How to utilize the EASE Shift Perspective principle
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) provides many techniques for helping people Shift perspective so that they have the ability to look at their own thoughts, understand where they may be useful/unuseful, and adjust their thinking to be more accurate and constructive rather than (self) stigmatizing.
The CBT acronym: EASE = Education, Awareness, Shift perspective, Empowerment has great lessons to help us stay in a more positive mindset when our default brain wants to continue to think about things as it did when something upsetting happened. Following this process allows us to be conscious of our thoughts, and whether they serve us, or whether they are still trying to protect us from previous experiences.
EDUCATION: Helping us understand how our unconscious beliefs drive our thoughts and behaviors. If we don't learn about this automatic response default our brain has created, we become victim to the past response our brain has created to protect us.
AWARENESS: Also referred to as Mindfulness. Paying attention to what you are thinking and doing a self-check. Is this thought helping me move forward, or trying to protect me from something from the past? Assessing why you need to think negatively about the situation, event, or person.
SHIFT Perspective: After assessing the "why" of continuing to think in terms of protection, habitual self-negative thoughts, we now have concious control and decide if we want to continue to have these negative thoughts, or change our perspective to positive, forward moving thoughts.
EMPOWERMENT: Now that we realize we have control over what we think, we can start to constructively work on where these thoughts originated, release them, and stop the automatic default.
We can do this manually, by working on the “3 C’s” which is:
Catch it, (the negative thought, Check it, (the negative thought- does it serve us?), and Change it. This gives us power in the moment. However, to make the deeper shift in our brains default belief that drives these thoughts, we need to go a little deeper into our unconscious, which has stored all of our experiences, both negative and positive. The energy of the negative experiences we have had become like radar for ANYTHING that reminds our brain even in small amounts of the original experience, so it can protect us from experiences that emotional pain again. Most of our beliefs come from the first 7 years of our life, when our childlike brain didn't know how to differentiate between what was about us and what was about another's negativity. Therefore, if someone was mean to us, we just created a belief that we were bad. As an adult, we can look at someone else's behavior as their own self-inflected, experiential anger that has nothing to do with us, but if we have not gone back and re-assessed that belief that we are bad when someone is mean to us, we will continue to respond to it as if it does mean we are bad.
When we learn how to Catch it, Check it, and Change it, more deeply, not just in the moment, we are able to rewire our brains default response to negative events, situations and people. This is life changing!
Stay vigilant, stay focused, stay kind...to you, as you learn how to live life with E.A.S.E.
If you would like to join us as we start our fall schedule of workshops, please email me at pheitz@patriciaheita.com for more information.
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