Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

Hello everyone, thank you for taking the time out today to read the first educational style post of 2022. I hope you like and understand the content that will be provided to you today. My hope is by the end of this post, you will be able to identify when it is useful to use cognitive behavioral therapy when meeting with a client as well as a general understanding of the practice. Any questions or concerns please leave a comment and I will respond at the earliest convenience.

The post for today is on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). The best way for me to explain this in layman’s terms would be to break down each word in the name, starting with cognitive. According to Merriam-Webster, cognitive means, “of, relating to, being, or involving conscious intellectual activity (such as thinking, reasoning, or remembering) cognitive impairment”. According to the same resource, behavioral means, “of or relating to behavior: pertaining to reactions made in response to social stimuli”. In the context of CBT, therapists would use their understanding of the mind and behavior and assist the individual in understanding how their thought processes directly influence their behaviors.

The main tenet of CBT is the identification and restructuring of negative thoughts. Due to this some of the main disorders that are treated with this type of therapy are depression, anxiety and addictions. Informedhealth.org provided a chart that depicts both a negative and neutral thought and how each lead to their respective behaviors. For the sake of this post I will recreate it here.

Reaction

Harmful

Neutral

Thoughts

(Harmful Thought) “He ignored me – he doesn’t like me anymore”.

(Neutral Thought) “He didn’t notice me – maybe he doesn’t feel well. I should give him a call to see how he is doing”.

Feelings

(Harmful Feeling) Someone who thinks like this feels down, sad and rejected.

(Neutral Feeling) These thought processes do not cause any negative feelings.

Behavior

(Harmful Behavior) The consequence of this thought is to avoid this person in the future, although the assumption could be completely false.

(Neutral Behavior) This thought is a prompt to get back in touch with the person to find out if everything is alright.

From this chart you could see how a negative thought process could lead to a negative behavior. The person in this example was ignored in passing by a person and due to their diagnosis, they believed that it was personal thing. This leads them to avoid them in the future and potentially ruining a friendship that did not need to be. These thoughts would be identified and explored by a therapist using CBT and certain tasks would be done next in order to help the client change their thought process.

Some tasks that are done with CBT would be the use of journaling and relaxation techniques. Journaling is a great tool for this therapeutic style because it allows both the client and therapist to sit and explore the negative thoughts that may plague the individual. The relaxation technique is a good tool as well because it allows the individual to use a skill that will help deal with the negative thought processes.

The last thing that I want to discuss is the length of treatment. Depending on the therapeutic style and issues that the client is dealing with, there is a time frame attached. For CBT it can be anywhere between 12 – 20 weeks ranging from 30 to 60 minute sessions. You may think that it is a short amount of time to change any behavior OR why are certain individuals in therapy indefinitely. For CBT to work as intended, the client has to be a willing and active participant in their care. If we look back at the Stages of Change post, for the best results the client should be in the Preparation stage ready for the Action stage. 

The hope of CBT is that the client leaves therapy after the intended time frame with a better understanding of how their thoughts influence their behaviors and identifying when a certain thought may lead to less than desirable outcome.