Good question, I guess if you look at the transcripts it also looks like at least in some cases two beliefs are actually alternating rather than being literally simultaneous? Though there seem to be some actually simultaneous cases as well.
In general I’d say it probably doesn’t matter that much, and that the main fact is to have them both in your general “field of awareness”. Even if you are not literally thinking about both at the same time, you still have some sort of awareness of them both being true and their discrepancy “linking up” in some sense. Think of when you say something that you believe, and someone points out a problem in what you said, and you realize that they’re right and you go “oh”. It’s basically that.
I think that if you need to actually keep consciously alternating them with each other and it doesn’t feel like there’s any “oh”, then there’s something else going wrong. Either you haven’t managed to tap into the core of both schemas and actually experienced their beliefs as true, or one of the schemas is about something else than you think.
E.g. you might have a schema saying you’ll always fail at everything, and you are trying to disconfirm it using examples of times when you have been successful. But it could be that the underlying belief in the failure schema isn’t actually “I will always fail at everything”; it might instead be something like “I must never succeed because successful people get hurt by jealous people”. In that case, presenting evidence about having had successes does not actually disconfirm the core belief in the failure schema.
Good question, I guess if you look at the transcripts it also looks like at least in some cases two beliefs are actually alternating rather than being literally simultaneous? Though there seem to be some actually simultaneous cases as well.
In general I’d say it probably doesn’t matter that much, and that the main fact is to have them both in your general “field of awareness”. Even if you are not literally thinking about both at the same time, you still have some sort of awareness of them both being true and their discrepancy “linking up” in some sense. Think of when you say something that you believe, and someone points out a problem in what you said, and you realize that they’re right and you go “oh”. It’s basically that.
I think that if you need to actually keep consciously alternating them with each other and it doesn’t feel like there’s any “oh”, then there’s something else going wrong. Either you haven’t managed to tap into the core of both schemas and actually experienced their beliefs as true, or one of the schemas is about something else than you think.
E.g. you might have a schema saying you’ll always fail at everything, and you are trying to disconfirm it using examples of times when you have been successful. But it could be that the underlying belief in the failure schema isn’t actually “I will always fail at everything”; it might instead be something like “I must never succeed because successful people get hurt by jealous people”. In that case, presenting evidence about having had successes does not actually disconfirm the core belief in the failure schema.