Porn Free Radio, Episode 211, Automatic Thoughts.

All right, let's play a quick word association game.

If I said going to the movies, what's the first word that jumps into your mind?

Now, if you're like me or anyone I ask this question to, the word popcorn is what comes to mind.

It's such a strong association with the experience of going to the movies.

Think about it.

When you walk into the building, you smell the popcorn.

You hear them making it.

You see it, of course, because you have to pass the candy counter in order to get to your

theater. Those are what we call triggers. Now, triggers sometimes are negative when you talk

about them in recovery, but they're just props. You know, there's this, there's this experience,

these things that remind us of popcorn when we walk into the movie theater.

And that those triggers usually lead to some sort of automatic thoughts.

Thoughts like, well, it wouldn't be a movie without popcorn.

Or I'm hungry. All of a sudden, I feel hungry as I walked in. If we skip the candy

counter because we were on a diet or because we were trying to save money, we might walk to

our seats and feel a sense of feeling deprived like we didn't get something. We might even have

a kind of a thought of self-pity.

We might be agitated for a couple minutes

as we sat there waiting for the movie to start,

especially if we saw other people eating popcorn.

So the pattern is this.

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