What Are Different Cognitive Behavioral Techniques?

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is an effective way of treating several mental conditions such as:

• Agoraphobia
• Alzheimer's disease
• Anxiety or panic disorder
• Attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder
• Eating disorders
• Mood disorders
• Obsessive-compulsive disorder
• Personality disorders
• Post-traumatic stress
• Psychotic disorder
• Schizophrenia
• Social phobia
• Substance abuse

CBT is also reported to be very helpful in correcting anger management problems. It has also proved to be very important for cancer, arthritis and rheumatoid patients.

Cognitive behavioral therapy is also vital in dealing with resisting negative thoughts and actions that hinder joy and depression recovery.

If you think negatively, you slow your recovery from depression. Studies show that everyone, including people suffering from depression, have positive emotions. The people suffering from depression however, do not allow themselves to experience these positive emotions and for this reason, they always stay depressed.

How CBT Helps With the Negative Thoughts of Depression

Treating depression takes a while and Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) has proved to be the most effective way to do so. Using CBT, you work alongside your therapist and identify and agree on your behaviors and how to change them for the better. You learn to change the part of the brain that hinders positive and happy feelings.

You may react to an event in an unhelpful manner and CBT helps you recognize your reactions. It also helps you view yourself in a different perspective and therefore, you are able to change your own pattern of thinking and reacting to situations. You learn essential methods that you can use sustainably in case you encounter new or similar events in the future.

Treatment techniques

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is mostly provided by a therapist as an out-patient program in a doctor’s office or at the clinic. The therapist should be well trained to handle Cognitive Behavioral Therapies. The therapies may be programmed in an individual or group session.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapies are shorter compared to psychotherapies. The following professionals qualify to carry out Cognitive Behavioral Therapies:

• Psychologists clinical
• Social workers
• Counselors
• Psychiatrists

There are various methods used by the therapists to administer Cognitive Behavioral Therapies. These methods include:

• Validity testing
  After discussing with their patient, the therapist identifies the thoughts of the patient and puts him or her to a task of defending them. If the patient cannot come up with concrete defense of his or her own thoughts, then his or her false nature is clearly seen.

• Cognitive rehearsal
  After the patient and the therapist look into the past difficulties the patient went through, the therapist gives the patient a task of showing how he or she would have handled the situation. Most patients use the revised behavior in case they are in a similar situation.

• Guided discovery
  The patient may be treated to a series of questions by the therapists. These questions help the patient to face his/her own negative cognitive reactions.

• Journaling
  During the Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, the therapist may ask the patient to keep a diary.  The diary will include their feelings about particular situations, their thoughts and reasons behind them and how they react to the thoughts. The therapist and the patient will make time to look at them together to see the patterns and how to make them useful to the patient.

• Homework
  This is an important part of the therapy where the therapist will require the patient to work with the newly learnt skills to tackle situations. The therapist will ask the patient to note down their new ways of tackling situations and bring them to the next session. With this, the therapist can tell the progress of the patient and their areas of weakness.

• Modeling
  The therapist may assign roles to the patient and give them particular situations to deal with. In the process, the patient will learn how to deal with different situations using useful reactions to them.

Cognitive-behavioral therapy consists of methods to modify behaviors and ways to restructure cognition. You work together with the therapist to recognize unhelpful thoughts that cause you distress. The therapist then uses behavioral therapy to change your reactions. Patients may be clouded with schemas which have a resulting negative reaction every time a patient comes across a challenging situation.

For instance, you may find that a patient locks him/herself up thinking that he/she is not loved by the society. The therapists will always react by showing the patient just how much people value him/her by showing him/her the negativity in his/her own assumptions.

The therapist may also organize a series of gradual exposure to different types of anxiety. This will help the patient learn how to respond to their own fears. The therapist will then slowly introduce the patient with new social situations. The therapist can also use conditioning. This is the negative or positive introduction of reinforcement to influence certain types of wanted outcomes.

Preparation

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy may not be administered to some types of patients. Patients who are not willing to play a part in the therapy are impossible to help. On the other hand, conditions like the organic brain condition or adverse brain injury cannot be helped by Cognitive Brain Therapies.

Both the patient and the therapist must have a good relationship, this is because in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, the patient is not told what to do, but directed. Therefore, the individual seeking treatment should have a free will to undergo the therapy to get positive results. If you are interested in having the therapy, you have to have an appointment with the therapist to consult ahead of the therapy. This will help you know the therapist and give the therapist a chance to know you too. It will also give room for any questions you may have and build a working relationship. You will also learn the therapists’ qualifications to help you instill confidence in them.

Typical results

It is hard to measure the general percentage results of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy since it is applied in many different conditions. Again, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is used in conjunction with antidepressants in some cases. This makes the evaluation equally as hard. It is however shown in studies from different conditions that Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is one of the most successful ways to deal with anxiety-related conditions.

Studies also show that Cognitive Behavioral Therapy can be used to support patients who suffered severe depression not to relapse back into their conditions.

Learn to accept disappointment as a normal part of life

Life is not only perfection. There is room for errors and disappointing situations. You must understand that there are things that you cannot control and know how to use the ones that you can control to pick yourself up quickly and move from disappointing situations. You should use your past to learn how to do better the next time. Learning from past mistakes can greatly help in solving future problems.

Locate the problem and brainstorm solutions

When you notice a situation, write down how you have dealt with it, take it to your therapist and talk it out with him on how you handled the situation. Note down in the simplest way what is making your situation hard and suggest ways of improving them. When you write them down, you ease the negative feeling you have towards improvement.