Challenging Stuck Points
Goal
To be able to challenge faulty thinking
Faulty Thinking
If you are like many people who have experienced a trauma, you have likely been telling yourself certain things that result in feeling a certain way about the event (i.e. guilty, distrusting, anxious, powerless). Those thoughts have created a rut in your brain that automatically leads you down a path towards that feeling. It is time to get out of the rut and be on a new path with more realistic, accurate, and truthful thoughts and beliefs about what happened. One of the ways you can do this is by challenging those existing thoughts.
Challenging Stuck Points Exercise (Barlow, p. 101)
Instructions: Identify a single faulty thought or belief that is a stuck point for you and answer the following questions on a separate piece of paper:
- What is the evidence for and against this idea?
- If your belief a habit or based on facts?
- Are your interpretations of the situation too far removed from reality to be accurate?
- Are you thinking in all-or-nothing terms?
- Are you using words or phrases that are extreme or exaggerated? (i.e., always, forever, never, need, should, must, can’t, and every time)
- Are you taking the situation out of context and only focusing on one aspect of the event?
- Is the source of information reliable?
- Are you confusing a low probability with a high probability?
- Are your judgments based on feelings rather than facts?
- Are you focused on irrelevant factors?
Example: You may blame yourself for what happened. Consider your intention. If your intention was not to cause harm, your belief that you are to blame likely needs to be challenged using the above questions.
Next Step
Identify additional faulty thoughts or beliefs that are stuck points for you and evaluate them using the above questions.