Therapy involves more than just sitting across from someone and talking about your problems. For the therapist, it often involves specific therapeutic approaches to help clients face and resolve concerns.
One of the most popular approaches to therapy is cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). CBT may seem complicated at first glance. However, CBT can be a great beginning point for many people interested in therapy.
What Is CBT?
Pinpointing solutions to our problems or concerns can be difficult. Minimizing or resolving our mental health concerns is no exception.
For some, mental health concerns can feel even more difficult to manage. Why? There are external AND internal factors at play. To further complicate matters, our thoughts influence our emotions and behaviors. In turn, our behaviors and emotions influence our thoughts. It seems complicated, but, understanding these connections is more simple than most are led to believe.
CBT works to help someone understand this connection.
How Does CBT Work?
The first step in CBT is to identify the thoughts that are causing someone to feel stressed. To best ensure the success of CBT, a therapist will ask often ask their client to track their thoughts and what they felt after they occurred, and what it caused them to do afterward.
As the CBT sessions continue, it helps someone to see thoughts, emotions, and behaviors are intertwined with one another. CBT doesn’t stop there, because it’s a solution-focused approach to therapy. The sessions will also focus on challenging these negative thoughts.
It also teaches clients to manage their symptoms to help improve their mental health in the short and long term.
Main Goals Of CBT
While there are main goals of CBT, people often bring their own set of objectives into their sessions. With that said, the goals of CBT can look different from person to person. However, generally, they are to:
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Overcome negative thought cycles
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Learning how to express feelings
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Developing coping techniques for stress, anxiety, or depression
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Boosting self-esteem and confidence
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Feeling prepared for various life challenges that inevitably come up
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Learning how to manage their mental health so they don’t have to be in therapy forever
The focus of CBT sessions does not have to involve talking about the past. CBT is a solution and future-focused approach. While understanding past experiences can be useful for a therapist to understand the full picture, it isn’t required. CBT focuses largely on the present and future.
What Can CBT Help Treat?
CBT is a transformative tool to help someone with a variety of mental health or personal issues. Even if it is just learning to manage the general stressors that come with life.
CBT can be useful to help someone treat the following mental health concerns:
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Anxiety and Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD)
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Depression or Major Depressive Disorder
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Bipolar Disorder
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Trauma and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
How Long Does CBT Take To Work?
In therapy, there are no quick fixes to issues. Professionals in the therapy world wish there was, because we’d love to help people feel better immediately. Unfortunately, that is not the case.
How long it will take is solely dependent on the individual and the problems that they are facing. What we DO have an answer for is that CBT has worked for many of the client’s we see at our practice.
If you are interested in learning more about any of the services we offer, including anxiety or depression treatment, don’t hesitate to reach out.
