The ABC Model

Welcome. This is a tool for teaching the ABC model for disputing unhelpful thoughts to improve how we feel, think and act.

Read now: the ABC model in 5 minutes

The ABC model in 5 minutes

The following steps are an outline of the method used in the ABC model to change our own thoughts.

1. Think of a problem that is affecting you
2. Think of a specific time the problem was an issue for you
3. Do anything that can be done about the problem
4. Define the situation (what objectively happened in that specific time)
5. Define the adversity (what was your subjective take-away or conclusion from the situation)
6. List the consequences for you due to the adversity:
   • unhelpful negative emotions (depression, anxiety, anger, hurt, guilt, shame, jealousy or envy)
   • unhelpful thoughts and behaviours (eg. avoidance, substance use)
   • secondary emotions (having feelings about your feelings)
7. Set a goal for what you want to change about your response to the situation
8. Define the demand by asking yourself what you believed should or must happen
9. Define the evaluation by asking yourself what you thought would happen if your expectation is not met
   Keep asking until you express a statement with at least one of the following extreme beliefs:
   
   • awfulizing (saying something is awful/completely bad),
   • discomfort intolerance (saying you can't stand or tolerate something)
   • global negative rating (negatively judging yourself or others' worth wholly based on one aspect)
10. State your unhelpful belief in full: when the adversity happened, I had the demand that a condition must be met, and if it did not, I or others would suffer the negative outcome in the evaluation
11. Dispute the demand and the evaluations by questioning how logical, realistic or practical they are
12. Dispute the adversity by examining evidence for it
13. Create a new effective belief that is flexible and non-extreme
14. Practise new thoughts and behaviours consistent with your new effective belief

Continue reading step by step in detail: what is the ABC model?

What is the ABC model?

The ABC in ABC model stands for Adversity, Beliefs and Consequences.

The ABC model helps us clarify the thoughts we have in a situation that lead us to:

• form an unhelpful negative emotion
• engage in unhelpful behaviours
• generate unhelpful thoughts that further build on the initial thought we had.

When we experience an emotion in a situation, it is because we are telling ourselves something about the situation. The situation itself does not directly cause us to feel a certain way. Feelings or emotions are always indirectly caused by our thoughts about the situation.

Whatever emotions you are experiencing at any time, as distressing as they may be, are completely valid for you to feel. You can acknowledge this right now and work at challenging your unhelpful thoughts underlying those feelings.

Go to: 1. Define the problem

1. Define the problem

The first step is to decide what the problem is.

If you have been struggling for a long time with many problems, you may not be sure which one to work on.

We sometimes try to find ways to fix obvious problems that actually are attempted solutions to deeper, less obvious problems.

This tool cannot tell you what kind of problem you have. It can only teach you how to think about a problem in a different way.

If you are really stuck, write down a list of all the problems and picking one from the list to work on. Making a start somewhere is better than not making a start at all.

Identify a specific instance of the problem

Select a time when the problem was an issue for you. Be as specific as possible. Pick a specific time even if it has happened many times. This makes it easier to be clear about what you were thinking and feeling at the time.

This specific instance is the situation. We define it as the objective account of what is going on. It is what a group of impartial observers would agree has happened.

Consider what you can control or influence

Before looking at the ABC model, consider all your options:

If you have done everything possible to control or influence the problem and you still struggle with unhelpful emotions or behaviours, then the last step available is to cope with the situation. This is where the ABC model becomes relevant.

Learning to cope more effectively with unhelpful emotions makes it easier to take action to control or influence a problem.

Go to: 2. Define the adversity

2. Define the adversity

If the situation is the objective account of what happened, then the adversity is the thought that comes to our mind regarding the situation. It is the initial, knee-jerk answer to the question What does this situation mean for me, others, or the world around me?

The adversity is usually a subjective opinion, but it can also be an objective fact about what happened.

There are usually many possible adversities that can be generated from a situation. It is possible to have multiple unhelpful negative emotions about a single situation.

Another way of figuring out the adversity to ask yourself what you would want to remove from the situation to make the unhelpful negative emotion go away.

Go to: 3. Identify consequences

3. Identify consequences

List out the thoughts, emotions and behaviours that occurred when you had this adversity. This is referred to as the consequences in the ABC model.

To identify your unhelpful negative emotions, review this list and click on their names to learn more about them.

Identify secondary emotions

When we experience an unhelpful negative emotion, we might also have an emotional response to the initial emotion. These are known as secondary emotions.

In practice, this means we can be depressed about getting angry, shameful about being depressed, anxious about being jealous, and so on.

The initial, primary emotion becomes a new situation and corresponding adversity which activates another unhelpful belief that leads to the unhelpful negative emotion.

Consider which emotion is the most problematic for you. Addressing the secondary emotion might be more helpful if it liberates you to focus on the primary emotion more effectively.

Set a goal for the problem

When you are know what the situation is and how it impacted you, think about a goal of what you want to change.

All problems are negative events. Setting a goal of having positive or no negative emotion when you encounter a problem would be unrealistic and unhelpful.

Behavioral goals are the most helpful — ie. what you would be doing differently if you were coping more effectively with the problem.

Go to: 4. Identify unhelpful beliefs

4. Identify unhelpful beliefs

Unhelpful beliefs are unhelpful because they are rigid and extreme.

