Negative NAT's

[The Jerk]

How long does it take to get rid of Negative Automatic Thoughts? From CBT.
Anybody got any experience of this? Thanks.

[Pangolin]

It took me about two years, though they still come back sometimes when I'm feeling very depressed. I found it a lot easier to cope once I'd learned to repress/rationalise them, though achieving that didn't really allow me to do anything I couldn't do before.

[misslaura]

in Dr Richards series he reckons in takes 45-50 days to change thoughts for good,and for your brain to use them automatically.

[The Jerk]

Thanks, i hope its 45-50 days and not two years! At the moment i always seem to think negative Probably as i dont have much going on in my life because of the SA its a bit of a catch 22, need to get out and do things.........but dont feel like it because of the SA.

[Pangolin]

Originally Posted by The Jerk

Thanks, i hope its 45-50 days and not two years!

I think I could have done it quicker if I had taken the right approach, but I ended up trying a lot of things that didn't really help much. For a long time, I tried forcing myself to be really positive and optimistic but that never really worked very well; I just seemed to make myself even more miserable. I now know that the way to get rid of negative thoughts it just be as rational and objective as possible, trying to be optimistic is just trying to battle the symptoms (the depression) but not the route cause. These days, I rarely try and address my negative emotions, I find it better to just feel them and then try and move on.

[Left Of The Dial]

I haven't had CBT, but i would say that getting rid of most of my negative thoughts took around abouts 45-50 days, as has been mentioned. I had very bad negative thoughts until about February, but most of these have gone now, and i only have rational thoughts now. Good luck with the CBT!

[hardy]

I think it took about six months to get negative thoughts down from their first level to say 20% of what they were