Today we are talking about the way we think. If we are thinking positively, our lives will reflect that mentality. Conversely, if we are thinking negatively, our lives will also reflect that mentality. One of the issues we talk about is bullying and the way we think about it. Bullies are people who have problems and self-esteem issues of their own which is why they feel the need to make someone else feel bad. We need to shift our thinking about bullies to invalidate the effect their behavior has on us.

Today we talk about the ABC form and how it is used. We talk about the feelings we get from certain circumstances or situations that make us upset. We need to write down this feeling, then write down what the trigger of that feeling was. Then we talk about how this alters your behavior. In this episode, a column D was introduced. This is what is “disputed.” This would be where you write down your own arguments against how you are perceiving a situation and how you can fix it.

When you feel more confident about identifying your “As, Bs, and Cs” and thinking errors, you can move on to the second part.  This second part helps you to question your unhelpful thoughts in order to reduce their intensity, generate and rate the effects of alternative thoughts and focus on acting differently. As you progress in your ability to overcome difficulties and develop you CBT self-help skills, you may still find the AFC form useful when you’re hit with a biggie.

The different thinking errors we learned about are considered to be “toxic thoughts.”  We are now going to go into a more comprehensive way of handling these situations. The method we are going to talk about here is the “ABC” method.  This is the activating event, the beliefs and thoughts, and the consequences.  This activity gives you a chance to focus on catching your negative thoughts on paper and to see the connection between your thoughts and emotions.

Today I just talk about how important it is to start working on identifying your thought patterns in order to stop them.  I shared more of what I went through in my earlier years and talked about my identifying the thought patterns and how helpful it was in my recovery.

The review and discussion of thought errors, what they are and how to combat them.

As we mentioned in the previous episode, thinking errors are the thought patterns that we have that are not healthy and do not serve us. We covered the first eight the last two episodes, so we will now move on to the last four.

The last four thinking errors that we are discussing are the following:

Mental Filtering

Disqualifying the Positive

Low Frustration Tolerance

Personalizing

As we mentioned in the previous episode, thinking errors are the thought patterns that we have that are not healthy and do not serve us.  In this episode, we will go over the thinking errors and some quick strategies to overcome them.  There are 12 destructive thought patterns in all and we will talk about four of them over the next couple of episodes.  We covered the first four last blog, so we will now move on to the next four.

Thinking errors are the thought patterns that we have that are not healthy and do not serve us. In this episode, we will go over the thinking errors and some quick strategies to overcome them. There are 12 destructive thought patterns in all and we will talk about four of them at a time.

Think about these four types of thought patterns in this episode and see if your thinking is like any of them. Give yourself some time to think about and identify the thinking errors that you have.

One of the essential concepts of personal development is that there is no failure.  There is only feedback.  So, as you are on journey, you may want to keep a journal to keep track of your progress.

Make sure you have a goal in mind. What do you want to get out of this journey through personal growth? In order to make this successful, you need to know exactly what it is you want to get out of this.  Otherwise, you’re just traveling to nowhere.