What would it take to prove it?: A brain-hack I’ve been loving lately

Are you in therapy right now, and do you take notes during sessions? I was just re-reading some of my old therapy notes the other day, and felt deeply grateful to my past self for writing down all these insights when they were fresh. I come back to them time and time again, and they often take on new meanings for me as my life changes and grows.

Recently I stumbled across notes from a session where my therapist posed one of those really juicy therapy questions, a question so good it unlocked something in my brain. They’d asked me: What would it take for you to believe that [false belief] isn’t true?

While this bears some similarity to activities I’d done before in cognitive-behavioral therapy workbooks, most of my CBT experiences have been about gathering and affirming evidence that already exists against my harmful belief (e.g. looking at old texts where my partner says “I love you” when I’m feeling unloveable). But my therapist was doing something a bit different in this case: they were asking me to identify what type of evidence would definitively disprove my belief, and then seek out or create that exact evidence. 

I immediately liked this idea, because it felt so much more empowering than what I’d done with CBT practitioners before. I didn’t have to wait around for evidence to present itself. I could go make my own.