Cognitive-behavioural therapy CBT

While it can be overwhelming to acknowledge and seek help for a mental health condition or emotional difficulties in your life, it’s important that you do. Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) can help you better understand and work through the roadblocks that are preventing you from living a full and healthy life. Mental health professionals are experts in their field and have up-to-date knowledge on research and therapy strategies that can help you. Your mental health professional will tailor the therapy to your situation and needs. Typical CBT treatment involves identifying personal beliefs or feelings that negatively affect your life and learning new problem-solving skills. Your therapist will help you gain confidence and better understand and appreciate your self-worth.

• Mental health professionals are experts in their field and have up-to-date knowledge on research and therapy strategies that can help you.
• This way of thinking results in strong emotional reactions followed by understandable attempts to cope.
• Cognitive behavioral therapy helps people address problematic thoughts and feelings to overcome addiction.
• You can learn about your child’s development by watching how they interact with their environment, including how they play, learn, speak, move and behave.
• There are also different types of specialists in mental health – they include psychotherapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, psychoanalysts and counsellors.
• This process should be continued until you have tackled all the situations you want to overcome.
• CBT is a type of psychotherapy focusing on how someone’s thoughts, attitudes, and beliefs may affect their actions and feelings.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

• We live our lives moment-by-moment and feel our feelings that way too.
• Face-to-face is usually the most effective method of receiving CBT.
• This can help you realise that your original belief isn’t true, and help you change your behaviour.
• While the core principles remain the same, the language, metaphors, and examples can be adjusted so that therapy feels relevant and respectful to each person’s lived experience.
• This could mean directing you to self-help, sessions with a trained mental health worker, group counselling or 1-1 CBT.

To learn how CBT and positive psychology can blend into a single, highly effective therapeutic approach, check out our article on positive CBT. It explores how these two schools of thought work together to support motivation, flourishing, and long-term wellbeing. Its wide-ranging applications show that CBT is more than just a treatment for Cognitive Behavioral Therapy mental illness.

What is cognitive behaviour therapy?

The aim of behaviour therapy is to teach you techniques or skills to alter your behaviour. For example, a person who behaves shyly at a party may have negative thoughts and feelings about themselves. For example, you may be taught conversational skills that you practise in therapy and in social situations. Negative thoughts and feelings reduce as you discover you can enjoy yourself in social situations. One key intervention used in cognitive behavioral therapy is guided discovery. Guided therapy is a technique CBT therapists use to help patients discover how they process information and reflect on how their thinking process affects perceptions and behaviors.

Using CBT to treat anxiety

So if your child is a little behind, that doesn’t mean they have a developmental delay. A developmental delay means your child is continually behind in developing skills expected by a certain age. Additionally, CBT programs can be standardized and tested so that the mental health field can identify which programs are effective, how long they take, and the benefits that patients can expect. CBT is a preferred modality of therapy among practitioners and insurance companies alike as it can be effective in a brief period of time, generally 5 to 20 sessions, though there is no set time frame. Research indicates that CBT can be delivered effectively online, in addition to face-to-face therapy sessions. For example, a person of color seeking therapy to cope with microaggressions in the workplace may not benefit from CBT because they are not imagining or inflating the reality of their experience.

It’s often the preferred type of psychotherapy because it can quickly help you learn about and cope with specific challenges. CBT generally includes fewer sessions than other types of therapy and is done in a structured way. Techniques like exposure therapy, behavioural activation, and role-playing are used to help clients gradually confront fears or adopt healthier behaviours. For instance, exposure therapy is particularly effective for anxiety disorders, where clients systematically face situations they fear in a controlled and supportive way (Abramowitz, Deacon, & Whiteside, 2019). Rather than spending years in therapy exploring the past, CBT concentrates on present-day challenges and equips clients with practical tools for everyday life. Typically, CBT is time-limited, with treatment usually spanning from 5 to 20 sessions depending on the complexity of the issues being addressed (Beck, 2011).