1. Know What You Want to Change You might already know what needs to be changed or you just have a sense that something in your life has to change, but you do not know what it is. Gilbert Chesterton said “Sometimes the problem is not not being able to see the solution, but not being able…
Continuing our session with Claire. She is having images on her mind in which her house burns down, and these are followed by compulsive checking rituals. In the previous part, part 1, we tried to help her see that the image on her mind is a thought, not the reality. In this part, we are working…
Our session with Claire was supposed to start 15 mins ago. While wondering why she might have been late, I was sitting on my chair enjoying my cup of coffee as I heard a car engine stopped. She must have arrived. Less than a minute, she was there, standing at my office door. C: Hello,…
Cognitive distortions is a concept from cognitive behavioral therapy, which implies that we usually tend to think in some biased way. Normally, having cognitive distortions is neither a deficit nor a disorder, but it is just a by-product of how our brains work. Our brains are programmed in such a way that when it tries…
In this post, I will try to tell you about what automatic thoughts are and how to identify them. Sometimes, all of a sudden, we find ourselves feeling depressed, anxious, furious, guilty… However, we can’t tell why. If someone asks, we can’t answer. Our mind is blank: “I don’t know, I just don’t feel well today.”…
In one of our previous posts, we examined What Automatic Thoughts are and How to Identify Them Using CBT Techniques. In this post, I will try to tell you about how to challenge automatic thoughts in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. You might have identified more than one automatic thought that you would like to work on….