Mental health therapy has the power to meet you wherever you are along your journey in life. Working with a therapist empowers you with the building blocks of mental health and well-being. It’s a safe, confidential space to learn new ways of thinking and seeing the world, improve your interpersonal skills and relationships, and gain a better, clearer understanding of yourself.
Seeking therapy also becomes a proactive effort to address issues before they begin to interfere with your life and well-being. If you’ve been feeling depressed, anxious, stressed, mourning the loss of a relationship, or dealing with unresolved trauma, sitting down to talk with a therapist can offer new perspectives.
“Therapy helps you learn how your own mind works,” states advocacy group Mental Health America (MHA). And the benefits of regular therapy are backed by science. Life experiences, good and bad, can physically change your brain structure and functioning — a phenomenon called neuroplasticity. Therapy is also an experience that can help to create more positive changes and return your brain to a healthier place, notes MHA.
One type of talking therapy specifically designed to bolster those neural pathways is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. With a myriad of talk therapy options and psychotherapy near me to choose from, what is CBT and how can it help you? Let’s explore.
What Is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)?
CBT is one of the most popular, effective, and most-studied types of behavioral therapies that operates on a few simple, fundamental principles:
- Our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors are all interconnected.
- Negative ways of thinking are often to blame for psychological issues.
- Unhelpful, learned behaviors also contribute to mental health problems.
- Psychological problems are also based on your beliefs central to you and the world around you.
- Through therapy, you can begin changing patterns of thinking and acting, change how you feel, and learn new ways of coping when psychological issues arise.
According to the American Psychological Association (APA), research has shown CBT to be more effective than other types of psychotherapy for a number of reasons. One way CBT differs is that it emphasizes what’s happening in your life right now instead of delving into your distant past to understand the roots of your emotional difficulties.
“(CBT’s) focus is primarily on moving forward in time to develop more effective ways of coping with life,” notes the APA.
This means that by analyzing how you’ve been thinking, feeling, and living today, in the present, you can work on shifting one of each to influence the others. CBT’s goal is to equip you with a toolkit of coping skills to help you identify and challenge each unhelpful thought pattern and behavior in real-time.
How Are Our Thoughts, Feelings, and Behaviors Related?
Imagine that you have a presentation coming up at work — in front of your colleagues, your supervisor, and the CEO. Almost habitually, your immediate, negative thought might be, I’m going to mess this up, and everyone will think I’m incompetent. I’m no good at my job.
This demeaning, defeating type of thinking then triggers feelings of anxiety and inadequacy, accompanied by a racing heartbeat, a knot in your stomach, and sleeplessness at night, leading up to the big day next week.
Because of this anxiety, you might avoid prepping, practicing, or preparing your slides. And on the day of, you’ll stammer and speak quickly, rushing nervously through the presentation and reinforcing your actual belief in yourself, even though it’s inherently false.
Here’s another example. You’ve gone through a significant end to a relationship where bridges have been burned. You think this always happens to me. It just goes to show that I’m unlovable and will end up alone. The negative finality of these thoughts has already led you to overgeneralize your current situation and jump to conclusions. Sadness and worthlessness surface, and depression sinks in.
Subsequently, you may withdraw from friends, turn down invitations to go out, and avoid any situation where you might meet new people. This isolation reinforces your initial thought that you’re unlovable, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy that keeps you alone when you don’t want to be.
Notice the patterns here? It illustrates how our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are not just related — they’re inextricably linked, where one essentially cannot exist without the others.
“Thoughts and emotions have a profound effect on one another,” notes a study by the University of Minnesota. “Thoughts can trigger emotions and also serve as an appraisal of that emotion. In addition, how we attend to and appraise our lives has an effect on how we feel.”
The central concept behind CBT is called the CBT triangle, which represents this connection of how easily negative thinking can influence ill feelings and, in turn, unhelpful behaviors. The triangle is bi-directional, meaning that these elements can be turned around. With the help of a CBT therapist near me, you can begin to reframe your perceptions into a more optimistic mental narrative, feel better about your situation, and start adopting more self-affirming behaviors.
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Check Your CoverageWhat Can CBT Treat?
