You are listening to Take Out Therapy, speedy sessions for everyday problems. This is your host, Rebecca Hunter. In my role as a private practice therapist, I don't really just tell people what to do, but in this podcast, I'm doing things differently.
In the next few minutes, I'm just going to be straight up with you about what to do in certain situations. Keep listening for awesome tips on how to live a more intentional and less reactive life. Clearly, this is not a substitute for therapy, but I guarantee it might help you.
Listen up. Hello, people. Thanks for stopping in.
This week's episode is going to be a fun one. We can dig into a little bit more of cognitive behavioral therapy, which I talked about last week. If you haven't listened to that episode, you don't have to.
You don't have to do it. You'll have a little more information than I'm going to talk about today that you might want to go back and get before you listen to this one today, or you can just rock on with your bad self and keep listening. Last week, I talked about cognitive behavioral therapy, which is basically a therapy method that many, many, many therapists use.
It's kind of the grandfather of therapy. We talk a lot in cognitive therapy about situations happen in our lives, and then we have thoughts and feelings about those situations that are really based in our own experience in our life, on our upbringing, and things that have happened to us, and all kinds of factors make up our thoughts and our feelings about situations. And then once we kind of have some thoughts and feelings regarding what just happened, the situation, then we take action, right? We have behavior.
We do something, basically. So like when someone in my house slams a door, right, I have feelings and thoughts about that that lead me down a path to do a certain behavior. So it used to drive me crazy because little kids always slam doors, but me particularly, my thoughts and feelings about door slamming generally follow a pattern of negative.
They're just negative thoughts, right, based in my past and my, well, frankly, my current day preference that people not slam doors. And that would lead to my behavior, which frankly would typically lead to more situations, right, when the boys were just little kids and they would, they slam doors, right? Kids do childish things. Like what is up with that? It's so annoying.
So anyways, that's kind of the model of cognitive behavioral therapy, that things happen in life. We have thoughts and feelings about those things, and then we do something. So that's kind of the cycle.
And then usually when we do something, we have another situation that happens, right? And on and on and on it goes. Today we're really going to hone in there and we're going to talk about that thinking, right? Because I want to teach you a little bit about a thing called thinking errors, which is part of cognitive behavioral therapy. And it's basically just this idea that some of the ways we think about things are very unhelpful.
So thinking errors, which frankly, you know, we don't have to call everything good or bad. So let's just say unhelpful thinking. Okay.
So let's talk today about the different kinds of unhelpful thinking that we use on the daily that lead us into conflict. And some of this thinking just leads us to basically be kind of anxious, be depressed sometimes, feel really negative, have the wrong ideas about ourselves. Or yeah, I mean, it's just like a perception.
Our perceptions about situations are very important. And that's our thoughts, you guys. Our inner dialogue is very important to take a look at.
So let's go through these, okay? And so I'm just going to use the example of like a lot of people feel really nervous when they go to events or parties where they don't know that many people. And so as they lay in bed the night after, right, that they like were brave and got super cute dressed up and went to the party anyways, right? They sit there and analyze the whole thing. And so there's a lot of different thoughts that we could have.
So I'll talk about some of those thoughts and then give an example based on this little situation of just like being somebody who's not that comfortable at parties and you went anyway and just kind of how the different thinking is, right? One of the ways, one of the most important ones to kind of be aware of and the first one I'll talk about is like something called filtering. So sometimes our thinking is very, it's like what we were expecting to see, right? So maybe you were invited to a party and it was somebody that you kind of know some of their friends and didn't really can like feel connected to them, but you were willing to go anyway. Maybe you would walk in the door with the thinking of like, I don't really connect with any of these people, right? Because that's what you kind of thought on the front end, right? Or these people are all, you know, kind of surface and you walk in and people are like kind of dancing and you're like, uh huh, I see you, right? That's like filtering.
It's basically using this big, huge negative filter to see an entire situation. The second thing I'll talk about is polarized thinking, right? So it's like either this way or that way, right? So maybe sometimes at the party felt okay and then sometimes didn't feel okay. But the way you kind of think about it is very kind of, it's either good or it's bad.
And a lot of times we take in that kind of like quote unquote bad vibe or feeling that we get from things and we're like, oh, it was bad, right? Whereas if we weren't so polarized, we could go, well, actually, right, there was this awkward moment here, but in general, like somebody even like brought me an appetizer, right? So there's a different way to think about that. The third unhelpful thinking is overgeneralization. So this is one that I really look out for in my own life, just so you know.
