What is Cognitive Behaviour Therapy or CBT?
Cognitive Behaviour Therapy focuses on short term therapy. CBT is popular because it makes the therapy affordable. The counselor helps the patient identify behaviours and triggers and to focus on changing the outcome. The counselor shows the patient they cannot change the incident but is able to change the thinking toward the incident. This helps the patient cope with changing the outcome. The patient also learns to recognize their thinking is distorted to make the outcome more reasonable. One thing CBT doesn’t focus on is the past.
Practice Makes Perfect
It does take a bit of practice. I always try to catch myself and say, “No, Tami, you do not want to go down that road again, it is dark and slippery.” I then change my thoughts. Sometimes I try to fill in the answers for example, I am walking my dogs and meet a neighbour on the sidewalk, I say, Hello. They reply gruffly, Hi and keep going.
The first thing I think is, that person doesn’t like me. I wonder why doesn’t that person like me, of course, I have all the answers, they don’t like dogs, they don’t like me, they don’t like my partner, another neighbour doesn’t like me and told this person, maybe all the neighbours don’t like me.
See why I say that dark and slippery road? If the truth were known that person may have a sore throat, their cat died, their basement flooded….Then I ask myself, why do I believe it is all about me??? What I have to ask myself is, mmm I wonder what is wrong with them, I hope they will be OK.
A Great Book on CBT
I found a really good book on Amazon, “Overcoming Depression and Anxiety through Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) for Beginners.” This really helped me to understand. It speaks of “low frustration tolerance”. Went to the store to buy some beautiful materials to do a landscape quilt. As I was about to trace my picture to make the pattern. I thought to myself, “this picture should be enlarged”. So what do I do? Instead of going to my computer software to figure it out, I stare off into space ready to give up on the project. In that book, I recommended it says, “train yourself to work on projects despite a bad mood, then send messages to yourself emphasizing your ability to tolerate pain. Please check out my blog on goal setting.