Don’t Believe Everything You Feel: A CBT Workbook to Identify Your Emotional Schemas and Find Freedom from Anxiety and Depression

Product Description

Find lasting freedom from difficult emotions with skills grounded in cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and emotional schema therapy.
If you struggle with difficult emotions, you should know that you aren’t alone. Many people feel sad, worried, or stressed out—whether as a result of depression, anxiety, or simply dealing with the common struggles of daily life. Emotions are a natural and healthy part of being human. It’s how we cope with these difficult emotions that reveal our true capacity for happiness, love, and joy.
Don’t Believe Everything You Feel offers a groundbreaking approach blending CBT and emotional schema therapy to help you explore your own deeply held personal beliefs about emotions, determine if these beliefs are helpful or harmful, and find the motivation to adopt alternative, healthier coping strategies. Each chapter contains exercises such as self-assessment, expressive writing, or guided questioning to help you manage your emotions more productively.
There’s no such thing as a “bad,” emotion. But if you’re experiencing sadness, anger, or anxiety most of the time, you need to find balance. This book will show you how to better cope with your emotions and live a full, meaningful life.

Review

“In
Don’t Believe Everything You Feel, author Robert Leahy provides a step-by-step guide to accepting emotions, rather than scrambling to change them; the use of adaptive, rather than unhelpful, emotional coping strategies; and an orientation to valued living. If you are experiencing emotional challenges—whether depression, or anxiety, or anger, or something else—you’ll find this book to be an invaluable resource for helping to navigate those challenges.”
—
David F. Tolin, PhD, ABPP, author of
Face Your Fears

“While animals can show all kinds of emotions that have a lot of overlap with us, humans can clearly think in a range of complex and new ways that other animals can’t. While these thinking competencies make us unique, they can also drive us into anxiety and depression. In his new and deeply insightful book on the link between thinking and feeling, internationally renowned cognitive therapist Robert Leahy guides us skillfully through the minefields and problematic relations between our thoughts and feelings. He identifies clearly how our interpretations and thoughts about situations, and feelings themselves, can make us feel better or worse, engage with them, or try to avoid them. Packed with years of insightful clinical experience, this is a wonderful guide for anyone interested in the relationship between thinking and feeling, and how to get one’s mind on a more balanced footing.”
—
Paul Gilbert,
PhD, FBPsS, OBE, author of
Living Like Crazy and
The Compassionate Mind

Through numerous self-assessments and exercises, Leahy helps the reader recognize that a rich and meaningful life includes experiencing a full range of emotions, including painful ones. In explicating the centrality of emotions to the human experience, Leahy both validates his readers and invites them to keep moving forward, transcending emotion-based perceived limitations and instead using emotions to increase awareness of priorities and pursue meaningful goals.”
—
Jill Rathus, PhD, professor of psychology at LIU Post; codirector of Cognitive Behavioral Associates in Great Neck, NY; and coauthor of
DBT Skills Manual for Adolescents and
Dialectical Behavior Therapy with Suicidal Adolescents

“To be human is to experience a tapestry of emotions. Now, for the first time, internationally renowned author and clinical psychologist Robert Leahy offers an inspiring workbook based on his unique theory of emotion. His integration of cognitive-behavioral and acceptance perspectives is a refreshing departure from conventional therapies that take a more pathogenic view of emotion. This workbook is packed full of wisdom, guidance, intervention strategies, and step-by-step exercises and worksheets that will transform a broad range of