Recurring negative thoughts.
At first, I wrote them all down. Soon I caught on to my patterns of negatives. I could say the same negative thing to myself, or to someone else, but I said it in different ways. What I had to do was notice there was a single theme. Theme noted, I would see it, and put a symbol next to each theme negative. At the end of the day I would add up the different symbols. I usually had four to seven themes going on, which meant I had four to seven different symbols identifying the thoughts as belonging to that negative theme. Does that help?