today i'm going to be talking about cognitive behavioral therapy what it is
and what it looks like
hi everyone today i'm going to be talking about cognitive behavioral therapy or cbt what it looks
like and what to expect of this a very popular and very common form of therapy but before i get into
that just a couple of disclaimers to go over i'm a registered psychologist in british columbia canada
and this video is for informational purposes only it is not intended as a replacement or substitute
for advice from your doctor or mental health professional now if you're finding my videos
helpful and would like to see more please hit that subscribe button and notification bell and you'll
be notified every thursday when i post a new video now with all of those things out of the way
let's talk about cognitive behavioral therapy now cbt is a very widespread and popular form
of therapy these days for one very good reason and that's because it works there is a lot of research
and evidence to support cbt as sort of the gold standard or the most effective form of treatment
for a variety of conditions including things like depression anxiety ptsd those types of things and
so a lot of people may have heard of cbt but don't really have a good understanding of what cbt is
what it looks like or what to expect if you were to pursue cbt with a therapist or a psychologist
and so what i want to talk about today is what cbt looks like and some of the principles of
cognitive behavioral therapy now the first thing to understand about cognitive behavioral therapy
is that it focuses on the interrelationships between behaviors thoughts and emotions
what you do how you think and how you feel now most of the time when people come to see
me they're having problems with emotion i feel really down i feel really anxious the problem
is there's no direct way of changing that there's no direct way of controlling how you feel so for
example it wouldn't be particularly helpful if a client came into my office one day and said
i'm feeling really down and i'm feeling really depressed and if my advice were to be okay what
i hear then is that you're probably experiencing depression so what you need to do is just cheer up
right that probably isn't going to be all that helpful or beneficial to the person because
we don't have direct control over how we feel and that's a key point it's not like we can just
hit a button and just feel a different emotion these emotions are out of our direct control
but to some extent we have control over our behavior so for example if i said i
want you to stand up and walk around the room for five minutes you could probably do that
we also to some extent have control over how we think
so if i said i want you to try and think about a situation differently for five or ten minutes
now you may find that a little bit challenging but you do to some extent have control over that
and certainly more control over behaviors and thoughts than you have directly over your emotion
and so what cognitive behavioral therapy does is it focuses on behavior change and thought change
to indirectly get at changing the emotion and indirectly get at helping you feel less
depressed and helping you feel less anxious so the key idea of cognitive behavioral therapy
is that it helps you develop a new understanding of your problem so for a lot of people who are
having anxiety or depression it feels like they just don't understand why they feel the way they
feel and why they can't shake it and so cbt really focuses especially early on on helping a person
develop a new understanding of what's going on helping them develop an understanding of anxiety
and depression that they may not have ever known before and so when we're doing cbt we work a lot
and we focus a lot on models models to understand what's going on because a lot of times it can feel
like this doesn't make any sense it doesn't make any sense why i'm feeling so depressed it doesn't
make any sense why i'm feeling so anxious but if you can understand models of depression and models
of anxiety it can help you better understand that it actually does make a lot of sense and it makes
a lot of sense to understand the mechanism behind these conditions so cbt is really about developing
a new understanding and a new model of why you're experiencing the emotions that you're experiencing
because from this model we're going to talk about skills so the skills and the tools of cbt
come directly from this new understanding of depression this new understanding of anxiety
so cognitive behavioral therapy is a very skills-based form of therapy and what that means
is that it's really about doing new things so changing behavior and changing thinking patterns
to get at improving emotion so it's about learning and practicing skills
so a cognitive behavioral therapy session is really about training it's almost like a course
in anxiety management a course in depression management and so the sessions tend to be very
structured and planned so rarely should you go into a cognitive behavioral therapist's office
and the session starts with okay so what would you like to talk about today in cognitive behavioral
therapy there should be a plan for each session and a plan for what it is that we're going to
cover what it is that we're going to talk about because again it's focused on developing skills
now one of the important results of this focus on skills in cognitive behavioral therapy is that
homework is a critical component of cbt so if you're not being assigned homework
if you're not doing homework between therapy sessions you're probably not doing cbt
because i cbt a lot to something like piano lessons so imagine uh you're taking piano
lessons and you sit down with your piano teacher once a week and you learn to play a piece of music
what happens if you don't practice at all between those piano lessons well you probably don't learn
very much about playing piano so it's not the hour that you spend with the piano teacher
where you're really learning how to play piano it's in the practice that you're putting in
between piano lessons where you're really learning how to play the piano it's the same with cognitive
behavioral therapy just coming into my office and talking to me once a week for an hour
probably isn't going to be all that beneficial but what will be beneficial is that we'll talk about
