Transcription:
Breaking the Cycle of Negative Thoughts: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Part 1

Bill: There's a line in an Eagle song that says, so oftentimes it happens that we live our lives in chains and we never even know we have the key. It's kind of what we're gonna be talking about today. Let's think about that. So oftentimes it happens that we live our lives in chains. Our negative thoughts can keep our lives chained up our negative thoughts.

Can keep us from reaching our potential from living a happy, productive, positive life. Our internal thoughts matter. You may not even realize it, but that internal dialogue in your head can affect the quality of your life in a positive. Negative way. And then the second part of that line, and we never even know we have the key.

The good news is you can change that. You can change those negative thoughts in your head by using cognitive behavioral therapy. And that's what we're gonna talk about today with Ted Vander flute,

Bill Klaproth (host): a psychotherapist at Morin health psychiatry.

Bill: a UC S F health clinic in part one of this two. Episode. This is the healing podcast, brought you by Marin health.

I'm bill clapper out, Ted. Thank you so much for your time. It's great to talk with you. I love topics like this because I think we really have an opportunity to help people live a better life. And that's what we're gonna talk about today. So to start out, so we all understand this. Can you tell us what basically is cognitive behavioral therapy or C B T.

Ted Vander Clute: Thanks bill for having me on this podcast. I really appreciate the opportunity. Cognitive behavioral therapy or CBT is primarily designed to treat depression and anxiety, although can be useful for anyone wanting to develop a more positive outlook. Cognitive behavioral therapy is based on the idea that while depression and anxiety do have a biochemical component, they are largely created and perpetuated by negative.

Self-defeating thought patterns. And unhealthy maladaptive behaviors. Through cognitive behavioral therapy, we can learn to identify these thought patterns and behaviors and with insight. Perseverance and a willingness to change. We can make healthier choices and improve our

Bill: And that would be welcome for many of us. I love how you say this is used to treat depression, but can be used in other ways for people who wanna develop a more positive attitude and a lot of this stems from those negative thoughts.

I'm so happy we're talking about this today. So let me ask you this next then. So can you explain to us the cognitive aspect of cognitive behavioral therapy?

Ted Vander Clute: Yeah. The word cognitive relates to the way we think. What we think affects how we feel and what we feel in turn affects what we think. So it's a symbiotic relationship.

So again, what we think affects how we feel and how we feel in turn affects how we think when depressed or anxious a high percentage of our thoughts are negative. Those are negative things we say to ourselves about ourselves. Things like I'm not good enough. I'm a failure. I'm worthless. I'm a loser. I'm an idiot.

I should be better than I am or I'll never get what I want out of life. These negative thoughts are self critical. Judge unrelentingly, harsh, and ultimately self defeating. These thoughts make us feel discouraged, hopeless, empty, and depressed in turn, the more depressed we feel, the more of these self-defeating thoughts we have.

So these negative thoughts can create a vicious cycle of sadness. That can be extremely difficult to break. Although these thoughts appear to us to be true. And can be very convincing. The good news is that they are most often distorted and do not portray an accurate depiction of reality. They can be changed and corrected to be more accurate. Balanced and healthier thoughts. And doing so will improve one's mood.

Bill: You're kind of blowing my mind here with this definition of the word cognitive, as you said, what we think affects how we feel. What we feel in turn affects what we think. I mean, just think about that for a minute. That is really powerful. And as you said, a high percentage of what we think generally is negative.

Ted Vander Clute: Everybody has these thoughts, some of the time, a hundred percent of people, but when we're depressed or anxious, we have these thoughts, a much higher percentage of the.

Bill: So it sounds like what you're saying is that depressed people are very self critical, more often than not, and hard on themselves. Kinda like they're beating up themselves.

So why would a person do this to themselves? Why do we have these thoughts?

Ted Vander Clute: Yeah. Why would we beat ourselves up like that? It's a good, it's a good question. Well, it's not something we're doing consciously. Depression is an insidious disease that operates below our conscious. these negative thoughts just automatically run through our minds without our conscious awareness.

In fact, Dr. Aaron Beck, one of the pioneers of cognitive behavioral therapy coined the term automatic negative thoughts for just this reason and in the C B T groups, I run here. In California, I refer to automatic negative thoughts as ant's or ants, which a lot of my group members get a kick out of depression, causes our mind to unconsciously focus on all the things that are not working in our lives and conveniently block out those things that are.

It's a mental trick that depression causes us to play on ourselves. When in the depth of despair in this way, our perception of reality becomes distorted and makes things appear worse than they actually are. That's why the author, Dr. David Burns, who wrote the best selling book, feeling good, referred to these thoughts as cognitive distortions.

They distort our reality it's as if we're wearing dark tinted glasses causing us to see only darkness. When in fact it may be sunny and bright outside the cognitive behavioral therapy that I do is designed to help us take off those dark tinted glasses so that we can see ourselves and our lives more realistically.

So instead of focusing on all the mistakes we're making and mercilessly beating ourselves up for them, we learn to treat ourselves with compass. part of overcoming depression is learning to treat ourselves as well as we treat the people we really love and care about in this way. It's about learning self love.

If we talk to the people we care about the way we talk to ourselves, when we're depressed, we probably lose those relationships. No one wants to be talked to that yeah, that's exactly how we talk to ourselves when we're depressed. So again, a big part of cognitive behavioral therapy is learning to treat ourselves with love and compassion.

Yeah, we

Bill: need to know the term ant automatic negative thoughts. Yes. And that's what we're doing to ourselves. You said we do this unconsciously. So when we're like, ah, I'm such an idiot. Ah, what a dope, we're not thinking, say that it just comes out. It's just automatic. You idiot. What'd you

Ted Vander Clute: do that for it comes out.

