ABSTRACT
In seeking to change negative thoughts, it is again important to proceed steadily and without hurry. The author suggests that the task of the therapist is not so much to change the client’s negative thoughts as to help them to open up a sense of dissonance between those thoughts and reality so that client may naturally be motivated to rethink the thoughts for themselves. The author suggests it is helpful to think of a range of strategies from ‘light touch’ methods to more challenging ones. On the one, lighter, hand, the therapist can simply write the client’s thoughts on a whiteboard and ask the client to look at and think about them. On the other, more challenging, hand the therapist can show clients how to use thought records to challenge their negative thoughts according to available evidence.
