David Burns has done some of the most important work helping translate cognitive therapy for lay audiences. He has also done great work on developing simple, user-friendly tools to help people learn to identify and transform their problematic or self-defeating self-talk. Here, I want to present a simple but powerful tool that I give to clients when we are trying to get them to understand the relationship between their beliefs and difficult feelings (anxiety and self downing, for example) or behavior (i.e. compulsively checking email instead of writing).
Here is David Burn’s Checklist of Cognitive Distortions. How do you use this, you may ask? Try this exercise. The next time you are experiencing a feeling/behavior in a way that keeps you from living how you wish, read the list. Ask yourself which distortions you resonate with. Chances are some of your patterns of thinking might be characterized by these. This provides a good place to start intervening (which we will explore in subsequent posts), and can also be found throughout this blog.
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