It's taken me a few days to make it through the fourth chapter of Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy partly because I've been trying to get more rest since I have had a serious cold the last week or so. But I finally got back into it, today. And the main thing he talks about in this chapter is the importance of writing down negative thoughts.
He presents a number of methods for evaluating such thoughts, framing them in a distortion (i.e. All or nothing) and suggesting an alternative positive response. I'm going to work on that right now regarding something negative that's been going through my head. I'll lead you know whether it helps me in my thought processes or not.
After reading this chapter, I feel more hopeful that I can overcome my negative thought processes, but that this is going to require work. Dr. Burns recommends taking 15 minutes to process such negative thoughts but I think my processing will require more time. We'll see.
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Hmmm.... I don't know the book, but I'm more of a fan of writing down the positive... but if you're going to write down the negative, so that you can look at them, and maybe see that they're not so helpful, I guess that kind of makes sense... I'd recommend doing something symbolic with them, though, after you're done analyzing and looking at it... burn the paper, or tear it into shreds, as a symbol of saying good bye to the negative...
Hmm...interesting...I have been doing this exercise on my computer so it is a bit difficult to shred or throw away though I suppose I could delete it. I think the positive comes with looking at things from the other person's perspective. I think the value here is writing it down because it forces me to make my thoughts concrete. And once my negative thoughts are in front of me, as well as a more objective way of seeing things, it helps me to change my thought processes. Sounds crazy, I'm sure.
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