ABSTRACT
Between an external stimulus and an emotional response to it lie a person's thoughts about this event. Eliciting these thoughts helps the person to understand why they reacted to the event in the way that they did. Aaron Beck calls this 'tapping the internal communications' and states that clients can be trained 'to focus on their introspections [examining one's thoughts] in various situations. The person can then observe that a thought links the external stimulus with the emotional response'. The process of cognitive change within the scope of a person's awareness enables them to eventually become their own therapist or coach. A client might experience an emotional response without an obvious external stimulus to trigger it; in this case, the client needs to search for an internal stimulus such as an image or a memory in order to understand why their feeling seemed to 'come out of the blue'.