And it's basically like always and never and it's sort of like this is how it is kind of thinking, meaning like, you know, parties are always too loud, right? And oh, I just, I don't like parties because they never have good food, right? Which it's like, yeah, well, maybe like Sally's party last year didn't have very good food. But, you know, Jones last night was pretty awesome. So overgeneralization is like one time maybe you went to a party and it was just a disaster.
You might like not go to parties because of that. That would be overgeneralization. You know, another thing to consider is that we do make a lot of assumptions.
And so the next category of thinking is jumping to conclusions or making assumptions, right? And so it's super interesting. You know, life is filled with nuance and a lot of times like you could go to a party and actually have a pretty good time, right? And then the host says something that's like a little bit confusing, like, oh, you got the invitation, you know, and then you could like really jump to some conclusions. You could be like, oh, my God, I don't think I was invited or right.
Or like, was she disappointed that I was there? So this is that kind of thinking where we're like just making a lot of assumptions about something when we don't really have any evidence. And yeah, and then another thing is another kind of thinking trap is personalization. And I, you know, I constantly help my clients point these unhelpful thinking habits out on a regular basis.
And this is something that comes up all the time. You guys, we take everything so personally, right? If I'm laying in my bed and I'm thinking about the post-party analysis and I'm like, yeah, but that one girl, Rachel, like she looked at me funny and I just don't think people at that party liked me, right? Whereas like maybe Rachel had something in her eye, you know, and maybe it wasn't about you at all, right? And so, and maybe, right, the host who is kind of like, oh, you got the invitation. Maybe it was because she didn't really understand how to send the invitations and she was like, oh, you got the invitation, right? But you could take it personally.
You could be like, oh no, this is about me. She didn't even want me here. So that's personalization, right? And then the other thing is like just kind of blaming, right? A lot of people, their thinking is very focused on others.
And so, you know, kind of in this situation, this is going to be a tough one. I'm laying in my bed and I'm analyzing the party. Oh, and it's like, well, I don't, you know, I don't even like, I don't even like Rachel's parties anyway or whatever.
It's like kind of, well, if Bob had been here to take me to the party, then I would have had a good time, but he wasn't even here. And so like, I don't, it's not even my problem that I didn't have fun. Does that make sense? It's sort of like this idea that your thinking is very other based.
So when you're using somebody else's name in your head a lot to explain why something happened, ding, ding, that's blaming. It's not helpful. That's not going to help you at all.
And then the last but not least pattern of unhelpful thinking is like this thinking that's about always being right. I think it's a good way to describe it. It's a very kind of defensive way of thinking and one sided that doesn't really consider others.
And so, you know, if you kind of if you use all these thinking patterns, right, or errors about a situation or even like three or four of them, you're going to end up in a state of mind that is like really unpleasant. So what we know through cognitive behavioral therapy and all the studies that they've done about it and there's been plenty it's yeah, they've proved that it works is that when we help people kind of take a look at these different ways that their thinking is not helping them, then they start to change the way they think about things and they start to feel better. So that's why CBT and doing work within like this idea that we can actually change our thinking around things.
That's why it really helps a lot of people. It helps people who have fairly serious mental health diagnoses and it also helps people that don't. Right.
We were teaching it to teens. This method is fast. I do a lot of brief one on one kind of I would say like cognitive behavioral like coaching with people.
I'm like, oh, you're really taking that personally or wait a second. It sounds like you think that this is what happened. What's your evidence for that? Right.
Like I'm really coaching people to challenge their own thinking. And it's a short a lot of times they just need a couple sessions. Like, let me let me process this and see where my thinking's at on this thing.
That's some of the work that I love to do. But I'll tell you, I've seen people make amazing changes in their life just by understanding kind of the general overall personality of their brain. Like my brain kind of thinks this way.
Like I'm my brain is sort of really actively defending me in most interactions. Right. Which is meaning like I jump like these are these are the categories of unhelpful thinking would be if I'm kind of a defensive thinker.
Right. I might make a lot of assumptions. I might catastrophize.
Right. Think of the worst case scenarios of things. I might take things very personally.
Right. I might be kind of a blamer. And I might always like to be right.
