2019-03-13 Identify and Change Y

2019-03-13 Identify and Change Your Core Beliefs

Following up from my last post yesterday, our Automatic Negative Thoughts all came from our Core Believes.

Psychologist Judith S. Beck defines core beliefs as “the most fundamental level of belief; they are global, rigid, and overgeneralized.”

The concept of a core belief captures the idea that our negative automatic thoughts are not random. When we pay attention to what our minds are doing, we’ll find themes that recur again and again.

Further, core believes are like radio stations, they have certain genre, such as country, jazz, classical, etc. By tuning in different frequencies, we can change our stations (core believes).

The author then discussed where these core believes come from, how we identify the negative core believes and how to change them to positive ones and make them work in our favor.

Basically, they exist because of the nature of our brain neurology structure and genetics. Our brains developed “scripts”, shortcuts to deal with vast amount of information they received every day. Certain scripts became routine, predictable thinking of “I am just not good enough for this” or worse, “I am a failure.” They could be buried deeply in our minds from the very early young ages that will affect our life all along.

But we can beat these negative core believes by identifying them. Then build positive core believes. Dr. Rob DeRubeis, the mentor of the author of this book, gave us a metaphor for how thoughts change in CBT that he called “cycling the puck.” It’s a long quotation. But I think it’s important. Here it goes:

“Hockey players cycle the puck—keep passing to one another while staying in motion—in the offensive zone when they are looking for an opening to score. The “puck” in CBT is evidence against our core belief, and we cycle the puck by repeatedly considering information that shows our core belief is not true. Scoring a goal means the mind absorbs that evidence and alters its core belief. You’ll know the evidence hits home when something clicks mentally, which might feel like an aha moment.”

Once we’ve identified the negative core believes, we can practice to shrug it off by using some phrases such as these:

•Oh, you again?

•Ha, good one.

•Oh, no, you don’t.

•I’m not falling for that.

•What a silly thought!

•Funny that I actually used to believe that.

As we start taking negative thoughts less seriously, we begin to develop a different relationship with our thoughts.