Rigid beliefs, or demands, occur when we insist our expectations be met regardless of reality.

Unhelpful beliefs are extreme in at least one out of three characteristics:

• Awfulizing — telling ourselves an adversity is awful, terrible, or completely bad
• Discomfort intolerance — describing an adversity as intolerable or unable to be coped with
• Global evaluation of worth — judging ourselves, others or a situation as wholly negative/worthless based on one aspect

When put together, an unhelpful belief takes the following form:

Identifying the demand

We are going to temporarily assume the adversity in the situation is true. We do this so we can focus on looking for the unhelpful beliefs that are determined from the adversity.

To identify the rigid belief, or the demand, we can ask:

This question is worth asking every time you are dealing with an unhelpful negative emotion. The words should, must, need or have to suggest the presence of a demand.

That said, there are exceptions, when shoulds/musts are used to express:

A preference stated this way is not unhelpful because you are simply indicating what you want without insisting. If you can replace the should with would like to without any change in how the statement feels to you, it is likely a healthy preference.

Identifying the evaluation

When we know what we are demanding in an unhelpful belief, we can then work out what we are expecting will happen if the demand is not met. This is the evaluation.

Evaluations are made up of at least one type of extreme belief out of the three below:

Awfulizing means to view something that is bad or unfortunate and to only see it as completely, 100% bad or unfortunate, without considering the possibility of any positive aspects.

Discomfort intolerance occurs when a person states that they cannot tolerate something uncomfortable or that they cannot be happy with the presence of the intolerable thing.

This can become a self-fulfilling prophecy: by believing you cannot stand something, you will likely develop unhelpful feelings (anxiety or anger are common) about yourself or others in a situation.

Global negative rating is relying on a single negative evaluation of ourselves, others or the world, and to judge the whole person or situation as completely defective.

We want to keep asking ourselves what is the result of an unmet demand until we come across one of these extreme beliefs.

Identifying the evaluation might require asking the question repeatedly, challenging each belief that pops up, to arrive at the most feared scenario.

Go to: 5. Dispute unhelpful beliefs

5. Dispute unhelpful beliefs

We dispute our unhelpful beliefs so we are less convinced they are true or correct. There are three questions you can use to dispute beliefs:

Two other questions, which are strictly speaking not part of the ABC model, but may help with convincing yourself of the unhelpfulness of your beliefs, are:

Disputing the adversity

Once the demands and any evaluations have been disputed, it is worth examining the evidence for the adversity too.

Often the adversity is something we have imagined rather than something we have concrete evidence for. Adversities can be invalid if their conclusions are based on assumptions that do not hold up in reality or ones that cannot be directly tested.

Go to: 6. Create helpful new beliefs

6. Create helpful new beliefs

Having disputed the original unhelpful belief, we need to replace it with a new one that is more effective by being more logical, realistic, practical and in line with our values.

That means adjusting our belief from rigid to flexible, and from extreme to non-extreme.

Demand Preference

A preference is distinct from a demand as it indicates we would like something to happen, without insisting that it needs to happen.

This does not mean giving up wanting something important. It means being able to gracefully acknowledge the possibility of not getting what we want.

If this was put into a statement it would sound like:

It is easy to slip from a strongly held preference to a demand, so be careful about the distinction between the two.

Awfulizing Non-awfulizing

Changing an awfulizing belief to a non-awfulizing belief means viewing the adversity as:

• less than completely 100 per cent bad
• something you can cope with

If you are not sure what coping well would look like, ask yourself how someone else would cope in the situation. In difficult situations even the most well-adjusted person would struggle to cope, so resist the temptation to define coping as being completely unbothered by an adversity.

Discomfort Intolerance Discomfort Tolerance

Changing a discomfort intolerance belief to a discomfort tolerance belief means viewing the adversity as something you can tolerate, and that it is worth tolerating because of its potential benefits. It means actively refusing to believe that discomfort alone will cause us to become irreversibly damaged or harmed.

Global Evaluation of Worth Unconditional Acceptance

Moving away from giving global ratings to people or situations means moving towards unconditional acceptance of ourselves, others, and life itself.

This means acknowledging the imperfection of all human beings and refusing to judge them by any single event. It means accepting the presence of suffering in life and acknowledging its inevitability and unpredictability.

This is not easy to do as it is so natural to assign labels of good and bad to people and things. Unfortunately, this oversimplifies how complicated the world is and promotes harsh and overly critical judgment. When we practise unconditional acceptance of ourselves and others, we can acknowledge when we have failed at something, but never use that to judge that we are failures.

Template of a helpful belief

Here is a template of a helpful belief to aid with constructing your own:

When you have settled on your new belief, write it down somewhere and look at it regularly to remind yourself what you would like to achieve when you are struggling.

Emotions

The emotions we are interested in addressing in therapy are unhelpful ones that cause us suffering and prevent us from reaching our goals.

The unhelpful negative emotions listed below are only a fraction of the words you could use to describe emotions. In some cases the words we commonly use to describe emotions are better understood as a combination of beliefs and emotions. Correctly identifying our inner emotional state is key to good mental health.

A negative emotion can be helpful if it leads us to take meaningful action to resolve a problem.

Depression

Anxiety

Anger

Hurt

Shame

Guilt

Jealousy

Envy

About this tool

The ABC model presented here is based on Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT), which is a type of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT).

References