Name: Getting Started: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in Action
Uploaded: 2024-11-02T13:00:44.000Z
Duration: 12 min 27 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Modal verbs - A2

Now, one thing I thought we might do today is to get an example of one of these situations in which you get really anxious and try to see if we can understand more about how you think and how you feel when you're in the middle of one of those situations.

So can you think of an example of something that's happened recently?

Adverbs of frequency

Yeah. My daughter has been, she's actually been sick and so she had a fever yesterday and they started her on an antibiotic and I had to go pick it up from the drugstore and that's like, I don't usually go there. It's hard to get there. Like, it's not right in the neighborhood.

Not expressways, but it's busy. It's busier and it's like in a mall so, you know, there's like...

So it just, it's not someplace I usually would go and if I was going to go, usually I would either have her go with me or my husband go with me, but she was sick and he was at work and...

So to try to understand what goes through your mind, let's try to take you back and now you know that the prescription's there and your daughter's sick and I guess you don't want to ask her to drive over there.

Yeah, probably not the wisest idea. So, you're thinking about doing the drive and what's going through your mind? What are the thoughts that are churning inside?

I'm just, you know, I'm sort of thinking about going there and I'm already starting to think, well, you know, what if, you know, what if I'm driving and somebody crashes into me?

What if I'm driving and I can't do it? You know, what if I just have to stop because

I can't do it anymore and, you know, it was raining and I'm sort of like I've got this picture of myself like out in the middle of the road and, you know...

What's the picture look like? You're out in the middle of the road and it's raining.

I'm stranded and it's dark and my, you know, my shoes are gone. I'm just like, it's like

I, it would be a million miles to get back home.

And Kate, as you put yourself back into that situation and have those thoughts going through your mind, what kinds of feelings go along with it? You know, by feelings, I mean things that are inside, like fear, anxiety, physical things that are going on.

Well, fear and anxiety and I just feel really shaky and I feel really like lightheaded and dizzy and I just don't feel like I can breathe very well and I feel like I'm going to like fall over.

Is this a panic attack now? You told me about having some panic attacks.

I've had worse ones, but it's getting there.

Not quite to a panic, but, you know, it's brewing.

Yeah, yeah. Well, what I think we might do to try to move things along toward getting a plan of attack on this is to actually sketch this out and see if we can figure out some things we might be able to start doing to give you a better handle on it that you have right now.

So let's put some boxes here and one of them is going to be event. These are the things that trigger your anxiety. And in this case, the event was...

Drive to pharmacy. And then this next box I'm going to label something we call automatic thoughts. And by automatic, I mean that they occur relatively automatically. They just sort of pop into your mind and you don't stop to check them out.

And we all have these kinds of automatic thoughts. You know, I have them. Everybody I know has them. They're inner thoughts. In fact, if you think about it for a minute, we probably have a lot more thoughts we don't speak out loud that are part of our inner dialogue than thoughts we actually end up speaking aloud to other people. And I suspect that you have lots of those thoughts. And you just gave me some examples of them. So that's why we call them automatic.

Yeah. So let's put a couple of those down in this box.

In the automatic thought box. And they are...

I can't do it. And there was this image about the rainstorm and you don't have any shoes on and so forth.

I think what if I... What if I can't get back home?

Yeah. What if I end up on this road forever?

And then we're going to put another box. There's a sort of a chain of events here.

The event can make you think in ways that stir up feelings of anxiety and so forth.

So if you're thinking like this, it makes sense that you'd be feeling pretty nervous inside and you might have some of these physical reactions.

Let's put those in here. This is the emotions box.

If we're going to rate that fear on a zero to a hundred scale and zero is none at all and a hundred is the maximum anyone could ever get, where would you be at this point?

But at this point it's an 80. Okay. And then you had some other feelings inside?

Well, yeah, I sort of felt like I might fall over.

My heart was pounding and I didn't feel like I could breathe very well.

How about your stomach? Any flip-flops in your stomach or anything like that?

And then we're going to complete this loop by putting a box we're going to call behavior.

This is how you actually acted when you were in this situation.

So what did you do after you had these thoughts and you had these feelings?

Okay. And what was it like for you when you were going to the pharmacy and driving there?

I just, you know, I think I left permanent marks on the steering wheel because I was holding on to it so tight.

So in this case you actually did go to the pharmacy.

Maybe there's some damage to the steering wheel or something like that.

But I really had no choice. I mean, I think usually I wouldn't go to the pharmacy.