Cognitive Behavior by Erin Leroux

Do you ever feel stuck in a continuous negative thought pattern? Or maybe you have trouble imagining or picturing a positive outcome or overthink almost every situation? Maybe you are hyper focused on negatives and have a perception that about your physical, mental or emotional self?  Well, you are not alone. Many people suffer from these distorted thought patterns and are constantly battling with themselves and their negative thoughts, which in turn, can cause a whole lot of anxiety, self-esteem, confidence and depressive issues and feelings…  kind of like you’re trapped in your own mind? – Sound familiar?

Well it is my job at BlueLights Wellness as their Cognitive Behavioral Therapist (CBT), Counselor & Coach to help you on your journey to discovering the roots behind these negative thought patterns and to work together to get you back to feeling like your best possible self. Learning to love yourself for WHO you are and finding internal happiness, confidence and contentment within.

So Let’s dive a little deeper into the meaning of CBT. CBT is a type of psychotherapeutic treatment that helps our clients understand the thoughts and feelings that influence certain behaviors. ( Ie; distorted eating, addiction to substance/alcohol, anxiety, etc.) During the course of treatment, the focus is on helping our client deal with a very specific problem and help them learn how to identify and change destructive thought patterns that have a negative influence on their behavior and emotions. I encourage them to look for the evidence that supports these thoughts or that counter these thoughts. We do this by slowing down the thoughts and re-examining their destructive thought pattern. With this they are then able to take a more realistic and objective look at the thoughts that are contributing to their feelings. Being aware of the negative thoughts people are able to start engaging in healthier thinking patterns. The focus is to retrain our thought pattern and replace the negative irrational thoughts with positive, more realistic thoughts. While we cannot control every aspect of the world around us, we can take control of how we interpret and deal with things in our environment.  Sound Easy? Well it may, however when we have spent numerous years having these distorted views or have been practicing negative self talk, it can take a lot of focus and time to retrain our thought pattern, however what I like to tell my clients is that whatever way we have trained our brain to think, we can most certainly Un-train those thoughts and re-train our brains to think and act in a less impulsive and more positive way.

Erin Leroux

Wellness Practitioner