Now that you’ve worked with your therapist to identify the thoughts you find yourself struggling with, you’ll move forward to identifying the emotions you feel with those thoughts.

Using the example I started last week, a fear of public speaking, we’ll look at how this step works. One of the thoughts we looked at last week was, “People will laugh at me.” Honestly, this is a common fear when it comes to doing anything in public. Whether that be dancing, performing, and for some people, even eating. None of us wants to have people mocking us.

Working with your therapist (please do not do this right now) you’ll isolate the feelings that follow from the thought that is troubling you.

Some of those might be:

• Shame
• Fear
• Anxiety
• A sense of failure
• Insecurity

Keep in mind, one of the underpinnings of CBT is the idea that thoughts leads to emotions, and emotions lead to the maladaptive actions.

Your therapist will then discuss the actual emotion with you. They’ll discuss history, physical responses, and other emotions that come out of that first emotional response.

Then they’ll move on to the actions you take when you have those emotions, which we’ll look at more next week.

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