Since most mental health disorders are rooted in the thought-emotion-behavior connection, there’s very little that CBT can’t treat. Not limited to mental health, CBT is also used clinically to help substance and drug use disorders.
Anxiety
Collectively, numerous different anxiety disorders go on to affect 40 million adults — that’s more than 19% of the entire U.S. population — each year, according to the Anxiety & Depression Association of America (ADAA). Generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder or seasonal affective disorder have many symptomatic things in common: they’re often fueled by cognitively distorted thinking like catastrophizing worst-case scenarios and predicting the utmost negative outcomes, all the while experiencing a series of physical signs that can take their toll on you physically and emotionally.
CBT helps you identify these anxious thoughts and examine, rationally, the evidence for and against them. One of the benefits of CBT is that it gives you the ability to accept that your feared outcomes — like in the work scenario we mentioned earlier — are unlikely to happen. Once you know you have the power to change, you’ll develop more confidence and learn to manage symptoms if they ever re-emerge.
Depression
Likewise, depression, often involving a persistent, permeating cycle of sad thoughts and feelings, affects 246 million people worldwide, notes the ADAA. It can lead to hopelessness and behaviors like social withdrawal and inactivity, which only serve to deepen one’s depression.
But because it touches on the three points of the CBT triangle, depression is highly and easily treatable through CBT. One way it can address depression is through CBT techniques like cognitive restructuring, imploring you to take a deep, objective look at deeply ingrained negative beliefs to challenge and change them. Another is behavioral activation. Depression can leave one stuck in a place of inactivity, but your therapist will empower you to take charge and engage in positive, rewarding behaviors (perhaps ones you once enjoyed) even when depression saps your motivation.
Trauma
Living through something devastating, like being victimized by abuse, surviving a natural disaster or car accident, or witnessing the horrors of wartime combat, can lead to feeling fearful, helpless, detached, confused, and unable to move on from the experience, which can develop into trauma. Traumatic memories can trigger intense emotional and physical reactions, but when they become a trauma disorder (such as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD), you may start to develop negative beliefs about yourself (“It was my fault”) or the world (“I can’t trust anyone”).
Using a more trauma-focused approach to CBT can help you heal from past, unresolved traumatic experiences. Your therapist may initially implore you to re-examine any negative mental narratives you may have built up about yourself or the event(s), but then, by gradually recounting the traumatic event, you can begin to desensitize yourself to the memory and reframe your understanding of it. “Reminders of the trauma or emotions associated with the trauma are often used to help … reduce avoidance and maladaptive associations with the trauma,” states the APA.
Co-Occurring Disorders
It’s not uncommon for mental health conditions and substance use disorders to exist together. Nearly 21.5 million people in the U.S. have some kind of co-occurring disorder, according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. In order to determine if you have a co-occurring disorder, your therapist will provide you with a dual diagnosis, a special treatment plan where two or more conditions are treated in tandem instead of separately.
CBT plays a big role in effectively helping co-occurring disorders because it’s an integrated approach. Sometimes, someone may drink in excess to cope with their depression, which can further exacerbate depressive feelings, creating a vicious cycle that can’t be beaten. But CBT can help you identify the triggers that lead to substance use, to understand why you choose to use drugs or alcohol, to learn better coping strategies when cravings arise, and to discern the underlying reasons for your mental health without needing to rely on drugs or alcohol.
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Speak With Our Admissions TeamHow Does CBT Work?
CBT is not only based on evidence-based theory (meaning it’s been proven effective through research), but one of the benefits of CBT is that it’s a collaborative process between you and your therapist. Together, you’re in control of steering your thinking in a more positive, productive direction. Essentially, “CBT places an emphasis on helping individuals learn to be their own therapists,” notes the APA.
However, your therapist — whether it’s a licensed counselor, psychologist, or psychiatrist — is your partner through the process, notes the Cleveland Clinic, even when the internal work you’re doing becomes difficult. So, what does the CBT timeline look like?
Firstly, expect anywhere between five and 20 sessions, more if one’s condition requires more exploration. Beginning from session one, here’s what your therapist will do:
- Understand the issue(s) at hand: As therapy begins in earnest, your therapist will start to get a clear picture of your challenges. You’ll talk about your symptoms, your present difficulties and, most importantly, what you hope to get out of therapy. This helps you both map out achievable goals.
