Distancing And Decentering – Stepping Back From Your Thoughts

We’re excited to introduce an exercise on Distancing and Decentering, designed to help clients learn essential cognitive behavioral techniques to manage distressing thoughts. It introduces ten practical strategies for stepping back from unhelpful automatic thoughts and gaining new perspectives.

Our thoughts are not reality

Everyone experiences unhelpful thoughts: automatic, often biased interpretations that can leave us feeling stressed, anxious, or stuck. In cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), these are often called negative automatic thoughts – subjective interpretations of events that don’t always reflect reality, but which are often accepted uncritically as ‘truths’, and which can significantly affect how we feel and behave.

Stepping back from your thoughts

Distancing and decentering are fundamental CBT techniques that help people view their thoughts as ‘just thoughts’. A helpful metaphor to illustrate the difference between them is to imagine you're in an art gallery, looking at a large painting which represents a challenging situation in your life:

• Distancing is like stepping back in the gallery to view the painting as part of the larger collection in the room. Instead of getting absorbed in the details, you start seeing it in context with all the other artwork around it. This perspective shift reminds you that the painting is just one interpretation among many; it’s not an exact representation of reality but rather an artist’s subjective view. In the same way, distancing from your thoughts allows you to see them as individual ‘pieces’ of artwork in the larger gallery of your mind – as specific interpretations rather than facts. It’s the difference between saying, “I believe this” and “this is absolutely true.”

• Decentering is like moving around the gallery to look at the painting from different angles and lighting. Each new perspective reveals something different: perhaps certain colors seem more vibrant from one side, while other details become clear when you examine them very closely. By observing the painting this way, you get a fuller understanding of it, and you start to question the assumptions you made based on just one viewpoint. Decentering from your thoughts encourages you to approach your thoughts from different perspectives, treating them as ideas you can explore and test, rather than getting locked into a single view.

The Distancing and Decentering exercise introduces clients to 10 practical strategies that can be used in-session or as homework to support cognitive distancing and decentering.

Read here

Who can benefit from this resource?

This exercise is suitable for anyone who struggles with distressing thoughts that feel overwhelming, or which lead to difficult feelings. Distancing and decentering are fundamental skills which can be used transdiagnostically. It is useful when working from a CBT perspective, but also within ACT, DBT, or mindfulness frameworks.

How can it be used?

This resource can be used to introduce ten different categories of distancing and decentering techniques. Clients can be helped to practise different skills in-session and as homework. The options are so varied that clients are not advised to try all of them in quick succession, as this is unlikely to lead to mastery. A better approach is to advise clients to practise one group for an extended period of time – even as an experiment – and monitor the outcome.