Do thoughts cause feelings and behaviours? A CBT view..

Your thinking causes your emotions – events and situations only influence them…

If our thinking is irrational and negative we’re going to cause ourselves ‘upsettness’ – and behave in self-limiting ways.

This is the core theory of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. All of its methods and techniques developed over the past decades flow out of this simple premise.

So it follows that if we can change unhealthy thinking to healthy thinking, we will feel and act in a way that’s more constructive and doesn’t cause us unhappiness or pain or anger or self-sabotage or destructive behaviours…

Let’s take a look at a couple of examples of how our thoughts determine our emotional mood and subsequent behaviour – we’ll take exactly the same scenario, but put two different thinking types in as the star…

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Example of unhealthy thinking and consequential behaviour:

Event: Your colleague snaps at you when you say good morning.

Thought: You think “Oh God, Tom really doesn’t like me, and he certainly doesn’t respect me. I feel humiliated. I’m embarrassed. What did I do to make him treat me this way? It must have been that thing last week. Or maybe that other thing last month. Does everyone in the office feel this way about me? Of course they do! Nobody really likes me. I’m a [insert whatever negative you attach to yourself generally].”.

Feeling: You experience emotions that reflect this thinking – eg shame, embarrassment, stress, anxiety, hurt… take your pick. And your body reacts by jumping into ‘fight or flight’ mode.

Behaviour: Your irrational unhealthy kneejerk thinking and resultant feelings cause self-defeating / self-limiting behaviour – all that day and night, and most likely into the next day and perhaps the next, and the next…

• • often Avoidance Behaviour – where you withdraw and stay away from people and interactions, and feel tongue tied so become quiet, and can’t focus so procrastinate in order to endlessly ‘worry’ and ‘awfulise’ this ‘horrible’ thing that’s happened, so you can re-run it as a movie in your head, perhaps changing the script (‘I should have said blahblah, and then he’d say blahblah) and so on.
• • If you have ‘demand’ thinking, you may react agressively and set out to punish Tom for his behaviour, and carry a disturbing anger and resentment around with you – upsetting yourself and others in a way that is out of proportion to the event (“you must not treat me that way, you should behave appropriately and with respect, now you deserve my wrath – actually everybody does, because the world is ‘awful’ and ‘it’s not fair”.)

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CHANGE THE THINKING AND CHANGE YOUR FEELING AND BEHAVIOUR!

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Alternative healthy example:

Event: Your colleague snaps at you when you say good morning.

Thought: You think ‘Gosh, Tom is in a horrible mood! What’s up with that? What’s wrong with him? Maybe he’s feeling a bit low…’.

Feeling: You experience emotions that reflect this thinking – eg confusion, disappointment, concern, curiousity… but you don’t assume you ‘know’ why he did what he did, or that it means you’re a bad person or a loser, or that it has anything in particular to do with your value at all – you even wonder if you may have misinterpreted it.

Behaviour: Your rational balanced thinking and resultant feelings cause you to react in positive ‘healthy’ ways.

• • You immediately tell Tom you feel he just snapped at you – maybe using humour – you ask if you’ve upset him in any way, or if he’s just ‘in the horrors’ – you ask if he’s OK. You attempt to cheer him up.
• • Alternatively you say nothing and ‘let it go’ and don’t let it affect your self-esteem – you don’t carry it around with you or use it as a stick to hit yourself with all day. You don’t feel Toms behaviour or attitude defines who you are and your value. And you don’t feel it defines who he is or his value – ergo you don’t feel the need to badmouth him to everybody else and obsess and plot to punish him for his behaviour.

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Do you see how the same event can cause different feelings and behaviour depending on your ‘perception’ of the event and of yourself? If your core belief is that you are a worthless/inferior person, you’ll be more prone to the first scenario – whereas if you have a healthy acceptance of yourself (and others), and a belief that you’re a worthy individual, the second scenario is more likely.

Can you think of alternative scenarios? & reasons for Toms behaviour that are not all about you (personalisation)? We shouldn’t assume/mind read/or fortune tell… And – even if somebody does have an unfavourable view of us (this will happen through our lives), we don’t have to share it!  (See ‘common thinking errors‘ for a description of typical negative thinking styles.)

We can make it so that the second healthy thinking scenario is natural for us – with CBT!

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Task: review the following basic CBT exercise to test the premise on yourself – go on, it’ll just take a few minutes…

First: think of an occasion when you were very emotionally upset, when you were not happy with the way you felt or acted… then ask yourself the following questions :

•  What thoughts were you thinking? (exact ‘statement’ thoughts not vague descriptions)
•  What emotions were you feeling (eg stressed, anxious, jealous, angry etc. You can have several)
•  What was your body doing? (were there any physiological reactions to your emotions – butterflies, shaking etc?)
•  What did you do? (what was your behaviour, how did you act? in a way that made the situation better or worse?)

 

Second: think of an occasion when you were delighted with yourself – when you were thinking positively and behaved in a way that made you proud to be you… and then apply the above list of questions to that situation!

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See the difference? Can you make useful observations? Do you agree that your negative/positive thinking and perception and attitude caused your feelings and behaviour? You do? Great – CBT should work well for you then. Enjoy the journey!

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