Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
Cognitive Therapy is a kind of psychotherapeutic, psychological treatment that helps people identify and manage their negative, disturbing thought patterns that influence their emotions and behaviors. It is talk therapy is often used to treat a plethora of issues such as depression, anxiety, alcohol, drug use, marital problems, eating disorders, and many more mental and physical illnesses. CBT is one of the most effective forms of therapy.
Cognitive therapy focuses on helping individuals deal with negative thoughts, worsened emotional difficulties, and overwhelming problems that are caused by a vicious loop of interconnected thoughts and feelings. These intrusive thoughts are broken down into simpler terms of understanding with the help of CBT and mechanisms are found to debunk the negative patterns of life. CBT focuses on the current issues at hand, unlike a few other therapies which focus on past trauma and difficulties, hence it’s more practical.
TYPES OF COGNITIVE THERAPY
A plethora of techniques are used to help deal with thoughts and emotions that are negative in nature. These can be in the form of psychotherapies as well as self-help materials. These approaches are :
Dialectical Behavioural Therapy (DBT): a modified cognitive therapy that helps individuals develop healthy coping mechanisms, improve the quality of relationships and live in the moment.
Rational emotive behavioral Therapy (REMBT): helps individuals develop strategies to help develop coping mechanisms that replace their irrational beliefs with more rational thoughts.
Multimodal therapy: this approach provides multiple therapies together including behavioral and psychological interventions, pharmacotherapy, combination therapy, and more to optimize the treatment.
Cognitive Therapy: it helps in identifying and changing emotional disruptive behavioral responses and patterns.
CBT majorly focuses on problem-solving techniques:
Identify the problem
List down solutions
Write down the pros and cons of each solution
Select a solution to execute
Implement it
The discovery of CBT has been revolutionary for the treatment of depression. With the increase of application of CBT, we see an increase in people’s positive mental health and healthy thinking patterns.