Lesson 5- Automatic Thoughts

Welcome to video five of the Coping Power Caregivers series. We’re glad you’re back!

This week, your child began learning about thought-based coping and self-talk. We are exploring automatic thoughts and thinking patterns that can be either helpful or hurtful. Most people talk to themselves in their minds, something we call “internal self-talk,” even though we often don’t even realize we’re doing this. Sometimes, we even get into patterns where we say the same kinds of things to ourselves repeatedly over time, to the point that these thoughts become automatic. But even when it’s not conscious or intentional, these automatic thoughts can have a major impact on our feelings and behaviors.

When these unhelpful thoughts play out in our brains repeatedly, they can have a negative impact on our emotions. The great news is that, with practice, we can begin to recognize and interrupt unhelpful thinking patterns. That’s the first step in working to change those thoughts to be more helpful, which will help us feel better over time!

There are four main unhelpful thought patterns that your child learned to recognize this week. The first is disqualifying, or missing, the positive. This happens when you overlook all of the good things that happen and focus only on one little challenge or mistake. For example, assuming a presentation went horribly because you stumbled over one word at the end, even though the rest was perfect.

Next is all-or-nothing thinking. This happens when we assume that imperfection is automatically failure, or that we can either do things right or not at all.

The third unhelpful thought pattern is catastrophizing, sometimes called magnification. That’s when we blow things out of proportion and make small problems seem like a much bigger deal. As the saying goes, it’s making a mountain out of a molehill.

The last unhelpful thought pattern your child learned to recognize is jumping to conclusions. This occurs when we imagine we know what others are thinking or try to predict the future, in a way that is negative or hurtful to ourselves. For example, thinking that because someone didn’t smile at us, they must hate us.

Thought-based coping is really tricky for children to understand, so we’re going to spend two weeks working on this in class. Your help at home is so important to making sure your child understands the concepts and feels comfortable practicing and asking questions!

This week, we encourage you to try to recognize your own automatic thoughts, including assumptions that are unhelpful or unrealistic. If it’s appropriate, share these with your child to help normalize how common this self-talk is. Ask your child what unhelpful thoughts or self-talk they have experienced after a challenging or upsetting event and how they might interrupt those thoughts in the future.

Again, we want to thank you for your continued support of the program. Good luck with these conversations and we'll see you next week!