Think of a time when something happened in your own life that led you to

feeling down or depressed. What thoughts went through your mind? Use the dia-
gram below to illustrate this example:

THOUGHT(S)

EVENT
EMOTION(S)

W H AT I F I CA N ’ T I D E N T I F Y A T H O U G H T ?

With other events that we looked at in retrospect, Neil didn’t know what his
thoughts were. “It’s funny,” he said, “but before we talked about these things I
didn’t even really think I was thinking. I just took the way I saw the world as fact.
I’m still working on recognizing what my thoughts are.” For these episodes, we
left a placeholder—we would need to gather more information from new events
to get a clearer understanding of his thinking.

A lot of times, it’s hard to know exactly what we were thinking if we’re not actually
in the moment when we had the thought. If you weren’t able to pinpoint a thought