Part of cognitive behavioral therapy is psychoeducation. The therapist tells the client how the psyche works, why we do certain exercises, why homework is needed, and so on. Today I would like to tell you about what the cognitive model or ABC model is. In simple words, this is an explanation of the formation of our emotions and behavior. The founders of CBT, Aaron Beck and Albert Ellis, suggested that our emotions are not caused by the situation itself, but by our reaction to it, our thoughts and beliefs, the prism through which we perceive this situation. A - Activitating Event / Activating Event or Trigger B - Beliefs / Thoughts and attitudes (thoughts that occur in response to an activating event) C – Consequences / Consequences (how a person feels and behaves when he has these thoughts and attitudes). That is, emotions are formed not only in response to an event , but also in response to the thoughts that we had during this event, therefore, different people have different emotions for the same events, or even one person at different times of the day for a repeating event may have a different emotion, while thoughts We, perhaps, didn’t really notice. This structure helps me a lot, because sometimes anxiety rolls in, and you don’t understand where and why all of a sudden. Then I begin to remember what happened during the day that could trigger me? I want to be frank with you and share a situation from my life, psychologists are also people and also face anxiety. The last situation I had was this: In a language lesson we We discussed that learning a new language is super difficult, that you need to approach it slowly, it takes time. So, I came home and realized that I had been anxious for an hour: I was fidgeting, I wanted to eat all the time, I was procrastinating. I started to think that this was happening. I realized that it was always only for a couple of minutes during the discussion that I was driven: “I’m going to enroll soon, but how am I going to study in another language, it’s crazy how many words I need to know, I won’t be able to do anything,” and so on. Moreover, these thoughts flew by in 5 seconds (how long did it take you to read what is written in parentheses?) That is, the sequence: Conversation about the difficulty of learning a new language -> thoughts “how should I act and study, I won’t succeed” -> hello , anxiety and procrastination When I catch this thought, I feel better. Why? Because then I can calm myself down, reduce or remove anxiety (how to handle client objections during sales, for some reason such an association). I can calculate how much time I have, what I can do, perhaps adjust the plan and somehow support myself or share with someone and get support. True, noticing such thoughts is a skill that develops over time; sometimes it is not possible to understand what is disturbing - and this is also normal, everything takes time, and anxiety will never go away forever, so my task as a therapist is to teach my clients to cope with with this anxiety, to “catch” your thoughts. At 3-4 sessions, after diagnosis and setting goals for therapy, we begin to keep a diary of automatic thoughts, which looks something like this: And we learn to cope with them, we study the reasons for this particular reaction, and not another, how adaptive this reaction is for life or maladaptive ? That is, does it help in life or does it make life harder? Does therapy help you move towards your goals? Have you ever kept a diary of automatic thoughts??