Allison Fallon

there are three elements your writing needs to cover in order to have the power of change: facts, thoughts, and feelings.

nge: facts, thoughts, and feelings. More specifically, the facts of whatever story you’re writing, your thoughts about those facts, and then your feelings about those thoughts.

They are also elements of the Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) model, developed by Aaron T. Beck.

CBT assumes that there is a natural cause-and-effect relationship between our life stories, our thoughts, and our feelings. The cause and effect go like this:

Things happen to us in our lives.
We have thoughts about those things.
We have feelings that stem from those thoughts.
Those feelings cause us to behave or act in a certain way.
Those behaviors lead to outcomes.

if we can get past the events of our lives to our thoughts and feelings about those events, we can discover why things are happening the way they are happening.

Dr. Joe Dispenza, in his book Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself, details what is happening in the brain while the cognitive behavioral process is taking place.

The biggest mistake we all make when it comes to trying to produce measurable change in our lives—and Dr. Dispenza agrees with me—is that we get focused on changing outcomes when the system is driven by thoughts and feelings. No wonder we’re stuck! We cannot control every little thing that happens to
us.

What we can do, though, is rethink our thoughts and our feelings about our lives. We can change the story we’re telling ourselves.

If we engage in expressive writing, we begin to ask ourselves:

What are the facts of the story? What happened?
What are my thoughts about those facts? What is the story I am telling myself?
How did it make me feel? Where did I experience that in my body?
What did I do because I felt that way?
What happened next?

Facts: What are the facts of what happened?