Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is a form of therapy from a Behaviorist stance. The idea of CBT is more on the current behavior rather than psychoanalyst stance of looking into a person’s past and how it is affecting them today. Each view of therapy serves their purposes depending on what the person needs help with, or what the behavior the person is looking to change, and CBT is a wonderful way of learning to change behavior by changing thoughts.
The Cognitive model says that a situation leads to a thought that leads to an emotion that leads to a behavior. An example of this would be that a person who is feeling depressed and isolated goes to a party and does not talk to anyone. Breaking this situation down
Situation: Person goes to party.
Thought: “No one wants to talk to me”
Emotion: feeling sad, lonely, unwanted.
Behavior: Person becomes more isolated and does not talk to anyone.
As seen in the example above, the behavior of the person becoming more isolated, is the same behavior that causes the person not to talk to anyone in the first place. As we can see this becomes more and more of a cycle causing the person to feel more and more depressed, more lonely, more unwanted.
How do we stop this? We start with the thought. Challenge if the thought “No one wants to talk to me” if it is real or a way of distorted thinking. As we evaluate the thinking process, we find that a lot of the negative thoughts that we have are caused by distorted thinking. With CBT we attack the negative thought and attempt to change the thought from “no one wants to talk to me” to “maybe someone would want to know me”. By doing this we break the cycle. Let’s look at a new way of doing the same situation.
Situation: Person goes to party.
Thought: “I am worth getting to know”
Emotion: feeling happy, connected, and belonging
Behavior: Person is more willing to approach other people and talk to others.
As we can see by breaking the thought, we were able to break the behavior. CBT is a wonderful therapist tool for helping people with depression, anxiety. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is one of the tools that is offered by Christopher D Patchet, LCSW at Awesome Life Skills. To get help please feel free to call Christopher D Patchet at 267-972-0365 or emailing him at christopherpatchet@awesomelifeskills.com.
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