a skills and tools you'll be assigned to homework you go you work on the homework between the
sessions and when you come back the next session we review the homework see what you learn
doing it troubleshoot any problems and then assign talk about a new skill and assign new homework
so that's what i meant by cbt is a very structured form of therapy it's really about a plan
moving forward and every session builds on the next to help a person move forward
because the ultimate goal of cognitive behavioral therapy is for the client to become their own
therapist the idea is that at the end of the therapy sessions the formal end of therapy it's
not that a client has mastered all of the skills and all the tools or that they're feeling 100
but the idea is that you've learned all of the tools and skills that you need to manage your
anxiety and manage your depression moving forward so i know that i've been successful
in therapy with my clients if by the end of the therapy sessions they don't need me anymore that's
the goal is that the client becomes their own therapist they know the skills they know the tools
that they need to use they've been practicing those tools and they know what they need to do
moving forward so that i really like about cbt is that it really gives a sense
it really gives a person a sense of control and autonomy that they know what they need to do
they understand their depression they understand their anxiety better
and that they know exactly what they need to do to manage their anxiety and depression
moving forward uh another unique component of cognitive behavioral therapy and it differs and
this is something that differs from a lot of other types of therapies is that cognitive behavioral
therapy really focuses on the here and now it's really focused on what's going on in the present
when we're doing cbt we don't spend a lot of time going into the past and going into
sort of childhood experiences that might have contributed to the person's anxiety and depression
because for example if i could tell a person the reason why you're feeling anxious now is because
you when you were five years old you were stung by a bumblebee and there was this weird neurochemical
reaction that took place and that resulted in you experiencing anxiety later in life well
even if that were true you can't go back in time and get unstung by the bumblebee
so that doesn't really help so from my perspective as a psychologist the goal
isn't to come up with some sort of regression equation to figure out all of the various
components that have contributed to somebody's depression or anxiety when they're in my office
the goal is to focus on what are the factors that are maintaining the anxiety in the depression
what's going on in the person's life right now that's contributing to their
psychological distress because that's what we have control over we can control and we can change
some of the things that are going on now we can't change the things that have happened in
the past so cbt is very much focused on the here and now focused on making changes in the present
and finally cbt tends to be time limited so i talked about it being a very structured form of
therapy with a goal and a direction and a plan the idea isn't that you see somebody for cbt
indefinitely so uh usually it's anywhere from eight to twenty sessions obviously this
can differ depending on the complexity of the case and the number of different types of conditions or
the the types of difficulties and the severity of difficulties that a person's having but the
idea is cbt tends to be time limited it's not an ongoing form of therapy where you see your
therapist indefinitely because you need their advice like i said the goal is for you to become
your own therapist for you to understand your anxiety and depression in a new way and have a
toolkit of skills and knowledge that you can use to manage your anxiety depression psychological
condition moving forward so i find cbt to be an extremely useful and effective form of therapy
and pretty much everything i do with my clients focuses on cbt and all the videos that i'm
i've been presenting and talking about they're all based in cognitive behavioral therapy
techniques so i'm a real big advocate of it uh now it's not for everybody um one of the questions
i'll often have clients ask is well how effective is this how likely is it that i'm going to
see some improvement in my condition if i do cbt well the answer is it depends so one of the nice
things about cbt is that if the client puts in a lot of work and a lot of effort and does the
homework chances are they're going to see some significant improvements however the downside is
the success of cognitive behavioral therapy depends on the amount of effort and work that
a person's willing to put in so if you don't do the homework if you don't practice the skills
then you're probably not going to see a lot of benefit from cbt and for a lot of people
they don't want a kind of a structured form of therapy they just want somebody to talk to
and that type of supportive therapy is fine that's there's nothing wrong with that it's just not the
type of therapy that i do in terms of effective therapy for managing anxiety and depression
so i hope that's been helpful in terms of understanding cognitive behavioral therapy
to understand what it looks like so if you're doing therapy with a psychologist or a therapist
and they're saying that you're doing cognitive behavioral therapy but you're not getting any
homework you might want to ask your therapist hey where's the homework um i thought this was
a skills-based form of therapy but all it really feels like we're doing is just
sort of talking about what's going on in my life and like i said there's nothing wrong with that
if that's what you're looking for if you're just looking for supportive therapy somebody to talk to
a kind ear to sort of give you some feedback that's fine but if you're looking for skills
and tools that are effective in terms of managing anxiety and depression and want to get a sense of
tools that you can use to move forward on your own then cognitive behavioral therapy is probably what
you're looking for so i hope that's helpful i would love to hear your thoughts and ideas
about this so please leave me some comments down below so that's it for today uh thank
you for making it all the way to the end of this video and i will see you in the next one