Understanding Cognitive Restructuring Therapy
Identifying and Calling Out Unhelpful Thinking
When your therapist notices a distinct negative shift in your emotional tone, they will ask you, “What was running through your mind just then?” When you tell what you were thinking, then your therapist will ask you what you were feeling.
Your Cognitive Restructuring Therapy has begun. This technique is grounded in the understanding that thoughts, emotions, and behaviors are interconnected. Your therapist will help you identify cognitive distortions – unjustified, largely irrational negative beliefs that can lead to anxiety, depression, and stress. Common distortions include all-or-nothing thinking, overgeneralization, and catastrophizing.
In CRT, the therapist then guides the client through a series of steps that enable them to modify negative and unhelpful thinking associated with emotional distress and replace it with more balanced, constructive thoughts. By reshaping maladaptive thoughts, individuals find that they feel differently: their moods improve and they can think and respond in healthier, better ways.
How do maladaptive thoughts develop into negative moods and emotional disorders?
We like to make sense of things. Our brain cobbles our emotionally charged past and present-moment experiences into highly credible narratives, stories that help guide our present actions and generate predictions. But there’s no reason for them to be true.
Don’t believe everything you think. The cognitive restructuring (CR) process typically begins with recognizing these cognitive distortions and the moods they produce.
Irrational Thoughts and Beliefs Coalesce into Negative Moods
- Negative and self-critical thinking unfold into
- Worry, self-doubt, and catastrophizing are typical of
- Themes of unfairness, disrespect and being disrespected, and being harmed and mistreated by others are typical of (from Greenberger & Padesky, Mind Over Mood, 2nd ed., 2016).
The Process of Cognitive Restructuring
The Cognitive Restructuring Process
In CR, the client and therapist converse about maladaptive thinking and beliefs and arrive at ways to modify them and remedy their bad effects. They often work together like detectives, jointly examining the evidence that supports and disputes the maladaptive thinking.
Or else they may take the approach of scientists – evaluating the data, arriving at a theory or hypothesis that they “test” through behavioral experiments for the client to do, and then drawing a conclusion. The BEs create real-life opportunities to determine whether these thoughts or beliefs are faulty, partly accurate, or true.
Cognitive Restructuring Therapy in Action
The cognitive restructuring process usually follows several key steps:
- Identification of Distorted Thoughts: Clients are encouraged to recognize and articulate negative automatic thoughts that occur in response to specific situations.
- Examination of Evidence: Clients evaluate the evidence supporting these negative thoughts versus evidence that contradicts them. This often reveals inconsistencies and helps individuals see their thoughts in a more balanced light.
- Challenging Negative Beliefs: Very important – Once distorted thoughts are identified and examined, clients work to challenge these beliefs. This can involve looking at alternative explanations for situations or considering the outcomes of holding onto these beliefs.
- Replacing with Balanced Thoughts: The final step involves formulating more balanced or rational thoughts to replace the negative ones. Clients learn to reframe their thoughts in ways that enhance their emotional resilience and decision-making capabilities.
Cognitive Restructuring Therapy greatly helps clients to alleviate their psychological distress while equipping them – You – with the cognitive tools needed to sustain strong mental health. Mind Over Mood – the title of cognitive therapy expert Christine Padesky’s famous book – does a good job of capturing the capacities and abilities that can be learned and gained through CRT.
Mapping As You Progress and Creating the Path Ahead
The Thought Record
As you engage in Cognitive Restructuring Therapy, you can literally write your own personal handbook of strategies and techniques for stepping through your disturbance and mastering clarity of thinking. While you’re developing strategies to stabilize and clarify your thinking and turn around your disturbing, deceptive psychological processes¸ keep a Thought Record.
Start a three-column record as you work through the cognitive restructuring procedure. Typically clients begin by regularly noting down a few words about situations that increase their emotional distress, as well as accompanying cognitions and emotional experiences.
As they acquire skill in identifying their thoughts, they switch to a 5-column thought record, which adds one column for recording a balanced response and one to re-rate the intensity of the emotional experience – to the original three. Clients often choose to keep thought records between sessions in order to work with the automatic thoughts that arise in daily life.
The idea behind the thought record is that it allows clients to practice the “real-time” applications of cognitive restructuring so that they can eventually catch and reframe unhelpful cognitions without having to write them down.
Doing CRT with Me
If you’d like to do Cognitive Restructuring Therapy with me, when difficulties or challenges arise you’ll discover you’re better equipped to become aware of your thoughts and feelings in the Here and Now. Then you can answer the questions, “What is most important right now? What matters to me the most?”
Then you will be much better at knowing the best course of action to take.
> Treatments that you will receive to overcome your condition… Learn More >>
> Get an understanding of what is causing your condition… Learn More >>
For questions or to schedule a 15-20 minute phone consultation to determine whether therapy with David Mellinger is right for you, click the link below.