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CBT Practice
CBT becomes most powerful when its skills move from formal exercises into daily life. This final lesson explains how thought records, cognitive restructuring, activity scheduling, exposure, and core belief work mature over time — and how to maintain the practice through setbacks, stress, and future difficulty.
8 min read
CBT Core Beliefs and Schemas
Core beliefs are the deeper convictions that shape automatic thoughts, emotional reactions, and repeating life patterns. This lesson explains the three levels of cognition in CBT, how schemas filter experience, how core beliefs form, and why changing them requires slow, patient evidence-building over time.
11 min read
CBT Exposure & Behavioral Experiments
Exposure and behavioral experiments are CBT tools for interrupting the anxiety-avoidance cycle. This lesson explains why avoidance keeps fear alive, how graded exposure works, what safety behaviors are, and how behavioral experiments test the predictions anxiety has been making.
10 min read
CBT Behavioral Activation
Behavioral activation is one of CBT’s most practical tools for depression, burnout, grief, and chronic stress. This lesson explains why action often needs to come before motivation, how activity monitoring and scheduling work, and why small, manageable actions can begin to shift mood over time.
9 min read
CBT Cognitive Restructuring
Cognitive restructuring is the CBT skill of taking an automatic thought, examining it carefully, and building a more balanced and accurate version. This lesson explains Socratic questioning, evidence for and against a thought, the seven-column thought record, coping cards, and when restructuring is — and is not — the right move.
11 min read
CBT Cognitive Distortions
Cognitive distortions are the predictable patterns the mind uses when it turns painful moments into larger, harsher conclusions. This lesson teaches the ten classic CBT distortions, how to recognize your own recurring patterns, and why naming a distortion creates space from it.
8 min read
CBT Identifying Automatic Thoughts
Automatic thoughts are the fast, often-unnoticed thoughts that shape mood before we realize they are happening. This lesson teaches how to separate thoughts from feelings and situations, catch the “hot thought,” and begin using a simple thought record.
8 min read
CBT The Cognitive Model
The cognitive model is the basic scaffold of CBT: thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and the body all influence one another. This lesson explains the triangle, the ABC model, maintenance cycles, and why changing one part of the loop can begin to shift the whole pattern.
7 min read
Who is Aaron Beck | Founder of CBT
Aaron Beck’s work began with one deceptively simple question: “What is going through your mind right now?” This lesson tells the story of how Beck discovered automatic thoughts, broke from psychoanalysis, and helped build the foundation of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.
6 min read
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy begins with a simple but life-changing observation: what happens to us and what our mind makes of it are not the same thing. This opening lesson introduces the core CBT idea that thoughts, feelings, and behaviors influence one another — and that once these patterns become visible, they can be worked with.
9 min read
📜 Module 13 — Thinking Like Aquinas: The Lens in Everyday Life | Thomas Aquinas Course
A free course by Everything IFS Academy on thinking like Thomas Aquinas: discover the lens his separate arguments add up to. Explore his conviction that reality is intelligible, the both/and instinct that fused faith with reason and Aristotle with Christianity, and the purpose question asked of things, actions, and whole lives. Revisit the dumb ox who out-argued his century, his final verdict that his life’s work was straw, and the January 28 feast day.
📜 Module 12 — Just War: When Is War Permissible? | Thomas Aquinas Course
A free course by Everything IFS Academy on just war theory: follow how Thomas Aquinas, building on Augustine, answered whether waging war is always sinful. Learn his three conditions of legitimate authority, just cause, and right intention, then trace how Vitoria, Suárez, and Grotius developed jus ad bellum and jus in bello into modern international law and the Geneva Conventions. Weigh the pacifist objection from turning the other cheek and the charge that every nation claim
📜 Module 11 — The Principle of Double Effect | Thomas Aquinas Course
A free course by Everything IFS Academy on the principle of double effect: when it is right to do good knowing harm will follow, the four conditions that decide it, and why it explains the trolley problem, end of life care, and the ethics of war. In plain English for everyday people.
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