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Coping Skills - 2

© Cheryl Foote

Last week we began discussion on Coping Skills.  This week we pick up that discussion by discussing what is known as cognitive therapy.  This is how we cope with the thoughts we have in our day to day lives.

I would like to ask 3 questions:

• Where a glass of soda is at the halfway point, is it half empty or half full?
• When you reach 35 or 40 years of age, is our life half over or do you still have more living to do in the next 35 to 40 years?
• Finally, when a project at work does not work out quite as well as you had planned, do you say that you aren't good at this kind of work, a failure, or... do you say that perhaps there was more involved in the project than you originally realized?

These are 3 highly simplistic questions but they can truly speak volumes on how you think and react to a number of situations.

When one hears the term cognitive therapy, I am sure it conjures up visions of hypnotic suggestions, or brainwashing; this is not the case.

Simply put, cognitive restructuring is changing the way we view and react to our own negative thoughts.  This can be done with a psychotherapist, or depending on the severity of the mental illness, by ourselves.  It takes a lot of patience and practice to change the way we process thoughts and it can't happen over night.

I would like to direct your attention to a book written by David Burns, called The Feeling Good Handbook.  This book is how I was first introduced to the concept of changing one's own thoughts from negative to  positive.

We must understand, that when faced with a situation, we think about it and then react to it.  For some people, when we think about the situation, the thoughts are negative, leading us to react in a negative, non-healthy way.  It is by looking at each thought that comes as a result of a situation, and reducing the negative self talk that we can turn it around and react in a healthier way.

Try keeping a journal for a week or so, and see what ways we see our thoughts in reaction to a situation.  If we were to see them in a more  positive way, would we react in a more healthy and socially acceptable way?

Next week we will look at some of the negative ways we process our thoughts, and then react to them. 

 

Until then

Keep happy, safe and free

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