How To Use CBT and The Sedona Method Together

One powerful personal transformation method that I have experienced first-hand is based on combining the Sedona Method with Cognitive Behaviour Therapies.

Imagine what it feels like to drive to work or catch a bus to school. For those of us that walk recall what it feels like to walk there. You might notice during that trip the same surroundings along the road each time. However apart from these external surroundings there are also internal happenings.

How we perceive the events that might happen at work or at school or at the place we're going to spend time has a large effect on the overall attitude we have on the trip there.

Your feelings about the entire potential for what could and could not happen in the following few hours can have a huge detriment when left unconscious. It's like driving at night without headlights on.

Understanding automatic thoughts

In CBT automatic thoughts are understood to be thoughts that we might not even be aware of but that lead to specific feelings nonetheless. Our automatic thoughts have a strong link to our beliefs about the world.

I'll illustrate this through an example. During one point in life I had a hard time planning and finishing large amounts of work or projects. If it was a small task I would get right on to it and finish it. But I had this mental blockage of associating large amounts of work with a huge burden that would take me forever to finish until I learned to break down these tasks into smaller components.

That's in fact the automatic thought that I had-

Large amounts of work are a huge burden that will take me forever to finish

But at the time I didn't know that I kept having this automatic thought. It was somewhere in the pre-conscious mind. I had a lower level of awareness that it was even there until I learned how to use CBT. But what I did have an awareness of is the consequences. The trigger emotion and behaviour.

I would not notice the automatic thought that kept coming up. One of the reasons that these thoughts are called 'automatic' BTW is that we often have no conscious control over thinking them.

Each time someone would tell me that there was a huge pile of work I had to finish I would tense up and have a negative attitude about the task.

CBT

It seemed like I was going from unconscious automatic thought to unconscious emotion each time the same events happened. I ended up feeling irritated and upset towards large projects in college and was unreceptive towards taking on large clients in one of the first jobs I had as a website developer.

Then something changed.

Once I began using CBT in combination with belief refraining models like NLP I started to become more conscious of the automatic thoughts I was having.

For example now if someone said to me "there is this big project …" I will 'hear' the mind chatter within responding 'not again … I'll never get this done…' and because I hear this mind chatter I can challenge it! The effect I've noticed as a result of challenging automatic thoughts is that these thoughts appeal less and less before disappearing altogether.

Challenging automatic thoughts is a powerful method of reframing negative emotional responses and making behaviour changes within weeks. Sometimes sooner.

It's like driving forward through the shadows of the unconscious mind with the headlights on full beam — we begin to understand where our emotions and repetitive behaviours come from.

Challenging automatic thoughts

Next time when walking or driving to a specific location or even when doing a particular task I recommend doing it with emotional consciousness.

Instead of just feeling irritated … upset … nervous … frightened or attaching to other emotions it's a good idea to ask these few simple question as often as possible –

Consider – when did I first started feeling this?
Consider – what is the first thought I had before this feeling started?
How can I investigate this thought?

In CBT a large part of the process is investigating and evaluating our thoughts to look at how we came to those conclusions and whether these thoughts are valid or not. In the example I gave earlier the thought "large amounts of work take forever to finish" is not a valid thought. How can something take forever? But the mind uses these black-and-white and absolute statements that make our emotions fluctuate to extremes.

… "You're leaving me forever?" … … "I am never good enough" … … "Doing this is impossible" etc…

Most of the time these automatic thoughts are quite ridiculous but the power that these thoughts have over us is massive. It's enough to make a personal change their entire life situation.

Combining The Sedona Method and CBT

In late 2008 I began listening to The Sedona Method home-workshop. One of the notable effect is that I have noticed is that I am able to challenge automatic thoughts much faster and eliminate them from running how I see the world. The main principle of the Sedona Method is releasing negative emotions rather than attempting to interpret them as truth.

If a person attends counselling to deal with negative emotions a CBT-based therapist would help them become conscious of their automatic thoughts and then find evidence for and against each one. This is the process that I use to reframe automatic thinking. However sometimes the emotion is just too strong. It is too difficult to challenge it no matter how much evidence is available. For example an individual suffering clinical depression might believe her painful emotions to be true just because of the sheer magnitude of them.

In the recent few weeks I've been using the Sedona Method to let go of automatic thoughts instead rather than evaluating each one all the time.

So for example if I find I'm feeling quite upset for no apparent reason I'll ask the three questions I mentioned above except for number three which I substitute for the Sedona Method mantra – "would I let this go? when?"

In asking ourselves the question 'when?' we are bringing the automatic thought into conscious present moment awareness. In the present moment each one of us centred … focused … resourceful and engaged. Becoming aware of this makes it easier to just let go of negative automatic thoughts.

For example when we recognize thoughts such as "I can't do this" in the present state of consciousness it becomes possible to realise that these thoughts cannot be true.

It's not a matter of as much finding evidence against them as it is the conscious soul of realising that there is no place in consciousness for this and therefore just letting it go.

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