Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) is a type of psychological modality that can address a variety of problems. This therapy helps the client make a conscious effort to change their negative thinking and behavioral patterns.
Who Can Benefit from Cognitive Behavior Therapy?
According to the American Psychological Association, many people benefit from this specialized treatment, including those who suffer from the following:
- Low self-esteem
- Anxiety
- Social anxiety
- Relationship problems
- Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)
- Depression
If we struggle with one of the above difficulties, we likely find it hard to cope in our daily life. The stress that builds up from our problems extends into other areas, including our home and work life and personal and professional relationships.
We may even look around and wonder how everyone else seems to be keeping it all together and why we haven’t managed to figure it out. Often, we just don’t have the proper tools to handle these problems.
How Can Cognitive Behavior Therapy Help?
Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) works quickly to help us identify our challenges. It is structured in its approach and encourages the client to work together with the therapist to develop real-world strategies. First, we work to understand our problem. Next, we create a treatment strategy.
What many individuals like about this form of therapy are the core principles it follows. For example:
- Problems are partly based on learned patterns of unhelpful behavior.
- Problems can result from unhelpful ways of thinking, which we can modify, given the proper techniques.
- We can learn better ways to cope with problems, alleviate disruptive symptoms, and take charge of our life with learned tools.
What Strategies does Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) utilize?
Before we identify some of the strategies, it’s important to remember some things. Firstly, strategies vary according to the individual’s specific challenges. Secondly, the approach depends on a specific plan designed by the client in collaboration with the therapist.
But no matter the problem, there are practical tools we can learn, to develop effective ways to cope and ultimately create a more confident version of ourselves.
Here are some helpful CBT strategies with which many clients have familiarized themselves and applied in their daily life.
- Role-playing – This helps us prepare for possible problematic future interactions with others.
- Relaxation techniques – Knowing how to calm ourselves in a stressful situation, allowing us to healthily tackle our fear and anxiety.
- Journaling – This helps us express our thoughts and emotions nonjudgmentally.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is one of the most widely evidence-based used psychological therapies today. It has many benefits, focusing on helping the client obtain well-being and providing them the opportunity to learn life-long coping skills during the therapeutic process.
