Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is a form of mental health treatment that has proven to be effective through years of intensive research. CBT is used by psychologists, psychotherapists, and counselors to treat a variety of mental health issues including depression, anxiety disorders, low self-esteem and unhealthy relationship patterns, stress and burnout.
During your sessions, the counselor will explore your thoughts, emotions and behaviors. Through CBT, you can unlearn negative thoughts and behaviors and learn to adopt healthier thinking patterns and habits.
CBT is based on several core principles, including:
Psychological issues are partly based on problematic or unhelpful patterns of thinking.
Psychological issues are partly based on learned patterns of unhelpful behavior.
Psychological issues are partly based on problematic core beliefs, including central ideas about yourself and the world.
People experiencing psychological issues can learn better ways of coping with them. This can help relieve their symptoms and improve their mental and emotional health.
CBT treatment usually involves efforts to change thinking patterns. These strategies might include:
Learning to recognize distortions in thinking that are creating problems.
Reality testing to challenge irrational thinking and responses.
Gaining a better understanding of the behavior and motivation of others.
Using problem-solving skills to cope with difficult situations.
Learning to develop a greater sense of confidence is one’s own abilities.
The therapist creates a treatment plan to address client issues, by defining treatment goals and subgoals. The treatment plan will incorporate several important interventions from CBT to best tackle the issues of concern.
Using these CBT exercises in the session as well as “homework” exercises outside of sessions, clients are helped to develop new coping skills, which can lead to a change in their own thinking, problematic emotions and behavior.
Unhelpful Thinking Styles
Cognitive distortions are irrational or negative thought patterns that can cause people to inaccurately perceive reality. They can be a symptom of anxiety or depression and can contribute to the development or worsening of mental health conditions. These irrational thoughts that shape how you see the world, how you feel, and how you act, can become harmful when frequent or extreme. Here are some common unhelpful thinking styles:
All-or-Nothing Thinking: This is a way of thinking in black and white terms with no shades of grey. You are either a success or failure. You feel either loved or hated.
Over-Generalization: This is a pattern of thinking about a negative event and then applying it to all events and even using it to predict future events. If you made a mistake with your school presentation, you feel you are a bad student and will always give bad presentations.
Mental Filter: This is where you pick out a single negative detail and dwell on it exclusively, so that your vision of all reality becomes tainted.
Discounting the Positive: You reject positive experiences by insisting they “don’t count.” If you do a good job, you may tell yourself that it wasn’t good enough or that anyone could have done as well. Discounting the positive takes the joy out of life and makes you feel inadequate and unrewarded.
Jumping to Conclusions: This is almost like mindreading. You think you know what another person is thinking when in fact, you do not. This is a distortion because you make a conclusion without considering all the facts.
Magnification: This is a way of thinking where you exaggerate the importance of your problems and flaws, often minimizing the importance of your good qualities.
Emotional Reasoning: This is a cognitive distortion where you feel a certain way or have an emotional reaction to something and then make this a reality, regardless of evidence or facts to the contrary. If I feel this way, it must be true.
“Should statements”: You tell yourself that things should be the way you hoped or expected them to be. Should statements that are directed against other people or the world in general lead to anger and frustration: “He shouldn’t be so stubborn and argumentative.”
Labeling: Labeling is an extreme form of all-or-nothing thinking. Instead of saying “I made a mistake,” you attach a negative label to yourself: “I’m a loser.” These labels are just useless abstractions that lead to anger, anxiety, frustration, and low self-esteem.
Personalization: Personalization is a distortion where a person believes that everything others do or say is a direct, personal reaction to them. Some people do the opposite. They blame other people or their circumstances for their problems, and they overlook ways that they might be contributing to the problem.
Benefits of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
Some kinds of therapy allow clients to talk freely and randomly about issues which can be helpful when a client wants to process an issue and get emotional validation, but it usually does not result in a shift in unhelpful thinking styles or create new behaviors. CBT is more direct and offers methods to build insight and create alternatives to negative and unhealthy patterns. CBT uses a process to move through treatment with a planned progression to meet the goals of therapy.
These problems and goals then become the basis for planning the content of sessions and discussing how to deal with them. Typically, at the beginning of a session, the client and therapist will jointly decide on the main topics they want to work on this week. They will also allow time for discussing the conclusions from the previous session. And they will look at the progress made with the homework the client set from the last appointment. At the end of the session, they will plan another assignment to do outside the sessions. This practice of rehearsing target skills can establish new behaviors, increase emotional regulation and improve a person’s overall outlook that can lead to sustainable new patterns in life.
