Principles of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
Cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT, is a psychotherapy technique that attempts to teach patients to correct emotional and behavioral responses to troubling situations. The treatment focuses on identifying the situations that lead to negative emotions and behaviors and then examining the thought process and beliefs of the patient that leads them to make the wrong behavioral choices. Once patients are aware that they are making the wrong choice and understand why, they can be retrained to make the right choices with the result being the elimination of the negative behavior. This is always the goal of CBT: to eliminate the negative behavior.
The treatment is effective when it is done as a systematic process and it takes time. Patients need to encounter problem situations numerous times in order to have the opportunity to retrain their thinking and thereby change their behaviors. Cognitive behavioral therapy has been successful in the treatment of eating disorders, anxiety, insomnia, obsessive compulsive disorder, and post traumatic stress disorder.