Dr. Tabatha Barber explains that about 80% of our automatic thoughts aren't actually true, especially for trauma survivors. Treating intrusive thoughts as facts leads to shame and false beliefs like "nobody will ever love me again." Learning to recognize thoughts as misleading, not factual, reduces harmful emotional reactions.
Not everything you think and feel is true, and especially when you've been traumatized, this becomes really important to understand. There's really good neuroscience research that indicates that about 80% of the automatic things that pop into our heads on any given day and the automatic things that we feel at any given time are not true. If you think that you're supposed to react to everything that pops into your head or that every time you hear that thought, you know, if this happened to me, it must have been because I did something wrong, or if I was, if I went through this, then I must be. I need to be ashamed of that for the rest of my life, or whatever. That thought, that thought process, that nobody will ever love me again, or he's never going to stay with me, or whatever. If you think that everything that pops into your head is your voice and therefore it must be true, then you're going to spend about 80% of your time reacting to things that are leading you down, a set of responses that aren't helpful to you because it was based on false information.
