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, my friends. Thank you so much for stopping in today.
I think you're going to find this lesson super helpful. I'm going to teach you today about how to use CBT in your everyday life to elicit change. What's that you say? What the heck is CBT? CBT, it's cognitive behavioral therapy.
I'm going to teach you about a therapy method. I think it would be safe to say that CBT is probably the granddaddy of most of the therapy methods that a lot of therapists and counselors, even coaches, we just ... CBT is a great method. It's evidence-based practice, for one thing.
There are plenty of studies dating all the way back into, I believe, the 1970s. Maybe it's been done since the 60s. Plenty of studies that point to CBT as a really effective way of helping people elicit change in their lives.
Of course, we talk about that in this very ... It only helps people that are depressed and anxious and all the other labels, but I'll tell you, CBT is super helpful for all the humans. If you know how to use it well and use it on a regular basis, it's super ... Well, it's very effective, so I'm going to teach it to you today. One of the reasons that a lot of therapists ... Most people in the mental health field, we know about, we need to learn CBT.
What's super interesting is for my social work degree, we didn't learn CBT. I learned it at my job, where I think a lot of social workers first learn about CBT. Basically, what that means is that some people learn half of CBT, which is fine.
It's a great method, but it actually really works the best when you know all the different parts. That doesn't mean you can't mix and match the way you do it in the order. Of course, we all have our personality and our method, but doing CBT, there's a lot of elements to it that are very important to kind of go through.
Anyways, I learned cognitive behavioral therapy when I was first a social worker. I worked in a juvenile justice treatment school, basically, for kids in juvenile justice. They were high schoolers.
It was super ... It was such a great, fun, just a deep experience as a social worker. Working with teens in juvenile justice, these kids were ... Let me tell you, they did not have homes with white picket fences. They'd been through a lot of stuff.
Yeah, so basically, we used CBT as the backdrop for most of the work that we did with our teens. I got to tell you, we saw so much change in their level of empowerment, their ability to kind of see themselves moment to moment through their lives and what ... Like, gee, when I do that, what happens, right? Ooh, okay, maybe I'll try something different. Just tons of growth and change.
Anyways, through my years since then, which that was many, many years ago, and a good experience and a great kind of intro to being a social worker, but many, many years ago, I still teach most of my clients CBT. That's an interesting kind of thing that I do that's a little bit different. Most therapists would probably say I use CBT, but I actually teach people what the method is that I'm using them on, with them to help them elicit change.
I do ... I have a whiteboard and I do all this diagram crap and everything, and that works for me. Then people aren't like, ooh, that was like my ninja tricks. I'm like, okay, well, we're recognizing this thing that we're working on here.
This is what we're doing right now. They're in the model with me. Yeah, so let's dig in.
Let me tell you about cognitive behavioral therapy and how you can kind of use it in your own life to get some change going. Like I said, nothing really has to ... It doesn't have to be a big change. It can be something little, right? Of just like, wow, this really irritates me.
Let me do CBT with that and see if I can get to a different place there. Let me dig into the method. Basically, in a nutshell, and this is a short show, so it's totally a nutshell, situations happen in our lives.
Shit happens, right? Good things, not so good things. When things happen, we as human beings have feelings and thoughts about what just happened. Those feelings and thoughts and thoughts and feelings, they're kind of flowy together, and they kind of cause us to behave, basically.
They cause action, right? Behavior. So things happen, and then we have thoughts and feelings about what just happened, and then we do something, basically. That is, well, in a little bit of a nutshell, kind of what CBT is all about.
It's all about basically looking at, well, first of all, looking within, looking at yourself to figure out, well, what are my feelings and thoughts about what just happened? One of the fun things that we, if we are teaching CBT, we're helping people to understand how to objectively look at what happened, okay? So what happened is kind of tricky, you guys, right? So if I'm like, I have a plan to go and walk with my sister, and I'm standing there waiting for her for 20 minutes. Of course, I left my cell phone at home because I don't bring that thing along. You know, that's a situation.
