Cognitive Behavioural Therapy For Dummies

Rob Willson, Rhena Branch

• Publisher: For Dummies
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781119601333
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
• Index: Psychology

Retrain your thinking and your life with these simple, scientifically proven techniques!

Cognitive behavioural therapy, or CBT for short, is often cited as the gold standard of psychotherapy. Its techniques allow you to identify the negative thought processes that hold you back and exchange them for new, productive ones that can change your life. CBT's popularity continues to grow, and more individuals are turning to CBT as a way to help develop a healthier, more productive outlook on life.

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy For Dummies shows you how you can easily incorporate the techniques of CBT into your day-to-day life and produce tangible results. You'll learn how to take your negative thoughts to boot camp and retrain them, establishing new habits that tackle your toxic thoughts and retool your awareness, allowing you to be free of the weight of past negative thinking biases.

• Move on: Take a fresh look at your past and maybe even overcome it
• Mellow out: Relax yourself through techniques that reduce anger and stress
• Lighten up: Read practical advice on healthy attitudes for living and ways to nourish optimism
• Look again: Discover how to overcome low self-esteem and body image issues

Whatever the issue, don't let your negative thoughts have the last say—start developing your new outlook on life today with help from Cognitive Behavioural Therapy For Dummies!

Part 1

Introducing CBT Basics

IN THIS PART …

Get to grips with what CBT stands for and why it’s the ‘weapon of choice’ among mental health professionals.

Understand how your thinking about events leads to how you feel (and how negative feelings also lead to more negative thinking).

Discover how to recognise and tackle your negative thought patterns.

Gain some tips about exerting control over your attention.

Chapter 1

You Feel the Way You Think

IN THIS CHAPTER

Defining CBT

Exploring the power of meanings

Understanding how your thoughts lead to emotions and behaviours

Getting acquainted with the ABC formula

Cognitive behavioural therapy – more commonly referred to as CBT – focuses on the way people think and act to help them with their emotional and behavioural problems.

Many of the effective CBT practices we discuss in this book should seem like everyday good sense. In our opinion, CBT does have some very straightforward and clear principles and is a largely sensible and practical approach to helping people overcome problems. However, human beings don’t always act according to sensible principles, and most people find that simple solutions can be very difficult to put into practice sometimes. CBT can maximise on your common sense and help you to do the healthy things that you may sometimes do naturally and unthinkingly in a deliberate and self-enhancing way on a regular basis.

In this chapter we take you through the basic principles of CBT and show you how to use these principles to better understand yourself and your problems.

Using Scientifically Tested Methods

The effectiveness of CBT for various psychological problems has been researched more extensively than any other psychotherapeutic approach. CBT’s reputation as a highly effective treatment is based on continued research. Several studies reveal that CBT is more effective than medication alone for the treatment of anxiety and depression. As a result of research like this, briefer and more intense treatment methods have been developed for particular anxiety disorders such as panic, anxiety in social settings or feeling worried all the time.

As scientific research of CBT continues, more is being discovered about which aspects of the treatment are most useful for different types of people and which therapeutic interventions work best with different types of problems.

Research shows that people who have CBT for various types of problems – in particular, for anxiety and depression – stay well for longer. This means that people who have CBT relapse less often than those who have other forms of psychotherapy or take medication only. This positive result is likely due in part to the educational aspects of CBT – people who have CBT receive a lot of information that they can use to become their own therapists.

More and more physicians and psychiatrists refer their patients for CBT to help them overcome a wide range of problems with good results. These problems include the following:

• Addiction
• Anger problems
• Anxiety
• Body dysmorphic disorder
• Body image problems
• Chronic fatigue syndrome
• Chronic pain
• Depression
• Eating disorders
• Gender identity and sexuality issues
• Obsessive-compulsive disorder
• Panic disorder
• Personality disorders
• Phobias
• Post-traumatic stress disorder
• Psychotic disorders
• Relationship problems
• Social anxiety

We discuss many of the disorders in the preceding list in more depth throughout this book, but it is very difficult to cover them all. Fortunately, the CBT skills and techniques in this book can be applied to most types of psychological difficulties, so give them a try whether or not your particular problem is specifically discussed.

Understanding CBT

Cognitive behavioural therapy is a school of psychotherapy that aims to help people overcome their emotional problems.

• Cognitive means mental processes like thinking. The word cognitive refers to everything that goes on in your mind including dreams, memories, images, thoughts and attention.
• Behaviour refers to everything that you do. This includes what you say, how you try to solve problems, how you act and avoidance. Behaviour refers to both action and inaction, for example biting your tongue instead of speaking your mind is still a behaviour even though you are trying not to do something.
• Therapy is a word used to describe a systematic approach to combating a problem, illness or irregular condition.

A central concept in CBT is that you feel the way you think. Therefore, CBT works on the principle that you can live more happily and productively if you’re thinking in healthy ways. This principle is a very simple way of summing up CBT, and we have many more details to share with you later in the book.

Combining science, philosophy and behaviour

CBT is a powerful treatment because it combines scientific, philosophical and behavioural aspects into one comprehensive approach to understanding and overcoming common psychological problems.

• Getting scientific. CBT is scientific not only in the sense that it has been tested and developed through numerous scientific studies but also in the sense that it encourages clients to become more like scientists. For example, during CBT, you may develop the ability to treat your thoughts as theories and hunches about reality to be tested (what scientists call hypotheses) rather than as facts.
• Getting philosophical. CBT recognises that people hold values and beliefs about themselves, the world and other people. One of the aims of CBT is to help people develop flexible, non-extreme and self-helping beliefs that help them adapt to reality and pursue their goals.
  

  Your problems are not all just in your mind. Although CBT places great emphasis on thoughts and behaviour as powerful areas to target for change and development, it also places your thoughts and behaviours within a context. CBT recognises that you’re influenced by what’s going on around you and that your environment makes a contribution towards the way you think, feel and act. However, CBT maintains that you can make a difference to the way you feel by changing unhelpful ways of thinking and behaving – even if you can’t change your environment. Incidentally, your environment in the context of CBT includes other people and the way they behave towards you. Your living situation, your culture, workplace dynamics or financial concerns are also features of your larger environment.
• Getting active. As the name suggests, CBT also strongly emphasises behaviour. Many CBT techniques involve changing the way you think and feel by modifying the way you behave. Examples include gradually becoming more active if you’re depressed and lethargic, or facing your fears step by step if you’re anxious. CBT also places emphasis on where you focus your attention. Mental behaviours, such as worrying and chewing over negative events, can be helped by learning to focus your attention in a more helpful direction.

Progressing from problems to goals

A defining characteristic of CBT is that it gives you the tools to develop a focused approach. CBT aims to help you move from defined emotional and behavioural problems towards your goals of how you’d like to feel and behave. Thus, CBT is a goal-directed, systematic, problem-solving approach to emotional problems.

Making the Thought–Feeling Link

Like many people, you may assume that if something happens to you, the event makes you feel a certain way. For example, if your partner treats you inconsiderately, you may conclude that she makes you angry. You may further deduce that her inconsiderate behaviour makes you behave in a particular manner, such as sulking or refusing to speak to her for hours (possibly even days; people ca...