IDENTIFYING A "CONVERSATION"
AND CORRECTING THE BELIEFS WITHIN IT
A FORM TO USE
The players:
"You" - writing down, as best you can, an internal conversation.
OBJ - The objective person commenting, addressing, asking you questions. (Your higher brain will occupy that position if there is no one else. Usually, even if consulting with another person, you would do all you can, based even on your limited knowledge, acting in the stead of the consulting expert. Then, you would have the expert provide additional insight.)
This website: Provides information and beliefs that are already figured out, for you to refer to and use.
At first, there will be lots of incorrect beliefs in one internal conversation, and you'll be confused.
What happens is that one incorrect belief at a time will be worked on later in more depth, after you've done this worksheet.
FIRST, WRITE FREELY
First you write down all of your thoughts within a conversation (self-talk) you are having which causes you to be upset, anxious, or having an unpleasant experience that you are concerned about. Those sentences, one per line, will look like this: where x represents the original conversation.
Date:
xxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxx
xxxxxxx
xxxxxxx
xxxxxxx
After writing the sentences in the conversation, you will do the next step below and then use the additional prompters.
Some people just write stream of thought style and then some of those people will answer the remaining questions and items that have not been addressed. The latter is preferred (to answer all of the remaining items).
It is desirable to write:
What actually happened (described objectively and then corrected by looking at it again and seen what was not objectively true),
How I felt,
What might not be true,
How I would rather feel or think,
THEN, ANSWER AND COMMENT AND DEVISE AND...
Then the other "players" contribute, like this, always labelling OBJ so that we know who (the objective observer/commenter) is talking, but all words added after the original conversation are normally indented or with a blank line below any original sentence. (In the original format similar to this there were two columns used, but this is easier to maneuver in. Figure out which symbol in your word processing software page will indent, and which will "outdent", so that all the word will align to the same level of indentation as the original indented line. The symbol (in the word processor) looks like a bunch of lines with a small arrow pointing the the right and one with an arrow pointing to the left...)
Date:
xxxxxxxx
OBJ: yyyyyyyyyy (Objective person or your higher brain being objective)
Answer zzzzzzzz ("you")
xxxxxxxx
OBJ: yyyyyyy
xxxxxxx
OBJ: YYYYYY
Response: zzzzzz ("you"
xxxxxxx
OBJ: YYYYYYYY
[and, finally]
xxxxxxx
OBJ: YYYYyyyyy
Sum up contents: zzzzzzz ("you")
Lessons learned:
My new beliefs (which then go to your beliefs list, kept in your Reminders Notebook,to be repeated and "installed".)
My declarations: ("What I declare to be true is...!", " What I will now do is...!" Or "What my life will now be like!")
How I feel now: Before, I felt: Now I feel:
What I will do next to close the loop even further:
THE ALTERNATIVE
You could simply number each one of the sentences after your first writing of your conversation and then go below the sentences and use the sentence number to identify which sentence you are writing your OBJ response to - and then just follow the format as above with that one variation.
