Helping Clients with Worry & Rumination
Free Audio Resource
Greetings, Colleagues!
Worry and rumination often show up in the therapy room as automatic, exhausting patterns—but they’re not inevitable. It is often our beliefs about worry that sustain this draining mental behavior.
Have you ever found yourself or your clients thinking something like:
If I worry about it, I’ll be more prepared.
Worrying shows that I care.
Worrying feels like the thing to do when there’s nothing else I can do.
It would feel irresponsible not to worry.
If I worry about it, it won’t happen.
If I just think about it more, I will figure it out.
I’ll admit it: I’ve had all of these thoughts myself. I’m a well-qualified worrier!
In Metacognitive Therapy (MCT), these statements are known as positive metacognitive beliefs—beliefs about the usefulness or necessity of worry and rumination. While worry can often feel reflexive or uncontrollable, when we look beneath the surface, we frequently find an assumption that worrying is helping us in some way. And if we believe a behavior is helping us, we’re unlikely to stop doing it.
This is why MCT focuses not on the content of thoughts, but on these overarching metacognitive processes. Our goal is to identify and challenge the beliefs that sustain worry and rumination, similarly to how we confront cognitive distortions in traditional CBT.
In this episode of Practical Psych, I sit down with a fellow therapist and author to explore the process of worry: how it forms, what sustains it, and why clients often feel stuck in endless loops of “what-if” thinking.
We dive into practical, evidence-based strategies from CBT and Metacognitive Therapy that help clients shift attention away from unproductive thinking and back into the present. If you’re looking to deepen your clinical understanding of worry—and gain tools to help clients break free from it—this conversation is for you.
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That’s all for now! Please share if you see fit.
Kyrie