In the modern world, millions of people face psychological problems daily, significantly affecting their quality of life.
Conditions such as depression, neurosis, and PTSD torment millions of people worldwide every day.
You might be reading these lines not just by chance, but because something unconscious inside you is preventing you from living a full life.
This does not make you incomplete. In fact, everyone, even the healthiest person, has destructive beliefs.
Often these problems are formed by our childhood traumas.
More content in our app
You're only seeing a portion of the content. In the app, you'll find numerous interactive articles. Additionally, there are psychological tests to track your mood dynamics, a daily planner, an automatic thought journal, and much more!
If you truly want to improve your life, we invite you to embark on an exciting journey into the world of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT)!
In this chapter, we will begin to delve into the basic concepts of the method.
CBT is a deep and multifaceted method, and in our interactive learning course, there are already hours of study material.
Now we will present you with a simplified model of the basic concept of therapy, and in future chapters, we will discuss it in more detail.
In cognitive behavioral therapy, our consciousness is represented by three levels: core beliefs, intermediate beliefs (rules), and automatic thoughts.
Our thoughts shape our perception, and this perception determines how we live.
Rebecca Walker
To make this clearer, let's imagine an apple tree.
The roots in our analogy represent core beliefs (they are few and fundamental to us).
The trunk illustrates intermediate beliefs – these are less fundamental concepts, rather rules by which we act.
The most numerous part is automatic thoughts. These are the fruits on our tree. A fruit can be healthy or rotten.
Each of us has our own tree, and we filter all life events through our tree.
Each event in our life produces fruits, and what kind of fruit it will be depends on all three levels of our model.
Now we have a model of our perception of reality. For simplicity, we will not consider each level now, but we will generalize and call this tree our thoughts.
Let's consider a simple situation with the reaction of two people to one event.
We move to an imaginary city where two young women, Maria and Christina, live not far from each other.
It so happens that both are about to leave the house and go about their business.
However, the weather in our city is capricious. Five minutes ago, the sun was shining, and now it is already drizzling.
The life circumstances are the same for both women, and it would be logical to expect a similar reaction from them.
But we see something completely different – horror in Maria's eyes and a smile on Christina's lips.
What is the matter?
Let's look into Maria's thoughts and see how her reaction was formed.
Maria's thoughts:
Wow! And it just started to rain. Notice that Maria's thoughts may be slightly related to the actual event, but in her worldview, the connection can be literal.
Perhaps in her childhood, Maria's mother scolded her for dirty clothes, saying that no one likes untidy girls.
Traumas throughout life have developed a defensive reaction in Maria, which now manifests as a fear of looking untidy.
Maria filtered the situation through her perception tree and got automatic thoughts.
In turn, automatic thoughts triggered emotions – sadness, despair, hopelessness, and bodily reactions (increased blood pressure, tears).
The interaction of thoughts, feelings, and reactions to them is the topic of separate chapters of our training. We only mention that this interrelation is extremely important.
But why is Christina smiling? Here are her thoughts:
For Christina, rain is associated with the family tradition of going mushroom hunting in the forest in summer.
Her tree produces healthy fruits because the model in the core and intermediate beliefs is properly formed.
Obviously, such automatic thoughts will trigger completely different emotions and bodily reactions.
This is how CBT considers the psychological problems of people.
Because each person has their own tree model, each has their own automatic thoughts. In turn, automatic thoughts trigger different emotions and reactions.
That is why some people fall into depression, while others do not.
In this chapter, we broadly covered a large amount of material, so do not worry if you still have many questions.
We will repeat the material and consider each important part of the theory in more detail.
It is important to understand that we can influence our perception tree.
The goal of this application is to help you on the path to self-discovery and make your life brighter!
