The First Step
Finding: In CBT you start off by monitoring and recording your thoughts during situations that lead to you feeling emotional upset. These situations can be internal like an unpleasant memory or external like making a mistake during a presentation at work. This thought to emotion linking allows you to:
1. Remove your emotional interpretation of what has happened or what is happening and bring in your higher-order executive reasoning
2. Get a better understanding of how the way you think contributes to stress, depression and anxiety
3. To become better at identifying distortions/untruths in your thinking
4. To be able to view your thoughts as rough ideas about what is going on rather than as facts
5. To become a less fearful observer of your thoughts
6. To treat your thoughts as being separate to yourself and learning to consider situations from different viewpoints
The Second Step
Challenging: The simplest analogy is that you are both a detective and a lawyer and that your unhelpful thoughts are to be investigated and put on trial. You examine the evidence that does or does not support your thoughts and beliefs. In other words, you ask: Where is the proof that my negative self-talk is true? And is the situation really as hopeless as I think?
The Third Step
Replacing: After you have looked for the evidence and concluded a disputation of your thinking you then work on replacing your old unhelpful thoughts and beliefs with newer more truthful alternatives.
The Fourth Step
Reinforcing and Upkeep: This final stage is about challenging any old difficult to remove unhelpful beliefs and also to help you continuously reinforce your newer held beliefs from the third step.