What Is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)?

When you’re thinking about seeing a therapist, you might talk about cognitive behavioral therapy. CBT is one of the most popular forms of psychological therapy, but few patients understand it fully. If you ask yourself, “What is cognitive behavioral therapy,” then you deserve the answer.

Don’t get into a treatment program not understanding the methods they’ll use to help you with your problems and issues. We’ll examine the basis of cognitive behavioral therapy and the many ways it can help carious issues and disorders.

You’ll be able to walk into your therapist’s office confident in how the treatment works for you.

What Is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy?

The basis of cognitive behavioral therapy is that most psychological problems stem from, at least partially, on unhelpful patterns of thinking and learned behaviors. When you were a child, you were raised a certain way and how your parents or guardians reacted to situations helped shape the way you think.

It’s possible that not all the thinking mechanisms were healthy and led to the psychological issues you deal with today. With cognitive behavioral therapy, the therapist teaches you better coping mechanisms to help relieve and eliminate the symptoms of the issues.

The goal is to make life better by learning what the thinking patterns are and then learning new patterns that better take care of the problems.

Treatment Using Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

The goal of the therapist is to change your way of thinking, but it’s not easy unlearning years of reinforced thinking patterns. The therapist works with the patient to recognize how their thinking creates the problems and reexamine them in a new way. These treatments have been successful for many people.

They will teach you to better understand how others handle the same issues and use problem solving methods to deal with stressful situations when they arise. You learn to be confident in yourself and your abilities to overcome these obstacles that hampered your life.

One of the biggest obstacles a person faces is the innate ability to avoid their fears. In CBT, the therapist encourages you to stop avoiding and instead face your fears. They may even employ methods of role play, so you can prepare yourself for interactions that elicit the negative behavior and thought patterns, so you can learn to overcome them.

CBT Tactics Depend on the Patient

It’s possible a therapist need only use part of these mechanisms to help you overcome your issues. The technique emphasizes the patient understanding what the problem is, why it happened, and how to eliminate the negative responses.

In many ways, the therapist teaches the patient to be their own therapist and provide actions to be used outside of the therapy session. These exercises are meant to reinforce what was learned in the session and to help them use the coping mechanisms in the outside world.

Learn More About CBT

What is cognitive behavioral therapy? If one of the most effective methods for people dealing with PTSD, depression, anxiety, and many other issues. It’s why so many therapists use it on their patients.

If you want to learn more about CBT and how it can help you, then please explore our site.