Thoughts, Emotions and Behaviors
Foundational CBTWhen our clients come to us, they are suffering. In one way or another, one patient might be depressed, another one might be anxious, another one might be angry, another one might be drinking too much, etc. Part of our job as cognitive behavior therapists is to figure out why the patient is suffering. And by why, what I mean is what are the thoughts, emotions, and behaviors that have gone awry that are causing the patient to have a prolonged distress. Let me give you an example from my own practice. I was treating a woman with chronic depression, The initial presentation was just one of I feel awful. Because for her, it was this big tangled mess, and she wasn't really used to thinking about her feelings as having a a cognitive and an emotional and a behavioral component, but, of course, they do.
And as we started to break those part, we realized that on a cognitive level, she had a very negative pattern of thinking that led her to view things in a really, really pessimistic way. Emotionally, she was overwhelmed with feelings of sadness that made it hard for her to function. And behaviorally, she was withdrawing from her friends and family, not doing much that gave her a sense of mastery or pleasure. And that was causing her to feel even worse about life. So by breaking these things apart, by talking about the cognitions, the emotions, and the behaviors separately, we're able to give her a sense control over the problem so that it goes from being this big jumbled mess to being something that actually can be broken apart, analyzed, and worked on.
For the sake of our discussion today, we're gonna talk about how these thoughts, feelings, and behaviors become maladapted. And what I mean by maladaptive is working against the person's goals and values, leading the person in a direction they don't want to go. We need to understand those components so that we can start to reverse the process and help the client move more toward health and well-being.