- Gather information from you: Your therapist will continue to learn more about you as sessions progress. They’ll ask questions about how you think, feel, and react in difficult situations — central to the CBT triangle. Exploring your answers together, valuable insights begin to emerge on how to start reshaping these narratives by facing your fears and finding new, alternate, and positive ways of responding to challenging situations.
- Discern problematic patterns: Role-playing is one CBT strategy your therapist might employ. With their help, you can both verbally play out a scenario that’s particularly triggering for you — like that make-or-break work presentation — so you can identify the very exact moments that distorted thinking and feeling take shape. They may suggest you begin journaling your day-to-day experiences to track these patterns.
- Adopting new, tangible skills: Once you can recognize these patterns, you and your therapist will work together to change them. There, you can learn how to arrest those thoughts and emotions if you’re feeling anxious, depressed or craving a drink, putting into practice new, healthier methods of thinking and behaving. Watch how effective it can be in your daily life to adopt more positive patterns for future situations.
The Importance of Treating Mental Health
MHA data indicates that more than 50 million Americans experience mental illness at a given point, but only just over half — 54.7% — receive any kind of treatment.
It underscores why good mental health is an important, yet often overlooked, part of our mental well-being. Good mental health does so much to shape how you perceive and experience the world around you, how you respond to pressures, nurture relationships, make decisions, and ultimately improve your emotional awareness, realize your full potential, and find meaning in life.
“Mental health is a basic human right,” says the World Health Organization (WHO). It’s something that everyone deserves, and that includes the right to proper, compassionate mental health care. Look at engaging in therapy, especially CBT near me, as a smart investment in your future since reconciling the way you think, feel, and behave enables you to respond to challenging moments in ways that serve you and others well.
Find a CBT Therapist Near Me
Searching for “Cognitive Behavioral Therapy near me” can get the ball rolling on pursuing a type of therapy that can be life-changing for you in innumerable ways. When you’re ready to start therapy (or researching psychotherapy near me for a loved one), know what to look for in the right therapist.
Check their credentials. Are they licensed with a specific concentration or focus on CBT, along with other modalities? How many years of experience do they have in the field, and most importantly, what mental health or co-occurring conditions do they treat?
Find a mental health treatment facility that touches on different levels of care. Some people may require the round-the-clock supervision and structure that an inpatient treatment program provides. Others may call for the flexibility that outpatient treatment offers (or other versions in between, like Intensive Outpatient or Partial Hospitalization). Seek a professional mental health counseling provider that offers a continuum of care that includes all.
Lastly, what are the aftercare and support options? Ask about resources available after you complete a formal CBT program, such as alumni groups, support networks, or transitional housing.
We know you have questions, and we’re here, 24/7, to provide answers. Reach out to our admissions team today and find out more about what Aliya Health can offer.
- https://mhanational.org/resources/science-behind-therapy/#:~:text=Therapy%20helps%20you%20learn%20how,looks%20more%20like%20you%20want.
- https://www.apa.org/ptsd-guideline/patients-and-families/cognitive-behavioral
- https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/treatments/21208-cognitive-behavioral-therapy-cbt
- https://www.takingcharge.csh.umn.edu/what-are-thoughts-emotions#:~:text=Thoughts%20and%20emotions%20have%20a,effect%20on%20how%20we%20feel.
- https://adaa.org/understanding-anxiety/facts-statistics
- https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/9290-depression
- https://adaa.org/understanding-anxiety/depression
- https://www.healthline.com/health/cbt-techniques#types-of-cbt-techniques
- https://www.apa.org/topics/trauma
- https://www.apa.org/ptsd-guideline/treatments/cognitive-behavioral-therapy
- https://www.samhsa.gov/substance-use/treatment/co-occurring-disorders
- https://mhanational.org/the-state-of-mental-health-in-america/
- https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/mental-health-strengthening-our-response#:~:text=It%20is%20an%20integral%20component,community%20and%20socio%2Deconomic%20development.
- https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/cognitive-behavioral-therapy/about/pac-20384610
