Showing posts with label CBT. Show all posts
Showing posts with label CBT. Show all posts

Friday, February 1, 2019

What is cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT)?

From Medical News Today on 09/25/19 by Kathleen Davis, FNP
"Cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT, is a short-term therapy technique that can help people find new ways to behave by changing their thought patterns.
Engaging with CBT can help people reduce stress, cope with complicated relationships, deal with grief, and face many other common life challenges.
CBT works on the basis that the way we think and interpret life's events affects how we behave and, ultimately, how we feel. Studies have shown that it is useful in many situations.
More specifically, CBT is a problem-specific, goal-oriented approach that needs the individual's active involvement to succeed. It focuses on their present-day challenges, thoughts, and behaviors.
It is also time-limited, meaning the person knows when a course will end, and they have some idea what to expect. Often, a course will consist of 20 one-to-one sessions, but this is not always the case.
It can also take the form of either individual or group sessions.
CBT is a collaborative therapy, requiring the individual and counselor to work together."
For more information click here.
Editor's note:
CBT, the so called "talk therapy," is very helpful and achieves better results than medications in most cases. Psychotropic medications and psychotherapy can both be helpful. Psychotherapy usually contributes to the most effective and longest lasting results.

Friday, January 25, 2019

What are cognitive distortions in CBT( Cognitive Behavioral Therapy)

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy or CBT is one of the strategies of psychotherapy which is often studied and sometimes referred to as "research based."

In general, when psychotherapy outcomes are studied, psychotherapy which applies some of the ideas of cognitive behavioral therapy, it is found that CBT gets good results usually as good, if not better, than psychotropic medications.

One of the significant ideas of CBT is what are called "cognitive distortions." Cognitive distortions are very common and often are engaged in unconsciously. The person is thinking in certain ways that interfere with the person's good functioning.

In the short video below, five cogitive distortions are identified:

  1. Emotional reasoning
  2. Disqualifying the positive
  3. Mind reading
  4. All or nothing thinking
  5. Catastrophizing

As I am fond of reminding my clients, "If you can't name it, you can't manage it." If you can't name the problem, you are doomed to be influenced by emotional and cognitive forces which you are not consciously aware of. Once you can "see it" and name it, you can think of ways to manage it.

Most people are not aware of how their psyche works and consciousness, knowledge, is power.

A skilled psychotherapist can help a person identify the cognitive distortions which are operating in the person's thought system. Once identified, the person has the power, then, of deciding how they can be managed and changed for the better.


Wednesday, September 27, 2017

CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) helps children and adolescents with OCD (Obsessive compulsive disorder)

Children and adolescents with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) who respond to cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) appear to continue to experience benefits from the therapy even after their initial course of treatment ends, according to a study published Wednesday in theJournal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

Other research has suggested that CBT for pediatric OCD is a durable therapy, but these studies had been limited by either small samples sizes or having CBT combined with other treatments. 

For more click here.