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.
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We have so many ways to fix negative feelings, to minimize their impact, that we have the strong impression we no longer need to feel them. There’s taking a pill, drug or other mind-altering substance; calling a friend; seeing a movie; having sex; and so forth and so on. We seldom if ever notice our great loss in employing these strategies to stunt or stupefy negative emotional experience. What’s lost is learning new unexpected things about ourself – and thus about life. Negative emotional experience just happens to be the only place we’ll find new information trying to access our life, offering us the chance to see some part of ourselves differently, thus capable of changing us.
Positive feeling experience is wonderful. It’s no surprise or sin that we want to spend as much time inside it as possible. Nothing else makes more sense. But that doesn’t mean to kill the baby with the bathwater. We all want to ease distress and unhappiness as efficiently as possible. But positive emotional energy doesn’t offer anything new; that’s what’s so good about it – no hassles. Learning always disturbs. That’s what makes it such a good carrier of new information.
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Cognitive behavioral therapy is an approach used by psychotherapists to influence a patient’s behaviors and emotions. The key to the approach is in its procedure which must be systematic. It has been used successfully to treat a variety of disorders including eating disorders, substance abuse, anxiety and personality disorders. It can be used in individual or group therapy sessions and the approach can also be geared towards self help therapy.
Cognitive behavioral therapy is a combination of traditional behavioral therapy and cognitive therapy. They are combined into a treatment that is focused on symptom removal. The effectiveness of the treatment can clearly be judged based on its results. The more it is used, the more it has become recommended. It is now used as the number one treatment technique for post traumatic stress disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, depression and bulimia.
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