COGNITIVE BEHAVIORAL THERAPY
According to PsychologyToday.com, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is a short-term form of psychotherapy directed at present-time issues and based on the idea that the way an individual thinks and feels affects the way he or she behaves. The focus is on problem solving, and the goal is to change clients' thought patterns in order to change their responses to difficult situations. A CBT approach can be applied to a wide range of mental health issues and conditions. (Please click source button below for more information.)
PsychCentral.com explains that CBT is based on a model or theory that it’s not events themselves that upset us, but the meanings we give them. If our thoughts are too negative, it can block us seeing things or doing things that don’t fit – that disconfirm – what we believe is true. In other words, we continue to hold on to the same old thoughts and fail to learn anything new.
For example, a depressed woman may think, “I can’t face going into work today: I can’t do it. Nothing will go right. I’ll feel awful.” As a result of having these thoughts – and of believing them – she may well ring in sick. By behaving like this, she won’t have the chance to find out that her prediction was wrong. She might have found some things she could do, and at least some things that were okay. But, instead, she stays at home, brooding about her failure to go in and ends up thinking: “I’ve let everyone down. They will be angry with me. Why can’t I do what everyone else does? I’m so weak and useless.” That woman probably ends up feeling worse, and has even more difficulty going in to work the next day. Thinking, behaving and feeling like this may start a downward spiral. This vicious circle can apply to many different kinds of problems.
Beck suggested that these thinking patterns are set up in childhood, and become automatic and relatively fixed. So, a child who didn’t get much open affection from their parents but was praised for school work, might come to think, “I have to do well all the time. If I don’t, people will reject me.” Such a rule for living (known as a dysfunctional assumption) may do well for the person a lot of the time and help them to work hard.
But if something happens that’s beyond their control and they experience failure, then the dysfunctional thought pattern may be triggered. The person may then begin to have automatic thoughts like, “I’ve completely failed. No one will like me. I can’t face them.”
Cognitive-behavioral therapy acts to help the person understand that this is what’s going on. It helps him or her to step outside their automatic thoughts and test them out. CBT would encourage the depressed woman mentioned earlier to examine real-life experiences to see what happens to her, or to others, in similar situations. Then, in the light of a more realistic perspective, she may be able to take the chance of testing out what other people think, by revealing something of her difficulties to friends.
Clearly, negative things can and do happen. But when we are in a disturbed state of mind, we may be basing our predictions and interpretations on a biased view of the situation, making the difficulty that we face seem much worse. CBT helps people to correct these misinterpretations.