I'm not trained in cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), but I have had it (though looking back, I didn't have the best practitioner). In CBT, the focus is on cognitive distortions (thoughts, beliefs, attitudes) in order to improve your mental wellbeing and emotional regulation.

I'm not going to arbitrate the efficacy of CBT or anything like that, but I am using it as an intro to what I think now was missing from my CBT experience: getting into my feelings.

The CBT I was given was: write a belief, or feeling in a specific situation. Write down how distressed or anxious or depressed you feel. Now write your evidence for your thoughts and against your thoughts. Now write down how anxious/distressed/etc you are after looking at the evidence for and against.

Often this can calm someone. If logically you can think through all the evidence for any outcome, you can realise that you're not in danger of any of your fears coming true. You might then, depending on your CBT practitioner, look at those core beliefs that are propping up the feelings and start to unpick them. My practictioner didn’t do this, really. We spoke about the beliefs, but didn’t dive into what they mean, and why I believe them, which is why it was of limited use to me. It got me through some things, but no lasting change, really.

This problem, as I see it, is sometimes the whole thing feels like a mess. There's so many intersecting and connected threads that it's difficult to narrow things down in a logical way. A good therapist will help you focus and explore things in a way that feels less overwhelming and more doable. I've often found (on both sides of the table) that the therapist being a calm, solid presence who can follow your thought patterns, and help clarify when you can't can make the you feel more capable*. Like you do make sense and you can figure this stuff out. It's an anchoring presence, a knowledge that there's someone who can be with you and withstand the emotions that feel too big for you as the client to handle.

In my current work on myself, looking at disappointment has pulled out some stuff that I wasn't sure was really connected. I didn't even realise how much of an issue disappointment was for me, never mind how I was using at as a way to reject and neglect myself until recently. I feel rejected when I get disappointing feedback because I reject myself (because I was rejected growing up if I needed help). It's a replaying of a pattern I wasn't even aware of.

It's often subconscious, or implicit. My implicit self is one of keeping safe by keeping quiet, and by never looking behind the curtain of functioning. If I never look at things, I never have to deal with them. Just keep moving forward.

Being able to lay things out in front of someone, putting things into words out loud helped me pull all these patterns out, and then I can think about how I want to be instead. This year of commitment to myself is part of not rejecting myself. When I set this intention, I didn't realise just how big this theme would become to my own process. See? It's subconscious. I knew what I needed before I knew that I knew it.

This is the joy and difficulty of being in therapy. I get to know myself in ways I didn't realise existed, and I get to make changes with the knowledge of why these changes are needed, and what might cause them to be difficult to put in place, and how to handle that.

*This ability to bring out the implicit from under the explicit is a key theme in training to be a therapist, and one I'm still feeling out. I can see patterns, but helping the client see them in a way that isn't just telling the client is something I'm learning (we don't want to tell the client, because it can be disrupting for the client to not be able to realise these things themselves. Often there is a protective factor in what a client is ready to see and not ready to see, and this is part of the process. We're helping clients realise that their emotions are something that aren't to be feared, but also can hold information that helps explain themselves. If we short circuit that, we disrupt the process, and remove a client's autonomy).