So I could describe that a few different ways, right? I could be like, well, she never showed up, and I stood there forever, right? Or I could be a little bit less emotional and a little more objective. That's kind of how we talk about this, like, what actually happened, right? I was supposed to go walking at three o'clock, and I waited until 3.20, and my sister hadn't shown up yet, and so I left, basically, right? Or, you know, we could wait and kind of analyze the situation later, right? Or maybe my sister forgot. My sister would not forget a walk, by the way.
She likes to walk. She gets me walking. But, you know, like, what happened? Well, she didn't show up for the walk.
I called her. She said she forgot about it. Okay, that's the situation.
All the emotion and stuff, that's in a different column, guys. So if you want to look at your own situation, you can, like, make four columns, right? Situations, feelings, thoughts, and behaviors. So let's talk about feelings.
And by the way, when we have feelings about something, we also have thoughts. And when we have thoughts about something, we also have feelings. And so there's no, like, kind of order of events here.
But let's say for this model, let's say that the way we think about things that happen, it kind of affects the way we feel about it, right? Like, if John gives me a weird look when I ask him about how he feels about my new tights, because that's literally all I'm wearing all the time now, tights. If he gives me a weird look, I immediately have a thought. It's a sentence, like, why did he give me that look, right? And if that's my thought, then my feeling will come behind that, which is like, I'm kind of confused.
Right? And so, you know, just to remember here, it's important to understand, feelings and thoughts are very different. Okay, I'm going to just go quickly through this because most people know. Well, no, actually, you guys, most people actually come to therapy, and we don't understand the difference between feelings and thoughts.
That is an honest inside behind the door look. I'm going to just say that out loud. Feelings and thoughts are very confusing.
Like, this is not stuff we get educated about. So let me educate you. Okay, feelings is one word.
This is how I teach it to people. It's one word. There's no sentence, right? It's sad.
It's happy. It's angry. It's confused.
It's frustrated. It's content. It's, you know, blah, blah, blah.
Thoughts are a whole sentence. I cannot believe. She did not show up for our walk, right? I'm super angry because she never follows through on anything, right? Okay.
And so that's kind of the difference between feelings and thoughts. And then you have to understand behavior. And behavior, the way we want to look at that is like, well, what did you do? Right? So something happened, and then you had these thoughts, and those thoughts led to these feelings.
And then what did you do? Right? So that's kind of the first part of CBT is basically helping people to understand, first of all, the difference between feelings and thoughts, which takes a little time, frankly. And I'm still working on it. And then to, well, the other part of it is like, people have to understand that how we grow up gives us, gifts us, right? The gift of a belief system.
And for some people, that gift, they would like to return it, right? Because we are given the belief system a lot of times as kids of our parents, right? And then we also have our real, our deeper knowing, our belief system, our, right, individuated belief system that's separate from the other humans, right? Our belief system, frankly, doesn't flow based on who we're hanging out with. We kind of have a belief system. And when we behave outside of our belief system, it feels badly, just so you know.
So CBT kind of helps people start to take a look at, well, wait a second, what's the difference between the belief system you were given? I mean, you know, this is kind of where we talk about the past. And then what do you think right now? Right? And that can be a pretty, frankly, a pretty long or pretty short conversation. It can be over a few sessions, or it could be like a couple of sessions, or it could be by situation, right? We could look at our belief system every single time something comes up.
We can be like, okay, well, so my core belief, right, is like, okay, so I'll use the example of the sister going for the walk. My core belief, right? When people don't show up for things they say they're going to show up for, it kind of makes me feel like they don't think I'm very important, right? And so then that's really difficult, right? And my core belief is kind of this very deeper, right, fear that like, people aren't going to show up for me. Like I'm not, you know, like I'm not gonna be important enough for people to always show up.
So that's kind of like that core belief. And then we have a lot of thoughts, right? That kind of like go along with that, which I demonstrate for you. And then we can really get to kind of how that influences your thoughts and your behavior.
