ABSTRACT
Behaviors provoked by specific situations are the responses people find, or are compelled to carry out because of their idiosyncratic tendencies. Situational behaviors that have shown to be momentarily "useful" and are repeatedly used by the patient become habitual, and are progressively transformed into automatic coping strategies or safety-seeking behaviors. A vicious cycle is then formed in which the underlying assumptions (UAs) elicit safety behaviors, which produce automatic thoughts (ATs) that generate emotional reactions that strengthen the behaviors and reinforce, the original UAs. The UAs and safety behaviors may be so automatized that, in certain situations, challenging them elicits emotional reactions in the absence of explicit ATs. Making the modulatory role of UAs clearer to the patient, modulation used here as the capacity to regulate, by means of level 2 of the case conceptualization diagram (CCD) is a distinctive theoretical feature of Trial-Based Cognitive Therapy (TBCT). Emotions and behaviors elicited by ATs generate other thoughts in a self-perpetuating mechanism.
