE REALISTIC THING TO SAY TO HERSELF “I’m thirty five pounds overweight. While I don’t like this, at least I’m not a hundred pounds overweight. Maybe I can dosomething about it." WHAT MESSAGE IS MARIA GIVING HERSELF? “I’m uncomfortable with being overweight.” WHAT IS MARIA WILLING TO DO ABOUT HER MESSAGE? “I’m going to come up with a way to start losing some weight. Maybe I’ll start by cutting my food in half." See how these cognitive behavioral techniques serve as a treatment for depression? Let’s look at Maria’s next automatic thought using our form. MARIA’S NEXT AUTOMATIC THOUGHT (her second) “I look like a pig.” MARIA’S TALK-BACK TO HER THOUGHT ”Well, that’s ridiculous. Pigs have four legs. I have two. And pigs have a snout. I have a nose. And pigs are short. I’m not. Pigs live in the mud. I avoid the mud at all cost.” MARIA’S MORE REALISTIC THING TO SAY TO HERSELF “I am overweight, but I am not an animal who lives in the mud. I have speech and feelings. In fact, I am very much a human.” WHAT MESSAGE IS MARIA GIVING HERSELF? “It upsets me so much that I am overweight that I don’t even feel human.” WHAT IS MARIA WILLING TO DO ABOUT HER MESSAGE? “I will come up with a way to lose weight.” And so on with her automatic thoughts. In Maria’s case, she also needed to write down her assumptions and talk back to them. Not everyone uses assumptions in their internal monologues. For those who do, the same automatic thought form can be used for assumptions. MARIA’S AUTOMATIC ASSUMPTION (her first) “ I’m so fat I can’t travel because I can’t fit into an airline seat.” MARIA’S TALK- BACK TO HER ASSUMPTION “Airlines wouldn’t be so stupid as to make their seats so small that people can’t fit in them. Lots of people are overweight and airlines want business. They are not going to size their seats for skinny people only. Besides, thirty five pounds is not that much overweight and it won’t prevent me from fitting into a seat.” MARIA’S MORE REALISTIC THING TO SAY TO HERSELF “I may have to squeeze into the airline seat, but lots of other people have to do this because there are a lot of people who are overweight. I may feel uncomfortable if people are watching me, but the truth is that most people will be too busy with their own stuff to watch me. But I definitely don’t like the fact that I am overweight. WHAT MESSAGE IS MARIA GIVING HERSELF? “I don’t like being overweight.” WHAT IS MARIA WILLING TO DO ABOUT IT? “I’m going to lose weight. Let’s look at Maria’s next assumption
“I’ll never get a date.” MARIA’S TALK-BACK TO HER ASSUMPTION “How in the world would I know that? Lots of people get dates. Men are attracted to all sorts of women. Some men like women with fuller figures. Besides, my face is cute. And how can I possibly say I’ll never get a date? Do I know what’s going to happen to me for the rest of my life? MARIA’S MORE REALISTIC THING TO SAY TO HERSELF “Some men may be attracted to me, particularly men who like women with full figures.” WHAT MESSAGE IS MARIA GIVING HERSELF? “I need to lose weight so I feel better about myself and so more men will be attracted to me.” WHAT IS MARIA WILLING TO DO ABOUT HER MESSAGE? “I’m going to lose weight.” You get the idea. If you want to do your own automatic talk-back work and want to use my form, look under
Forms
and copy. There are other cognitive technique too. They, too, will help you change how you think. For more information on them, go to
Cognitive Techniques--Take Two
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