I am now a proud owner of Cognitive Behaviour Therapy for Dummies. Yep, for dummies. Through interviews and podcasts I had often heard of the benefits of CBT but only recently got round to actually buying a book on it and dreading the potential technical jargon I went for the dummy guide 😛
I’m now a few chapters in and it seems that CBT is all about disproving the damaging theories in your head.
So one of the exercises in the book is called the ABC’s form. To fill out this form you identify the emotion you’re feeling eg. guilt/shame, assign a trigger and the beliefs you have towards this trigger and then formulate arguments to disprove these unhealthy beliefs. You can then go one step further and conduct experiments to prove the validity of your assumptions.
For example you have come to believe that your boss doesn’t like you and you conduct the experiment to see if their dislike is just towards you. You then collect data by talking to other colleagues to get their opinions on the matter whilst also observing how your boss interacts with your colleagues. After collecting all this data you find that what you thought was your boss showing dislike towards you is actually how your boss treats everyone and there is no reason for you to believe that you are receiving special mistreatment.
The majority of experiments prove that there is a misalignment with the damaging theories that exist in your head and what is actually happening in reality.
It’s a very helpful practice and one I would highly recommend.
Thomas Duggan 