I am asking this question for a friend of mine. I have benefited from CBT myself and she has not always received good help from the psychologists she has seen for treatment, but I hope it could help her too. However, she finds it very difficult to ask this question herself, but she likes it when I do it for her, which is why I am now contacting her. Let’s call the friend Anna 🙂

Anna is a 27-year-old woman. She lost her father to cancer 2 years ago. Despite that, she has 3 university master’s degrees and she is now doing an intensive traineeship with the government. The rest of the world thinks she’s super beautiful (she really is), but she doesn’t see that herself. She is quite unhappy because of this insecurity, she thinks she is ugly and fears that she will never find a partner. This is of course due to various factors: she has had bad luck with boys and has, among other things, heard from a psychologist, where she was being treated at the time, that she pretended to be because everything in her life was going well (her father was dying at the time, but the psychologist felt that she had no right to be insecure and have problems). She also told me that earlier than she started taking pictures of everything and measuring everything to find out what she really looked like, but that didn’t help and she can’t do that to herself anymore.

I find it very hard to see how genuinely unhappy she is with the way she looks when I would almost kill myself to look like her. I have also had therapy myself and can now honestly say that I love myself, and I wish her that feeling. Her insecurity may not help her looking for a relationship either, she’s really scared about it, she’s so scared that if she’s not looking for a while, she might miss the one, while at the same time she doesn’t even feel like herself holds. The most recent psychologist told her she doesn’t need CBT because it’s not about behaviour, but I wondered if it might not help her after all, because I’ve seen it with myself and other friends how it has helped. And if you also think that CBT is not the solution, or maybe you have another solution in mind. It won’t be solved overnight, of course, but it would be so nice if she could see herself the way her friends see her, and not be so terrified that she never finds someone. Because, of course, even if she never finds someone, it’s not worth letting it ruin her life.

If you do think that CBT could help, could you please send an example G-Schema? Because we have found schemes and used my old ones, they are all about actions in response to thoughts, not just the thoughts themselves. How can she fill out such a schedule when it comes to “I’m ugly”?

I very much hope that you can do something with this, if necessary I can always give extra information and maybe once the story is “out in the open”, she dares to take over the contact herself. And if she might benefit from treatment in real life, do you have any tips for her to open up? I really told my psychologist everything, so that we could achieve a lot, but with me, it came naturally. How can someone who finds that difficult, and has bad experiences with it, manage to do that?