Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy [CBT]
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What core beliefs are at the heart of your negative thoughts? Find ways to challenge your thoughts, modify your mood and develop a positive upward spiral.
CBT is a well-established therapeutic approach with some newer versions of it that incorporate compassion and mindfulness. The framework teaches people to notice and chart their thoughts at difficult moody times. By challenging the thoughts with other evidence or challenging yourself to rnew behaviors, you can create new outcomes.
Hear your mind and change your heart ?
Let’s look at an example.
If a client comes in to look at social anxiety and describes unhelpful thinking, they may record thoughts like, “They think I have nothing interesting to say,” and “They find me silent and boring.”
Those thoughts may lead to anxiety before attending a social event and will likely be followed by obsessive review after the event. The client may further jump to conclusions like, “They will not invite me the next time because I screwed it up.” Those thoughts may come from a negative core belief such as “I’m not good enough,” or “I’m not likeable.”
In this example, the therapist would guide the client to notice when the patterns arise and to look for alternative evidence. Maybe the client can think of people who do like them. Maybe the client finds examples where they have feared not being included or invited again but in fact, more often than not, they were invited again.
New evidence and challenging the validity of negative thoughts is then reinforced with new behavior challenges and outside homework to create more reference points for a modified core belief like, “I’m enough,” or “There are some people who like me and some who do not, and I’m learning to get comfortable with that.”
CBT is known to create immediate results, and clients report seeing a decrease in depressive moods and anxious states within 10-12 sessions.