Hey everyone! todays topic
is something that many of you have requested, and that is
what is CBT therapy? So stay tuned.
(Intro Music)
so like I said, todays topic
is: what is CBT or Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
and how do therapists use it and why do I talk about it all the time?
Now CBT therapy which I'll keep calling it from now
on because Cognitive Behavior, that's just way too much to say. So CBT therapy
is a very different type of therapy
because it is short term and it is one of the only therapies that we can
actually monitor and kind of statistically show that people are improving.
Most therapies don't work quite so
I don't even know what the word I want to use, but they're not quite as direct and not
so A plus B equals C, you know.
Most therapies are very circular, and maybe we feel this way, and I don't know
What's your relationship with your mother and your father? Right. We might go
back
into our history where as CBT believes, the main belief behind CBT, I'm checking
my notes to make sure I say it correctly.
Is that, it isn't so much what happens to us in our life
but how we think about
what has happened to us. So, in a CBT world, it wouldn't just be
that, let's say
My dad wasn't around when I was young and he left and he never came back.
It wouldn't be that that happened. That's not what's actually affecting me.
It would be my thoughts about it like, "I'm not worthy"," he didn't care about me",
"he didn't value our family" or whatever it might be, right.
CBT focuses on those beliefs. And because of that, some of the main things that we use
are things that I actually use a lot with my clients and what they call it,
and I'm checking. These are my-
Do you remember my huge flashcard-mayhem-ness?
These are my CBT flashcards, so that's what my notes are.
So, one of the things that I use a lot is called
in the CBT world they call it thought tracking, and that is
almost what I want to call that "eating disorder voice" or "self-harm Voice" versus
"healthy Voice".
And what they do in the thought tracking is they have you keep
record of all those automatic thoughts. "Automatic thoughts" being:
"my dad had left" but it's not just because my dad left. My automatic thought is, "I'm not
worthy",
"I'm not important", "he doesn't value our family", all of that that follows.
So, for many of us it might be, you know,
"I deserve to be punished" or
"I don't deserve to eat that" or whatever it might be that feeds into
our eating disorder, our self-harm, or anxiety or depression.
So in CBT they have you keep track of it. Have you keep
this thought tracking record
so that we can notice what usually are "unnoticed"
thoughts. Okay. Now there are a ton of tools when it comes to CBT.
I mean, we have three flash cards here on tools. But I'm just going to give you a
couple that
I end up using most and that's why I thought thought tracking would be the
most helpful.
Now, another thing that we can do
is, obviously, there's a lot in here. Like as I'm looking through this just to make
sure I don't miss anything they have
automatic thoughts, so those the ones that happen
you know without us being aware and then you keep track of it in the thought tracking.
Then they have "underlying assumptions" which are kind of things I will have
people, when we realize that automatic thought
You know, like, "I'm angry", "I'm not worth it", or whatever it might be.
We want to find what's the underlying assumptions. So, we might
ask what we call downward arrow questioning and I know this is getting really
intense but I'm trying to break it down to very
easy to understand portions. So,
if my automatic thought is "I'm not worth it"
or "they forgot about me" or whatever right. Then I'd say
"So what does that mean to you?" and then you would say
"That they didn't consider it and you know, that my dad left right. So that would mean
that he just left and he didn't care."
"So what does it mean if he didn't care?" "Well then you know
that I'm a bad person.". Right we keep asking so
with then, "what does that mean to you if that's true"
Because a lot of our automatic thoughts we actually believe are true. And that's
why CBT can be so powerful.
Because a lot of times we're just not aware of all these thoughts that we have all day
every day.
And these thoughts can really stir us up. We can get really
angry. We can get really sad. We can get really
anxious and we get really depressed. But bringing this to the forefront and
recognizing what those automatic thoughts
are and then, doing that downward
arrow questioning where we're like, "Well what does that mean?", "okay, well if
that is true, then what does that mean to you?" and you can work this down until you
can figure out what that core belief is which could be anything from
"I'm worthless" to "I'll never be good enough"
to "My mom will always favor my brother"
Whatever that thought may be, you can see how once we can
recognize what those automatic thoughts are we can get to that point and that's
what makes it so powerful.