So it's pretty interesting and fun work to do, to kind of go through each situation as it happens and look at these different elements. And then also just like, hello, always a good idea to review your personal individual belief system versus kind of the belief system of your family, just to remind yourself like, oh, right, I don't think that I believe this about myself and my abilities in my life and how, like what's okay for me, right? And then the gold, right, is where we start to understand that sometimes we just think what we think based on like this very automatic process of going with that core kind of false belief, right? That core, sometimes it's just bullshit, right? Especially like I talk with people a lot about this when they grow up and in a religious environment, for example, and they don't align with that as they get older. It's a very automatic to have like a lot of religious shame, right? And that can spread itself through our lives pretty vastly.
But the great thing about this work and CBT in general is that we can intervene in this process. So just so you know, like half the work is seeing what's happening and the other half is the intervention. And so we can intervene and see what's happening.
And it's like if we're letting kind of our automatic selves drive our life, yeah, that doesn't always work out great. But if we can intervene, right, and we can notice and we can see what's happening, then we can be like, oh, I'm driving, like I can drive this, right? It's one of the things I talk with people a lot about because I do specialize in anxiety. And most people that work with me are trying to deal with the different elements of anxiety.
But one of the things I talk about all the time is overthinking. So one of the things that happens with people who experience a lot of that frenetic, anxious energy is overthinking. And so we can use the CBT model there, right? Because literally people that overthink have so many thoughts and feelings about the thinking.
They're thinking about the thinking. And this, I laugh because of course we think about our overthinking. But that's the situation, right? It's like I'm overthinking.
And so a lot of people's thoughts about that is like, this sucks. I'm so annoyed. Like it's very trafficky in my brain.
And, you know, and so it's like you get to the emotion of like this annoyance, this feeling frustrated and overwhelmed with all this thinking. And also kind of like this helplessness and not being able to stop it, right? And I don't know about how you act when you're annoyed, frustrated, overwhelmed, and all that. But like the behavior is not great, right? And so we're behaving in this way because of this situation and our thoughts and feelings about it.
So we're maybe short with our kids or we're really distracted. And we're totally like not able to focus on things. And we're just like our behavior is annoyed overall, which never looks good on me, frankly.
So we can do CBT here, right? So we can say, well, what's the situation? Well, the situation is that I'm overthinking, right? And where's the point of intervention? It's the thinking. So what other thoughts could we have, right? And if our thoughts are like this sucks and I don't have any control over this, how can we look at those thoughts and change them, right? I'm so annoyed that I'm overthinking. I could change that thought.
I could think, okay, well, I mean, I am kind of worried about this. So I could give myself a little bit of time to worry. And then I'll just like go do something else, right? Which is what I teach people to do.
Like go do something else, right? Or the thought could be like, I don't have any control over this. And we could change that thought to something like, well, I'm going to focus on something else. I am in control of my thoughts.
And then our behavior looks different, right? And like, if you ever have a thought that you're kind of like, I don't know what I could change this to. Like, I really feel this. And this is totally what I think.
One of the things that I try is to just like insert something nice. Just say like, it's okay, right? This is okay. It's going to be okay.
I'm doing my best, right? That's where kind of that just like, can you be nice to yourself? So I want to talk about CBT a little bit more, but I like this short format. So I'm going to continue next week. Let's talk about those automatic thoughts.
CBT really gives us a nice framework for looking at thoughts. And they have all these categories. Like what kind of thinking are you using? And they call them thinking errors.
But I think that's kind of rude. So we're going to call them unhelpful thoughts. They do that in Australia.
And I think it's very kind, right? Can we stop saying that we're thinking wrong? We're just human. We're just doing our best. So let's talk about unhelpful thoughts next week.
That'll be super fun. And then don't forget that as an anxiety nerd, I teach people about overthinking, the thought loop, and the monkey mind all the time. I have like a little handout on my website.
So anyways, I hope you enjoyed learning about CBT, Cognitive Behavioral Therapist. So now you know what three of the many, many letters in the therapist listings are. CBT.
Use it. It's super helpful to many, many people that I know. Okay.
Thanks for stopping by. 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.
