Help clients to explore and understand complex problems through a CBT framework, providing insights into their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.
Offers theory, guidance, and prompts for mental health professionals. Downloads are in Fillable PDF format where appropriate.
Includes client-friendly guidance. Downloads are in Fillable PDF format where appropriate.
An editable Microsoft PowerPoint version of the resource.
The Exploring Problems Using A CBT Model worksheet is designed to help practitioners and clients collaboratively understand psychological difficulties. This resource facilitates the identification of thought patterns, emotional reactions, and behaviors that can contribute to an individual’s challenges. By focusing on a specific moment in time, this tool supports the construction of testable hypotheses regarding the maintenance of these difficulties, enabling targeted interventions.
This worksheet offers a structured framework to help clients explore the interactions between thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. It is useful for:
Explores cognitive patterns related to low mood and self-criticism.
Identifies maintenance cycles in situations that trigger anxiety responses.
Analyzes stress responses and their emotional and physical manifestations.
Encourage clients to identify a recent emotionally-triggering event to explore.
Explore thoughts, feelings, and behaviors triggered by the event.
Analyze connections and interactions between these components.
Allow clients to reflect on the accuracy and impact of their thoughts.
Plan interventions targeting identified cognitive-behavioral patterns.
Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is based on the premise that psychological difficulties are maintained by patterns of interaction among thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. These interconnected domains can form reinforcing cycles that contribute to the persistence of distress (Beck, 1976; Clark & Beck, 2010). A central goal of CBT is to help clients recognize these patterns, understand how they function, and develop strategies to interrupt them.
The Exploring Problems Using A CBT Model worksheet introduces clients to a CBT way of thinking about difficulties. It provides a structured format for identifying the links between a distressing situation, the thoughts and interpretations it triggered, the emotional and physiological reactions that followed, and the behaviors that emerged. By mapping out these components, clients can begin to see how each element influences the others, and how certain reactions — especially avoidance or safety behaviors — may unintentionally sustain the problem.
This tool is particularly useful for clients who are new to CBT or those who struggle to differentiate between emotions, thoughts, and behaviors. It serves as a practical entry point into more detailed formulations, such as disorder-specific maintenance cycles. By grounding therapy in a shared understanding of the problem, the formulation process fosters a sense of agency and optimism. When clients see their difficulties as patterns that can be observed and changed — rather than as fixed or mysterious — they are better positioned to engage in meaningful therapeutic work.
