CBT Revision
- Deconstruct an incident of abuse so that they YP gains greater awareness of how they wind themself up and the beliefs/fears that drive this.
- YP gains greater awareness of how they already use self talk or imagery to counteract this process at times and learn what is most effective for them
In this exercise you will be revising the iceberg the young person did the week before. The young person will choose a different incident to develop greater understanding of their self-talk and the beliefs and fears that drive their behaviour. If you don’t remember the exercise without prompts you may wish to print out the iceberg exercise from YP6 again. Alternatively, you could use the following iceberg picture as a guide to help you remember.
The young person is likely to find feelings like anger, jealousy, annoyance etc easy to identify. Try to pull out the vulnerable feelings underlying those more familiar emotions. For example, anger is often underpinned by hurt or fear. If the young person learns to express that they are hurt or afraid, they stand a much better chance of getting these needs addressed. Behaving aggressively on the other hand is likely to push the other person away. Exploring this will really help to develop the young person’s emotional intelligence and help them build skills in communication.
As with the previous iceberg, get the young person to first identify the negative self-talk they used to wind themselves up and then think of self-talk they could have used to bring down feelings of aggression or anger.
Remember to pull out the underlying beliefs the young person has (point 3) and also their worst fears (point 4). What do they think about how people should or shouldn’t behave? What they feel should or shouldn’t have happened? In terms of worst fears, what were these? What did they fair might ultimately happen/ or was true as a result of the conflict? For example, did they worry they’d be abandoned, that they weren’t loved, that the other person didn’t care etc.
