Madison Taylor - Cognitive Behavioral Therapy For Beginners

Cogniti ve Behavioral Therapy for Beginners

How to Use CBT to Overcome Anxieties, Phobias, Addictions, Depression, Negative Thoughts, and Other Problematic Disorders

By Madison Taylor

Copyright 2016 by Make Profits Easy LLC
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Table of Contents

Life can be sad, and therefore some thoughts naturally make us sad. Thinking about a death in the family or the loss of a house in a fire naturally are depressing. It is OK to feel sad about truly horrible events. When someone wrongs you, it is normal to be angry and resentful. Everyone also has moments of fear when their lives appear to be in danger.

But constant sadness, anger, or debilitating fear can indicate that there is a problem in your thinking. For instance, if you get sad when a friend cancels plans and start thinking that no one likes you, there may be a problem. You are taking normal situations and blowing them up to be extreme in your mind. You are basically creating thoughts that lower your mood and have a negative effect on your overall life. Normal situations should not distress you, and if they do, you may be in need of cognitive behavioral therapy.

If you suffer from depression, anxiety, or anger problems, you most likely have too many negative thoughts in your head. You have unhealthy thoughts patterns that put you in a constant state of emotional agitation. If you struggle with addiction or phobias, often these are symptoms of deeper underlying disorders in your thinking. That is where cognitive behavioral therapy can make all the difference in your life.

Cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT for short, is a form of therapy that attempts to identify negative thought patterns in your mind and correct them. This therapy is employed by some of the most highly educated shrinks, but you can also employ it yourself to make a wonderful difference in your life. CBT allows you to gain control of your mind and stop the thoughts that make you depressed, anxious, or angry all the time.

Few people are actively aware of their thinking patterns, even though they engage in these patterns every day. This lack of self-awareness can lead to many problems. Thoughts govern your emotions and your actions, so constant negative thoughts caused by unhealthy thought patterns can wreak havoc on your life. By using cognitive behavioral therapy, you gain awareness of your thinking and actively work to correct it.

When in therapy, a therapist will have you talk about your problems. As you talk, you subconsciously reveal thoughts that lay behind your problems. For instance, if you feel lonely, you may reveal in therapy a lingering belief that you are unlovable. Your therapist is trained to point out the fallacies in your logic. When you utter your innermost thoughts, he or she may point out something like, But what makes you think that you are unlovable? Do you really believe that you are so horrible that no one can ever love you?

The beauty of CBT is that you do not have to pay a therapist hundreds of dollars an hour to find out what your real thoughts are and how these thoughts are incorrect. You can unearth these thoughts yourself and address the fallacies in your own logic. Using a journal or self-talk, you can go over situations, discover the thoughts that lie behind your feelings, and realize what group of negative thought patterns your thoughts belong to. Once you realize that the way you are thinking is simply untrue, you can work to replace your thoughts with more healthy ones.

CBT breaks negative thought patterns into clusters known as cognitive distortions, which we will discuss in more detail in Chapter V. There is always a better alternative thought to each negative one. This book aims to help you identify your bad thoughts, replace them with healthy thoughts, and thus be able to move forward with your life more happily.

By converting your negative thought patterns to more healthy ones, you will gradually get into the habit of healthy thinking overall. You will become a more positive person and your contentment in life will increase. This can eliminate mental issues, such as depression and anger. This can also help you take control of your life and live the way that you really want.

You will be amazed at how negative your thinking really is. Your thoughts have tremendous control over you, and negative thoughts naturally make you a negative person. When you start to employ CBT, you will begin to see how much you really do play a role in setting your own moods. You will also see where your symptoms and your behaviors truly come from. As you begin to change your way of thinking, you will notice that you change as a person overall.

If the true negativity of your thinking amazed you, you will be even more amazed by how much positive thinking can enrich your life and bring sunshine into your spirit. With control of your thoughts, you will find that you can attain pretty much anything that you want. Suddenly, the situations that used to destroy you emotionally will be much easier for you to cope with. Your symptoms, such as panic attacks and fits of uncontrollable rage, will suddenly vanish as you learn healthier coping mechanisms. Your mind will no longer run wild with thoughts and your behavior will no longer seem to emerge from nowhere; rather, you will have great control over all aspects of yourself and your life. This control is a great feeling.

Cognitive behavioral therapy allows you to address errors in your thinking to correct your behavior and in turn change your life. With this greater awareness of your own thoughts, you can really get to know yourself and how you want your life to be. CBT lets you become aware of the situations that you need to avoid to stay happy. It helps you develop coping mechanisms that enable you to tackle all of lifes problems. You can really grow as a person using CBT on yourself.

But how can you use CBT on yourself if you are not a trained therapist? Is there a risk of making a mistake and screwing yourself up? Read on to learn how to safely and effectively apply CBT to yourself.

Cognitive behavioral therapy works by transforming your thinking patterns in the hopes of improving your mood and your overall life. While CBT is based on theory, its real-life applications have indicated a high rate of success. This is why CBT is very popular therapeutic approach taken by many counselors and psychologists with patients.

The theory behind CBT is that your thoughts greatly influence your emotions. What you think has a dramatic impact on your feelings. Even a single thought can create a violent burst of emotion within you. Now since humans are believed to think at least seventy thousand thoughts a day, that means that you feel at least seventy thousand bursts of emotion throughout the course of your day. Negative thoughts are believed to lead to negative emotions, such as sadness and anger. If you frequently think negative thoughts, you are feeling nearly constant bursts of negative emotion throughout the day. If you feel more negative emotion than positive emotion, then your mood is obviously going to be lower overall.

CBT believes that repeatedly subjecting yourself to bad feelings from negative thoughts lead to your emotional suffering. When you exist in a state of constant emotional suffering, your life can become rife with problems. You can also develop mental illnesses such as depression, anger, and anxiety because your constant low mood influences the chemicals in your brain. Life is much harder for people with mental illness because mental illness leads to poor judgment and physical symptoms such as lack of energy. You may not be able to live a fulfilling life if your low mood and negative thoughts are constantly zapping your will to live and your ability to function.