What is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy?

Over the next few weeks here at the NECBT Blog, we will be exploring and explaining the treatment that we provide in our practice. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy itself is quickly becoming one of the most recommended types of therapy available, and yet still many people are unsure of what exactly Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is.

Our first installment of this series explores the basics of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.

As always, for more information, visit our website at  www.necbt.com.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, more commonly referred to as CBT, differs from the “talk” therapy that most of us have become familiar with through mainstream television shows, such as The Sopranos and Frasier. Mainstream representations of therapy have left many with the idea that all therapy usually involves a patient lying on a couch and talking while a psychiatrist listens, paraphrases, and offers advice. This is not always the case.

Although past experiences can be directly relevant to patients’ distress, and is welcomed into discussion, CBT instead works on issues and behaviors of the “here and now.” CBT emphasizes current life factors that maintain the problem. We still consider discussing thoughts and feelings as essential to successful treatment. However, unlike many other forms of therapy, in CBT, therapists will do something with the information that the patient provides, rather than simply asking “How does that make you feel?” Therapists instead apply patients’ feelings and thoughts, and discuss end goals to behaviors. 

CBT is a problem-solving, action-oriented therapy which has been found to be one of the most effective forms of treatment for anxiety and depressive disorders. CBT is a universal treatment and has no barriers when treating ethnicity, gender, education, or age (other than with very young children).

CBT shows us that preceding every single feeling we have or action we take is a deep-rooted thought in our minds. The human brain is biologically wired to respond to a stimulus by first thinking, then feeling, and finally, responding, by acting or behaving. If we change our thoughts, then naturally our feelings and actions will also change.

In Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, therapists help patients understand that although biological and environmental conditions can contribute to problems, to a large degree, the patients themselves create their own psychological disturbances, through irrational thinking. Consequently, the patients have the ability to change those disturbances, even if the causes seem to originate outside of themselves. Therapists play an integral part in correcting their patients’ irrational evaluations, emotions, and behaviors by guiding them toward rational goals and purposes, as well as in assisting them in generating alternative courses of action.

Using CBT, therapists also help patients to understand that distorted patterns of thinking can have problematic emotional and behavioral consequences. At NECBT, we teach patients to self-monitor their thoughts and feelings on a day-to-day basis through the use of a workbook that we have created in-house that corresponds with weekly treatment. Self-monitoring thoughts and feelings helps patients to tease apart their core beliefs and how those beliefs relate to ongoing feelings and behaviors. Patients learn how to detect and dispute their often long-held irrational beliefs by discriminating them from their rational alternatives. Over time, this enhanced awareness will lead them to actively challenge their dysfunctional thoughts by employing cognitive, emotive, and behavioral methods of change.

At NECBT, we provide our own specific type of CBT, known as Interpersonal Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (I-CBT), which was developed by our founder, American Psychotherapist Thomas A. Cordier. Next week, we will look at how I-CBT differs from CBT.