week eight :)
I was really intrigued by what we talked about in class on Thursday. This week was focused on the family under stress and the different ways families deal with it. There are a never-ending amount of stressors placed on families throughout their lives. We spent most of the time talking about the ABC-X mood log process and how that can help people overcome upsetting events in their lives. I was amazed listening to the process and hearing the results that my professor has seen as he has used it with those individuals that he’s worked with. I think more people should know about this because everyone experiences upsetting events, and this mood log is something anyone could do on their own as long as they properly understood how it works. My goal in this post is to break down the mood log process and explain to you how it works and how it can help individuals and families work through upsetting events in their lives.
These mood logs allow people to choose one upsetting event and break it down to help them process it. After they choose which event they want to log their mood about, they break down the emotions they are feeling and then rate them to show how much of that emotion they are feeling. Words like sad, anxious, angry, guilty, hopeless, frustrated, etc are used to portray how one is feeling about the event. The person completing the mood log will go through each of the emotions listed and use a rating between 0-100 to show how much of that specific emotion they are feeling at that point in time about that specific event. After the emotions have been sorted through and rated, the person going through the process of the mood log will use the columns given to fill out the following steps. First, they will write down any negative thoughts they are having. Those thoughts can range in severity and can also be quite diverse. Once all the thoughts are written down, they rate how much they personally believe their own thoughts on a scale from 0-100 again.
Then comes the self-reflection part. There is a list of cognitive distortions provided as part of the log, and the person filling it out must sort through them and decide which distortion might be affecting them or the specific thoughts they listed. The distortions are 1. All-or-nothing thinking, 2. over-generalization, 3. mental filter, 4. discounting the positives, 5. jumping to conclusions (a - mind reading or b - fortune-telling), 6. magnification or minimization, 7. emotional reasoning, 8. "should statements", 9. labeling, 10. personalization and blame. Each negative thought needs to have at least one cognitive distortion connected to it, so the thought process can be changed.
This will help those going through hard situations immensely because they will be able to intentionally change their own thought processes. After each negative thought has a connected distortion, the person then has to overcome that distortion by rewording their negative thought into a positive one. As the positive thoughts are written, rate them on a scale from 0-100 on how much you believe the positive thoughts, then re-rate how much you believe the negative thoughts.
After all of those steps have been taken, go back to the emotions and rates from the very beginning. Reassess how much you are feeling all of the emotions after completing the mood log. It is incredible how taking control of our thoughts and being aware of distortions that affect them can give us so much power. We can change how we feel about things if we take the time to understand why we’re feeling that way and break down how to work through those feelings.
I am so interested in this concept, and I want more people to understand it!
Here is a link to an example of a mood log if you’re interested in looking at the layout and specific definitions:
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