| Summary: | A young woman who retreats from relationships with men is treated with cognitive psychotherapy. The patient reports she caught herself at a grocery store using her old ways of thinking of “generalizing.” She blamed herself for a clerk’s rudeness, thinking the clerk did not like her, leading her to generalize, thinking she is not likeable. She wrote about the clerk’s rudeness and her first thoughts. She then wrote about other possible fictional thoughts, becoming creative with her thinking about what the life of the clerk, even editing, revising her thoughts to be more extreme in fictionalizing what was happening with the clerk. She reports the new thoughts made her feel better, leading her to smile at the clerk. The patient and therapist examine how the revised thoughts are probably not true, but also how the initial thoughts were not true. They explore when as a child, she began to think that she was a nuisance to all men, including her father, and thus felt unworthwhile, even to the extreme thought (fiction) that she ruins all men’s wellbeing. She learns how to examine her thoughts and keep them, discard them, or alter them, and realize that she has the power to choose which action to take with her thoughts. The therapist and patient also explore how her changing her thinking actually caused her to smile, altering the quality of her encounter with the clerk. They develop a homework assignment for the next week.
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