And after years of doing this to ourselves, we just assume that these are accurate thoughts after all. I've been saying this to myself for decades. So it must be true. Cognitive therapy is about helping people see that look. You're beating yourself And these thoughts are not even true. They're not accurate.

Bill: And you said our perception of reality becomes distorted and make things appear worse than they actually are.

So we're. Conflating these negative thoughts. So you are an idiot. You are stupid. We're making things worse than they are. Is that right? That's

Ted Vander Clute: exactly right bill.

Bill: Oh my goodness. And you said, gosh, if we treated other people the way we internally treat ourselves, we probably wouldn't have a lot of friends.

We wouldn't be a good person to be

Ted Vander Clute: around. It's kind of a form of self abuse in that way. And if we abused other people and they'd probably leave our lives.

Bill: So then how does C, B T help someone overcome this cycle of negative? Think.

Ted Vander Clute: Cognitive behavioral therapy is based on the idea that if we can learn to recognize the times when our thoughts are distorted, we can change these thoughts to be more rational and realistic and vastly improve our moods.

The first step in this process is to become aware of, and learn to identify these unhelpful distorted, negative thinking patterns in this book feeling. Dr. David Burns developed 10 types of thinking errors, which people tend to engage in all of us engage in these errors some of the time, but when people are depressed or anxious, these thoughts can dominate the thought process.

Bill: Okay. Curiosity and interest peaked. Can you describe some of the thinking errors that you just referred?

Ted Vander Clute: Sure I'll briefly describe three of the most prominent thinking errors that Dr. Burns developed. I'll describe discounting the positive, predicting the future and mind reading. The first one is called discounting the positive.

Imagine someone pays you a compliment, like you did a really good job on that assignment. Instead of taking it in and feeling good about it. You brush it off saying, oh, anyone could have done that. Or gosh, if that person really knew what they were talking about, they would see that I didn't do such a good job.

So instead of feeling good about a well deserved compliment, you end up feeling down about yourself. In this way, your distorted thinking is a mental gymnastics that keeps you feeling bad. It's as if it's a beautiful day outside. And then we unconsciously pull the shade down and live in the dark and say, what a dark world, when we've done this to ourselves, we've blocked out the sun and the good things in life.

The second one is called predicting the future in predicting the future, we act like we can see the future and we decide it will be BLE. We don't ask someone out on a date, cuz we've convinced ourselves. They're gonna say no, or we don't apply for a job. We want telling ourselves we won't get that job.

Anyway, we end up feeling worried because we're sure something bad will happen. We often block ourselves off from opportunities that otherwise would be available to us. Now, if we had a crystal ball. That revealed that the future would be bad, then we'd have a good reason to feel fearful. However, none of us has such a crystal ball.

Thus, this type of thinking is a distortion that unnecessarily causes suffering. And the last one is called mind reading. When we mind read, we act like we can read other people's minds and we convince ourselves, they're thinking negatively about. For example, you're walking down the hallway at work. You say hi to your boss.

Your boss is hurrying past you and doesn't even acknowledge you. You tell yourself, oh my God, my boss must be mad at me. Maybe she didn't like the report I gave her. Maybe I'll get fired and end up homeless. You convince yourself that you know what your boss is thinking when in fact she may simply have been preoccupied and didn't even notice.

Bill: Are these three of the bigger ones discounting the positive, predicting the future and mind

Ted Vander Clute: reading. Yeah, that's my experience that these are three of the most prominent, but as I said, there are 10 in his book and actually I've extrapolated it to be 11, which he himself made, but he just didn't label it as such.

Got it. I, and I love

Bill: how you put it. You called it. It's these mental gymnastics that keeps us feeling bad. We're doing this to ourselves,

Ted Vander Clute: basically. Exactly. Bill and the good news about that is since we're doing it to ourselves, we have the power. To change it and stop doing it to ourselves. A lot of things in our life, we have no power over, but these things we do have power over so we can change them.

Okay.

Bill: So after a person learns to recognize their patterns of negative thinking, right? This is part of what you're just talking about. We can change this. How does C, B T help them work through all that? Obviously the key thing here is recognizing the pattern of negative thinking. Is that right? That's correct.

Interest. So then how does C B T help us work through all of

Ted Vander Clute: this? Well, after learning to identify and recognizing negative thought patterns, the next step is to challenge and change these unhelpful thought patterns to something that's more accurate and helpful. One technique I use to do that is called a thought record, which Dr.

Burns calls examine the evidence in which a patient. And I look at the evidence for and against the patient's negative thought. Let's say the patient's negative thought is I'm not good enough. We would look at the evidence that the patient has, that they're not good enough. And then we would look at the evidence against they're not being good enough because the thought is distorted.

The evidence against the negative thought will be much stronger than the evidence for the negative thought. And the evidence for the negative thought will not be very good. At the end of that process, we'll come up with a, a balanced counter statement, which says something like, here are my strength. And here are the ways in which I can improve my life.

And because a person has been having the distorted negative thoughts for decades, it's gonna be very hard to change that. So they'll need to proactively practice the new, healthy counter statement until it becomes a habit. And because the old thought will come. We teach a technique called thought, stopping where you stop the old thought and then thought substitution that you substitute the old thought with the new healthier thought.

And as the person practices that and can incorporate that into their consciousness and psyche, they feel better.

Bill Klaproth (host): And once again, that's Ted Vander clued. And that concludes part one of this two-part episode. In part two, we will share an example of a thought record. We will also cover the Socratic method of thinking. And the, what would a friend say technique? And we'll share more on the behavioral aspect of C B T. And if you found this podcast helpful, please share it on your social channels and check out the full podcast library for topics of interest to you.

This is the healing podcast brought to you by Morin health. I'm bill clamper auth. Thanks for listening.