Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Worksheets - Healing Perspective At Your Fingertips
Rumination is a common form of repetitive thinking that focuses on negative content about ourselves and others. These thoughts release a steady flow of adrenaline and cortisol into the body, which can have serious long-term effects such as depression, self-medication, anxiety disorders, obsessive compulsive disorder to name a few. In the short term, ruminating devours a tremendous number of energetic resources that could otherwise be used for life-affirming activities. Wired for the serenity of flow and simplicity, our minds are instead held hostage to a constantly looping ticker bar of shoulda-woulda-coulda disempowerment.
Ruminating is an attempt to deal with an emotion where we misfiled it out of fear and/or overwhelm. When affronted with uncomfortable feelings/situations, our brains tend to utilize poor filing shortcuts which result in a cluttered desk, so to speak. That near argument with Aunt Sherry is summarily dismissed with “Well, I’ll just never bring THAT up to her again!” and the emotions are stuffed without objectively looking at the whole situation, including the true reason behind our own reaction. We stack it on the other knee-jerk reaction mess of files on our desk, so we’re always looking at the mess, shuffling the mess around to hopefully make some meaning of it, commiserating about the mess, making plans to never let the mess get that bad again and, if we’re completely honest with ourselves, we often plan to freely add to the mess the next time we face any sort of discomfort.
I.was.fantastic.at.it. Cognitive dissonances looping in the background of my existence: “why did I /they do THAT?!’ “if I/ they had only done this instead of that,” “why can’t I/they just figure it out?” “if I think about this enough, I will learn from it somehow” “I’ll never learn,” “I’ll always be stuck.” In other words, the doom scroll. Try as I might, it was hard to make solid, holistic choices when operating from fear and overwhelm. Instead, I often ended up creating more decision fatigue, dysfunction, and cognitive distortion by misfiling.
One of the most significant healing practices in my queue to this day is a simple technique called Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) worksheets. CBT worksheets helped me objectively challenge emotions and reactions, and encouraged me to think through a different way of handling the situation or emotion in the future.
When I first started using the worksheets, I generated several labeled and alphabetized pages a week and kept them in a safe place. Some subjects were only a page or two, some others required weeks or months of thought-recording until I accumulated all the unhelpful and helpful thoughts around the issue. And here’s the beauty of it: From the very beginning, if I caught myself starting to ruminate again, I could tell myself “I already thought of that, cataloged it on the CBT worksheet, so I do not need to waste time thinking about it anymore”. All my thoughts were already thunk and safely filed away physically and mentally. Eventually, I was even able to ceremoniously burn my entire stack of CBT worksheets amassed over more than a decade!
Use the free downloadable “CBT” worksheets (see button below) in tandem with the above emotion wheel (Source: The Emotion Wheel: What It Is and How to Use It [+PDF] (positivepsychology.com) on any subject or emotion. I found it easier to print one copy of each of the worksheets, then write my numerical answers on separate lined paper so I could leave extra room for thoughts/ideas as they came up over time, as well as save printer ink.
If you have any questions, thoughts, ideas, please email me or contact me via the Shaman PNW Facebook or Instagram pages.