I might. Yeah. Wouldn't you? So you can kind of see and think about in your own life.
Right. What's your thinking like? What are your thinking patterns? Do you tend to take things personally quite a bit? OK. We'll take a look at that.
What are some different ways you could think about a situation in which you're not taking it personally? Because taking other people's. Yeah. Taking other people's behavior towards you personally.
It it's so it's such a rocky road, my friend. Right. We don't want to get into a pattern of doing that.
So I thought it would be fun for me and maybe for you to just run through like an example. So I used to have a very visceral reaction to something that John used to do when we first were dating. And it took me a little while to kind of change my thinking about it.
So John is my husband. We've been married like 22 years. We just had our anniversary.
Amazing. Not in like I'm not saying, oh, my God, it's been so amazing. But like, oh, my God, it's amazing that we're still married.
I'm just joking. He's great. So John's a very nice person.
And he has like these really close. He's very kind and he like cares a lot about people. So he my man is a hugger.
And when I first met him, I'd never dated anybody that was like so emotionally like available and also like display. So when he sees somebody that he cares about, like you're getting a hug, except for, you know, when we can't hug people, which is sad for John. So I'm filling in for everyone else.
I'm doing my part. Anywho, when I first met John, you know, I was young. I was young, you guys.
I was in my 20s, very early 20s, maybe even 21. And hugging guys, there was like a belief system there about that, about experiences that had happened to me, where the people that I had dated that were also huggers were not great people. Right.
They were kind of like doing more than hugging. OK. And so, of course, right.
And Dana, super nice guy. And we're out listening to some music and he sees somebody that he knows from college. And I mean, it was like this beautiful like he ran to her and she ran to him and they gave each other this huge hug.
And I immediately. Right. Jump to conclusions.
Had a negative bias about that. I was like filtering that situation through everything that I'd known so far. I definitely catastrophize like, oh, I guess he doesn't actually like me because he's hugging that girl.
Right. Thinking that that was something that I needed to get control over. Yeah.
And taking that as something about me, which is personalization. And so being 21 or two years old, I basically like made this whole scene and I was like, well, how dare you hug her? And he was like, listen, I'm a hugger. I'm like a really affectionate person and I'm always going to hug people that I care about.
And that doesn't mean that I'm not a good like partner, like I'm a really good partner. I'm really respectful. I'm super trustworthy, but like I'm going to hug my friends.
And so it's super interesting because I had to really change my thinking about that because I could have kept going with that and had that idea that I maybe had some control over that, which is I guess I'll just say that's also thinking error. Right. But I learned through the years like to just think about it differently.
Like my man is nice. He loves the people in his life and he's a hugger. So if you ever get to meet John, you'll get a hug.
I'm just warning you right now. So anyways, I hope you enjoyed this extended lesson on cognitive behavioral therapy and thinking errors, which we're going to call unhelpful thinking. So pay attention, you guys, to your thoughts and your feelings and your actions following every situation in your life and see if you can just find out more about yourself.
Right. See if you can play there. Always having the intention of just like do your best and be intentional with your life and you'll be able to elicit change.
Thanks for listening. Hey, before you go, I just want to tell you a few more ways that I can provide you with the content you might be looking for. If you're somebody who deals with overthinking, I actually have a free downloadable guide on my website about how to deal with overthinking.
I also have a guide you can download that helps people who are thinking about exploring the therapy process and it helps go from tip to tail. Like how do you hire a therapist? What kind of therapy do you need? And then just so you know, I'm all over my social media. I really enjoy providing good content on social media.
So I'm on Facebook and Instagram and it's Rebecca Hunter MSW. And then within Facebook, I offer a private group for people who are interested in kind of learning the nuts and bolts of how to recover from anxiety. So just a reminder, I have my podcast, but I'm also here for people in a lot of different ways and just trying to get a lot of information out there.
So thanks for listening. Thanks so much for listening. This podcast is not meant to be a substitute for therapy, but I hope it was super helpful for you in any case.
I want to be part of some much needed change, but I'm going to need your help. Please subscribe and review the podcast, recommend it to your friends and family and share it on social media. We're living in the digital age, people.
Let's do some good where we can. All right. Visit my website at RebeccaHunterMSW.com to have access to resources, videos and the show notes if that interests you.
And again, I'm so grateful you're listening to Take Out Therapy. Thanks.
