Part I
Pinpointing Primary Principles
In this part . . .
You’ll get the groundwork for understanding your problems in relation to the CBT framework. We show you what CBT is all about and how it applies to common problems. We show you how to recognise your problematic thinking patterns, how to get on top of toxic thinking and how to find better alternative ways of thinking for the future.
You also get to act like a scientist in the interest of improving your emotional and mental health, before we come over a bit new age by introducing mindfulness and other techniques for directing your focus of attention.
Chapter 1
Exploring the Basics of CBT
In This Chapter
Seeing the science and the sense of CBT
Understanding your personal events
Putting problems into an A-B-C format
Usually people respond to negative, difficult, or downright bad life events with negative emotions such as sadness or anger (to name but two). It is both natural and normal to feel distressed when bad things happen. The degree of distress you feel depends partly on the severity of the bad event. But the key word here is ‘partly’. Often the meanings you attach to given events can take a bad situation and make it worse. The way you think about aspects of your current life or past experiences can move you from healthy, normal distress to more problematic psychological disturbance. Feelings of depression, anxiety, rage, or guilt, for example, are painful and can lead to further difficulties in your life.
Fortunately, the situation’s not all doom and gloom! You can learn to recognise how your thoughts, beliefs, and attitudes impact on your feelings. Once you understand this principle, you can then work on changing your thinking and behaviour to help you take bad situations and make them better.
In this chapter we introduce the main theoretical stuff you need to know about Cognitive Behavioural Therapy – CBT for short – to get you started.
Understanding the Nuts and Bolts of CBT
As the name implies, CBT is a form of psychotherapy that focuses on cognition – your thoughts – and on behaviour – your actions. One way of summing up CBT is to say ‘you feel the way you think’. But CBT also looks closely at behaviour, since the way you act is often determined by how you feel. Furthermore, the way you act can have either a positive or negative influence on your feelings. Without necessarily realising it, you may be acting in ways that are actually fuelling your bad feelings.
The interaction between thoughts, feelings, and behaviours is at the core of CBT. Therefore CBT looks closely at how you think and act in order to help you overcome both behavioural and emotional difficulties.
Blinding you with the science of CBT
CBT practitioners are interested not only in helping people to feel better in the short term but also in using scientifically verified strategies to help people get better and stay better in the long term. CBT has been tested and developed through many scientific studies. With continued research it is likely that more will be learnt about which techniques work best for specific types of problems. Because of CBT’s scientific basis, it invites you to take a more scientific approach to both understanding and resolving your problems.
A big component of CBT involves helping people become their own therapists through the continued use of specific techniques. This self-directed element is probably one of the reasons people who have had CBT relapse less frequently than those treated using other psychotherapeutic approaches or medications without CBT.
Okay. So here might be a good place to clarify a few terms. Like many professions, psychology and psychotherapy use a lot of jargon. Sometimes in this book we use weird words and other times we use more everyday words, but weirdly. The following definitions help to make your reading more straightforward:
Cognitive: Refers to your thoughts and anything else that goes through your mind including your dreams, memories, images, and your focus of attention.
Behaviour: Includes everything that you do and all the things you choose
not to do – such as avoiding situations or sulking instead of speaking.
Therapy: Describes a method of treating a pr...