And so there are a ton of tools around
CBT to help with that. So I'm going to skip ahead and I'm not going to go through each
and every one of the tools that
helps with that, but you may notice them if you're working with your therapist
who is a
CBT therapist. Now another portion along with
the automatic thought records and you know all of that kind of
stuff is thought stopping.
So, let's say we're having all these automatic thoughts okay.
I get up in the morning and I automatically think "Ugh. I overslept by twenty minutes.
I'm so lazy. I'm so stupid.
I'm so fat. I'm so dumb. I'm so...", whatever right. We might have that
running
right away. So, in CBT
they have us do what they call "thought stopping".
Now, we're supposed to actually, and it's funny but
there's a couple things we can do. Some people will
prefer to actually verbally say "stop!"
"Stop it!". You tell yourself to stop, right?
Some of my client like to visualize they're driving really fast towards a stop sign
and they can't go any farther.
It's like a cement wall with a stop sign. Whatever helps you
to stop. For me, if it was me
If I have all the automatic thoughts coming up, it would help me to actually
verbalize it.
Because sometimes what's going on in our brain is so noisy
that we can't even, visualizing
may not help. The actual verbalization loud,
out loud can help. Obviously we don't want to do that if we're in the middle of a,
you know, fancy dinner or we're out at a party
but you can get the idea. So, that's another thing that we'll have you do.
CBT and DBT also are very closely linked and you'll see
some of the tools I talked about in my
DBT mindfulness video, and I'll do other videos.
And there will be a lot of it in my self-harm workbook, but you'll see a lot of it
kind of
joins together. So just keep that in mind. I'm not going to get into that because that
will get really convoluted.
So, those are the main components to CBT.
We want to bring awareness to the thoughts that we have every day. Whether
they be automatic,
whether they are the same message over and over,
we want to figure out what the underlying core belief is. We do
that downward
arrow questioning and then we also want to be able to thought
stop. So, when they come in quickly we want to be able to stop them.
Because, if I go back to their original portion of CBT, the whole reason that we
have it
is because they believe that our life and our experience
isn't what happens to us. It's what we think about what happens to us.
And so that's really why in a lot of the things that I will tell you if you
ask questions and I've
done videos about it is talking back to that negative voice.
That's kind of that thought record and thought stopping
all in one. You can see how can be really powerful.
Most of you if you're in the UK or if you're in many portions of Europe,
I know that they utilize CBT first and they'll have you do it. You'll notice
that it's usually short term.
It'll be anywhere from I believe six to ten sessions, usually
eight to ten I want to say is about when you end up stopping.
But they can have you do
also some role playing and things. You can get into it so that you can
start verbalizing those thoughts and you can start changing them
and turning them into kind of more positive or "healthy Voice".
Right? And I think that's really it. I'm trying to double check to make sure
that I didn't miss anything. And i've talked about this before but
they also discuss a lot about catastrophizing
or jumping to conclusions like
because we have these big negative thoughts we will
make, we'll catastrophize, that black and white thinking that I talk about a lot
it's something that they also address in CBT because it's our thoughts, right?
We're catastrophizing, we're thinking black and white.
And those are some the things, the "cognitive distortions" they call them,
that we'll try to turn around and to make healthy thoughts.
So hope that makes it kind of clear. You can google CBT and you can
look up
a lot of information on it, but that is how I utilize it in my practice and how
you will most likely find it utilized in people that you see.
And that is really the reason that it's most hopeful is because
it's all about our thoughts, right. And we have to change our thoughts in order to
change
our behavior and our belief about ourselves. So hope you found that useful.
Keep checking back. Make sure to like this video if you want more
topics about like basic, I guess, counseling theory
and ways that we give therapy. I'm happy to do more. So, you can let me know in the
comments if there are other
therapies you want me to talk about, because I have to study for my exam anyway so I might as well
teach it to you too. And don't forget to subscribe to my channel because when I
put out videos, you're going to want to know.
Have a wonderful day and I will see you all soon.