A brief overview of CBT and resources to learn more.
What is CBT?
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is a form of psychotherapy that starts with figuring out what your thoughts are to then determine what thought distortions are common for you. Using cognitive distortions as a framework, you can evaluate whether your thoughts are true and if they are helpful.
The ‘cognitive’ part of CBT, figuring out what your thoughts are, can be done by writing down your thoughts, journaling, or using workbooks in order to determine where they fit into the cognitive distortion framework.
Common cognitive distortions include catastrophizing, mind reading, and black-and-white thinking. For example, if your child fails a test and you think “Oh gosh, my daughter failed a test — she’s going to be a failure for life, she’ll never get a job, this is a disaster!” — that is catastrophizing based on the results of one test, as opposed to thinking “Gosh, my daughter failed this test. This is too bad, but sometimes it happens. Let’s work on what we can do for next time.”
Cognitive distortions
Knowing what your cognitive distortions are allows you to evaluate whether your response is appropriate for your situation, or if it is possibly more extreme than the situation calls for. Is this response your cognitive distortion speaking? Is this your catastrophizing, for example, speaking? Knowing what your cognitive distortions are can be helpful for determining whether your response to a trigger is helpful in that situation.
While CBT requires some work on the patient’s part, taking the time to write down some thoughts every day to see trends and patterns over time and determine what their main cognitive distortions are, it can be well worth the effort. CBT helps us to see that it is not often a brand new situation creating a brand new response every time, but rather typical situations in life presenting themselves in different disguises, and that our responses are habitual or trained over time from past experiences. You may figure out you want a different habit or different response to your triggers — triggers that will continue to come up in different situations throughout life. If you are able to moderate your response to those triggers, you can curate or cultivate a different outlook on them.
Why CBT?
You might use Cognitive Behavioral Therapy because it is:
- well-researched, well-understood, and backed by substantial research – often considered the first-line approach to rapidly address many conditions and symptoms
- action-oriented, with emphasis on making changes to actively apply what you learn
- generally time-limited, often focused on a discrete number of sessions of steps
Our recommendations for learning more
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is one of the more common forms of therapy. For patients already enrolled in therapy, it is likely that their therapist is already CBT-trained. Even for patients who do not have a CBT-trained therapist, there are many ways to access it through books and other media.
Dr Aaron Beck, recognized as the father of CBT, as well as his daughter, Dr Judith Beck, have written books on the subject.
The Feeling Good Handbook as well as its sequel, Feeling Great, by David Burns are another resource for CBT books.
Dr Daniel Amen’s website, workbooks, books, and clinic also fall into the category of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.
This Way Up is an Australian-based CBT program that Wells Medicine is able to provide to its patients for free, and is otherwise very low cost. Its online program is broken up into segments over 4-6 weeks.
About Us
Wells Medicine is a Houston-based practice designed to provide meaningful care for mental health. Providing targeted interventional treatments for Depression, Anxiety, OCD, PTSD and other conditions, with Ketamine Treatments, Stellate Ganglion Blocks, TMS, and Nitrous-Oxide Treatments. Focused on comprehensive care and integration with Psychiatry, Psychology, and Support Services. We are evidence-based, patient-focused and mission-driven.
The content here is for informational purposes and should not be relied upon for medical decisions. For the details of your specific medical conditions and treatments consult your doctors or other qualified healthcare professionals.
