One of the main things I learnt through my CBT was positive thinking.

Positive thinking is having an optimistic attitude focusing on the positives not the negatives and having a forward looking approach to life.

For me positive thinking wasn't just a way of thinking that I learnt, but it actually brought to life some of my issues.

Early on in my therapy positive thinking was introduced to me and after a couple of sessions focusing on the strategy I still felt that I couldn't do it. I asked myself why, and the reason was that I truly was horrible to myself and never gave myself one ounce of praise for anything I did. My brain was so fixated on everything I did in life not being good enough that I couldn't even begin doing positive thinking as I didn't feel anything about me was positive.
My therapist was shocked at how horrible I was to myself, that we had to take very small steps to start thinking positively.

He gave me work sheets to basically evaluate things I did. At first he would allow me to write the horrible things I truly believed and then after he would help me evaluate them and try turn them into positives ( I think this part drove him crazy as my brain was having none of the positivity).

After a while (and I mean a while) I was trying really hard to think positively but I just felt that there was two people inside of me. The dominant person was constantly judging myself and putting me down, and the other one (the mouse) was trying to think positively.

This was a big step in my recovery, realising that I could think positively and that the negative part of me didn't always have to take over.

I am still working on positive thinking as I do still let the negative side take over occasionally but I just have to remind myself that I can think positively and me and my therapist had a lot of laughs over me trying to talk over the negative judgements my brain was trying to make.

I feel that everyone needs to do positive thinking on a daily basis as everyone deserves to think positively of themselves and should never be put down by others, and most importantly themselves!



And to carry on with the songs linking to my post, this song all about positive thinking definitely cheered me up on those down days!