These important attributes can be incorporated into the client’s toolkit of coping with other problems outside of the art making environment. When working with a client, the creative space can be a sacred space of acceptance, non-judgment, and compassion. This can provide insight for the client to view their reactions to making changes to held beliefs about other parts of their lives. The process of art making also provides the client with a space to explore personally held beliefs about their approach to trying new things when creating art. Using art materials and transposing abstract thoughts to a physical art surface can help clients understand there is a pattern to their thoughts and that these thoughts can be transformed just as art can be transformed. Creating art can provide a physical and metaphorical understanding of problems that a client may be struggling with in their life.Ĭreating art can give clarity to defining and understanding problems and it can also help provide insights for problem-solving. However, it is at the next step that we can begin to initiate some change.Ĭreating art is a helpful process in understanding and modifying automatic thoughts. So far we can see that the trigger and the thoughts are difficult to eliminate. Our emotional, cognitive, and physical reactions can be difficult to control in many situations. A well-known example of automatic thinking is when you’re told to not think about an elephant…and then you immediately think of an elephant. If the trigger cannot be avoided, it is difficult to stop thoughts from occurring. The second step is the activation of thoughts. Another example is someone who may be experiencing workplace bullying and is unable to leave their job. An example of this is for a child who lives in an abusive household. Trigger > thoughts > emotions > behavioursĪs a process of changing the pathway for the future, it’s important for clients to understand the points of the pathway that they can make changes.Ĭlients may not be able to change the trigger or exposure to the trigger. In these instances, we can be impacted by both the event itself as well as the recovery process.Īs we saw above the general pathway of negative automatic thoughts is: This is especially true when recalling the experience, however, this is also true when developing a strategy to cope with the events as they often reinforce negative beliefs we may hold about ourselves and our ability to problem solve and cope with emotional distress. We can work with the client to create a framework around the experience so that each step of the pathway can be safely explored.Īs these experiences are negative they can create emotional distress. In therapy, we can work with clients on specific experiences a client may have that they know creates distress for them. Following this acknowledgment, we then need to identify what the specific pathway involves so that we can challenge each step. The first step in challenging negative automatic thoughts is to understand that they exist. We may not be able to stop automatic thoughts from initially occurring but the goal is to learn methods to identify the damaging thought and then develop strategies to disrupt the thoughts at any point along the pathway. The most common automatic thoughts we have can be summarised as below: Anger, avoidance, anxiety etcĪll of this can happen in a matter of seconds which leaves us little time to identify each step to try and interrupt the automatic process. this leads to behavioural actions, eg.this leads to engaging in automatic thoughts eg.this may trigger a belief we hold based on past experiences, eg.It might be visiting a place or seeing a person for example Initially, we are presented with a trigger. While most automatic thoughts occur without specific effort from us, we can identify a clear pathway of how they develop in our thinking. This is especially true when the thoughts are pervasive and enduring over an extended period. However, other automatic thoughts can be detrimental and have a negative impact on our life. Most of our automatic thoughts are rudimentary and help guide us through our day so we are not overloaded with intense decision making. This trigger might be a sight, sound, smell, or seeing someone. They represent images, words, and general thinking that comes from a specific trigger. Automatic thoughts come without any purposeful effort from yourself.
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