Updating my template

[flamingsword]

Thoughts/feelings awareness log:
I felt happy because I thought:
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I felt sad because I thought:
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I felt angry because I thought:
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I felt fear because I thought:
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I felt disgust because I thought:
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List at least 5 things that you want, and the hidden emotional need behind the obvious desire.
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2.
3.
4.
5.

If you are crabby or out-of-sorts, it may help you to list as many forks as you can, to see which ones are the easiest to un-stick.
I am upset about _____, _____, and _____.
I am irritated about _____, _____, and _____.
I am sad about _____, _____, and _____.
I feel guilty about _____, _____, and _____.
I feel bored or stressed about _____, _____, and _____.
Think for a few minutes about which of these things would be the easiest or most energy efficient to fix. If it is a good day and you feel up to the challenge, you can pick something harder!

Comments

Wait what?

[silk_dragon_zen]

Don't you ever have feelings because *stuff happens*? I mean most feelings don't happen "because I thought ...". I recognize that's the CBT Party line "all feelings come from thinking", but that's partially neurologically backwards.

As I understand it from reading Lisa Feldman Barrett's book How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain last year, the timeline goes something like this:

Experiencing a situation leads to —>
initial feelings arising, which lead to —>
initial thoughts arising, which lead to —>
reflections on initial thoughts
(i.e.: more thoughts but this time more volitional), which lead to —>
transformation of initial feelings.

Yes CBT is correct that reframing things, noticing and countering distorted thinking, etc., can affect emotional states while they are happening, but our initial thinking about any given situation is nearly always preceded by an initial feeling state that arises as events are happening. CBT is also correct that over the long term it is possible by changing our thought habits and attitudes to set the groundwork that our emotional responses to certain types of situations will better serve us (e.g.: allowing us to be calm while things around us aren't going well and thus be more likely to have helpful rather than distorted initial thoughts), but CBT gets things backwards when they claim that in the moment our feelings are caused by our thinking.

— Sage

Re: Wait what?

[flamingsword]

The way I understand it, CBT talks about belief structures preceding and informing the initial feeling, so maybe the thought I’m expressing here should be “I felt _____ because I believed _____.” Or “I felt _____ because the story I was telling myself about the context these events happened in was _____.” - although that one is a bit long to roll off the tongue.

For me, changing a thought is easy - if the underlying belief structure and all the metacognitions I have about it don’t disagree with the new thought. So it feels sensible to me that to change our feelings we have to also change the contexts those feelings are happening in. I may need to read that book, though, because feelings are not a guide to objective truth. CBT and I could be way off base!