Supercharge Your Therapy Sessions: 35 Essential CBT Tools for Trauma

In the voice of

your

future self, you can imagine

your

self happy, healthy, and in that rich, meaningful life writing a letter to your present self about the things you learned or the changes you made, so how are you different in your rich life? and a meaningful life, there are many different permutations of this and I encourage you to do creative journaling, something along those lines, you can journal just by doing daily reflection, like journaling, you can keep symptom logs, some people don't like it. I like the whole prose thing. You can practice mindful journaling, so sit in the moment and spend 10 to 15 minutes writing down what you're thinking, seeing, hearing, feeling.

You can journal about a particular feeling, happiness, so you will write about the things that make you happy or the things that make you happy. that make you angry, you can keep a gratitude journal or a journal from the perspective of the inner child, the manager or the firefighter, and these are archetypes, if you will, from internal family systems theory, the inner child is the part of you that may have experienced

trauma

and is still scared and is still curled up in a corner so the child can come out and journal and talk about what they're feeling right now;

The manager is the part of you that just tries to get things done and tends to be less emotional and more practical and put one foot in front of the other, but they can get frustrated by the inner child who is, you know, restless and anxious and needy, and the firefighter, which is the emotional response, which is constantly trying to make it stop hurting. and you know, pour water on it or you can write it from the perspective of the firefighter who gets tired of being called all the time. You can make journals in text or in video or audio format.

You can change if you are writing it. You can change your writing utensils. You can use a pen, pencil, crayon, or even charcoal. You can make your journals verbally, where you write words, or graphs, when you scrapbook or draw. Guided imagery is one of the latest techniques we use. we're going to talk, but guided imagery can be used for emotional or physical pain, you can help people imagine a dial like a knob on the TV, I guess we don't have those anymore, but you get the idea, um, in the stove, we still have them. The knobs on many stoves when you turn it down, they actually turn down the intensity, the volume of your emotional or physical pain, you can visualize your emotion or your physical pain as a color and maybe it starts out red and then it turns. to blue or it starts completely dull and you can't even see what hurts and if it's your elbow, it's your elbow if it's an emotion maybe it's your heart, it's red and dull and you can't see anything and then As the pain It disappears, becomes more and more transparent until it disappears completely.

Nanobots, you can say I watch science fiction, but either your helper T cells or your immune system, you can imagine your body healing itself or sometimes you can imagine that If you have anxiety, you can imagine a wave coming towards you and just pushing it away Sometimes it can be helpful to sit under a fan when you do that, but guided imagery can take almost any form someone wants it to take, how would you see it? this is getting better and then encourage them by helping them see it really getting better, visualizing it, you can also use guided imagery for anticipatory anxiety if someone has to give a speech or they're anticipating something that's stressful or they're anticipating God forbid the death of a loved one. , you can help him use guided imagery to imagine himself going through that situation successfully.

You may not know all the bows and roses and butterflies, but you may begin to feel more empowered, feel more able to handle that situation. You can use guided imagery to grow right before you go to sleep. You can visualize what you want to do better or how you want to be tomorrow. You can start reprogramming your subconscious right before you go to sleep and then when you wake up, theoretically that has been imprinted on you. your subconscious a little now is not going to do things like overnight, but there has been a lot of research that has shown that meditating or using guided imagery to change your subconscious is most effective if done right before sleep and then images The old counting sheep thing that most of us told our children to do is an example of guided imagery: the person closes his eyes and imagines that he is seeing this image of a sheep jumping a fence and those Guided imagery can help them. trigger your relaxation response and focus your attention on a pleasant, safe, empowering scene, rather than going around and thinking about the meeting you have tomorrow and what happened today and this that and the other and health literacy doesn't can end something.

Continue with cognitive behavioral

therapy

without talking about education and cognitions. Part of cognitive behavioral

therapy

is helping people understand the connection between their mind and their body or their thoughts and their symptoms. Helping them understand the connection between their thoughts, their feelings, how they perceive the world and how they react and helping them learn and understand the connection between their past experiences and their present reactions. It is also important for many people, especially those who face

trauma

early, to understand that they are educated about the impact of cognitive development on the perceptions that children think. Differently from adults, children tend to think in terms of all or nothing and in a very personal, very egocentric way, so whatever happened the way I perceive it must be the way it is, whatever happened.

It's my fault and it's all or nothing, so if people's perceptions as children were formed that way and formed that way around trauma, then in the present they can still perceive things in very extreme terms, so we have to help them understand that those schemas that were formed when you went through that trauma when you were developing were very normal because that's how a nine-year-old thinks, that's how an eight-year-old thinks in the present, you have different abilities, your brain actually changes as you age, so perhaps we can review that cognitive behavioral therapy is not appropriate for everyone, but For many trauma survivors it can be helpful to have practical

tools

to better understand, address, and respond to their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors in context so that they don't feel like these flashbacks and feelings come out of nowhere and they are powerless against them.

Trauma-based cognitive behavioral therapy always allows the person to learn about the tool, decide if it is the one they want to use, and come to their own conclusions by evaluating thoughts, beliefs, and perceptions.