The next steps...

To pick up where we left off on the previous post about depression. We were talking about Identifying schemas that can lead to unhealthy thoughts.

Suppose we identified the schema that a person thinks they are always going to mess things up in their lives. The thoughts that might be coming from that are things like "I'm a failure" or "everything I do goes wrong!"

Once the thoughts are identified and that they often stem from this old experience, we try to notice these irrational thoughts, and try to replace them with more positive ones.

It sounds simple, in in principle is, but practice is harder, often these negative thoughts are deeply entrenched, so I trying to just replace it with something different is very hard. Sometimes I question the entrenched thought as if it is very helpful, compared to if it is true.

Does the thought "I'm a failure" help you to get toward things that you value?

This is the mindset, the rest is the hard work of changing habits and automatic thoughts, and if you ever tried to kick a bad habit, you know how hard it can be.

During this part we take time to do thing like setting goals of being more positive so many times a day or week, or counting how often someone has their negative thoughts.

There is certainly more to the process, but I hope this took some of the mystery out of therapy for at least someone.