CBT, basically

 “Summing it all up, friends, I’d say you’ll do best by filling your minds and meditating on things true, noble, reputable, authentic, compelling, gracious- the best; not the worst, the beautiful, not the ugly; things to praise, not to curse…do that, and God, who makes everything work together, will wreck you into his most excellent harmonies.” Philippians 4:8-9

It IS possible to change your life by changing your thoughts. I see so many individuals in counseling who struggle with depression and anxiety due to have what Cognitive Behavioral Therapy calls, “cognitive distortions”.  These are exaggerated thoughts about yourself and how others interact with you. I like to use different ways to think of it.

Using animals, like in fables, it is clearer with which one can identify more when you have the animals exemplify a certain characteristic. Catastrophe Cat is always concerned about something- and it’s usually the end of the world. Brain-reading Bear thinks he knows what others are thinking, and it’s usually bad. Predicting Penguin Dividing Dog.

There is also an acronym, called BLUE. B stands for “blaming yourself”, L is for “looking for bad news”, U is for “unhappy guessing”, and E is for “exaggerating the facts”. These are easy to do, especially if you’ve experienced a trauma or suffer from low self esteem. The way to overcome unhelpful thoughts is to first identify it, look at it under the light of reality, understand the genesis of the thought, make sense of why it still gets to be there, and exterminate it by changing your thought to a more positive one. I created my own acronym: ILLUME: Identify, Look in Light, Understand, Make sense, and Exterminate. I will show you how in the following example.

A young lady has been involved in an abusive relationship, so she gathered a thought in that time with the man who did not honor her thoughts or body. This thought is “I am worthless”. She is blaming herself because she feels she got herself into the relationship (forgetting she got herself out of it). So, we identified the thought through a situation that occurred where she was constantly getting angry at co workers in her job because everything they did she saw it from the lens of “I am worthless”. A co worker’s suggestion to improve an area of need caused this young lady to resent it and blame herself. Then we looked at it in the light by asking herself a few questions: How true is this thought? Can everyone really agree that I am worthless? If that is true, then I need to make myself worthy. Wait, that’s impossible, we are infallible human beings. So, what choices do I have now? Accept I am worthless? This is absurd because it is bringing strife in relationships. This thought started because of her  abusive relationship, which took away time and focus from self growth onto what his needs were because she did not want to be caught in a tense moment where he would put her down or hit her. So, we made sense of this thought and changed it to what God says. God says she is “fearfully and wonderfully made”, and “I am made perfect in his sight”, so she can hold onto that truth whenever she tries to think “I am worthless”.