Cognitive Behavioral Therapy: Mental Health Awareness Month 2022

I love this… Hope there will be a shout out between CBT, metacognitive-therapy, medicines and there combination, how effective they are and how bad the potential side effects are (probability and severity) .

Ever since my GF and I started doing CBT together our relationship is stronger than ever. It's a little painful at first, but you learn to love the process. I'll never again be the same man I was before CBT!

Cognivite???

I believe that the therapy I had as a six-year-old dealing with grief and emotion dysregulation (most notably anger issues) was CBT. It might have helped me to be a more functional member of society and lash out less, but it very much screwed up my relationship with my own emotions. "Stop the negative thoughts and replace them with positive thoughts" became interpreted as "negative emotions are bad and shameful and I should repress them." Took over a decade to unlearn those habits and find a kinder, more self-validating approach. It's hard to say if it was taught poorly by my particular therapist, targeted poorly to a six-year-old with limited emotional intelligence, or just CBT being a flawed approach, but I'm definitely very wary of it as a result. If it works for some people, that's great, but it damaged me, and it's definitely important to be careful with any form of therapy or treatment where different people have different needs and responses.

I think this was published in a scholarly article titled "Research Summary of the Therapeutic Relationship and Psychotherapy Outcome," but it's important to remember only 15% of what makes therapy useful is the actual therapeutic technique used. 40% of what makes therapy useful is the therapeutic relationship, which is why most therapists are still talk psychodynamic and humanistic approaches.
CBT is great because it's very easy to break down into specific prescriptions, tell a client to do, and study in a randomized controlled trial. Cognitive behavioral therapy is not THE answer to ALL of life's problems, but it is a powerful tool.

I've had CBT a couple of times, but didn't find it terribly helpful. Eventually, I did a couple of courses of person-centred counselling and they were amazing! Because in my case most of my issues were caused by me not being able to access and process my emotions, and that I was repressing the hell out of the fact I was transgender, which all festered under the surface and caused undirected feelings of anxiety and inadequacy. So when the CBT therapist asked me what negative self-beliefs or catastrophic predictions were making me anxious about meeting other people, I couldn't tell her cause I didn't have any. I just had a vague feeling of discomfort and a feeling of wrongness that got worse when I was around other people. The most specific I could get was an amorphous feeling that I would "make some terrible mistake" and that would be the end of my world. But what that mistake might be I had no idea, and how my world could be ended by some social fopar I also couldn't explain. Logically working through how unlikely such an eventuality is did nothing at all to reduce my fear of it. And the feeling that I was having to hide something about myself and that if people got to know the real me they would reject me. But again I couldn't articulate in cognitive terms what that was. Turns out my fear of getting things wrong was caused by unprocessed trauma from when I was bullied by teachers in school who didn't believe dyslexia was real and belittled me in class for making mistakes in reading and writing. And the feeling of having to hide a socially unacceptable truth about myself was obviously the fact I was trans, which I was hiding so well I was successfully hiding it from myself. Luckily I am so enormously blessed to have amazing family and friends because no one has reacted with anything other than love and acceptance to my coming out. And being able to interact with people as myself, instead of trying to pretend to be a "man" the whole time (without ever having a solid idea what being a man even meant), has meant I can interact with people soo much more naturally and effortlessly. And after learning methods of engaging with and processing painful memories and the emotions that arise from them the fears that were causing my terror of being seen to make some mistake in front of others just went away by themselves.

It's like any treatment, you need to find the intervention that solves the underlying problem. If the problem is negative thought patterns causing difficult emotions then CBT can be great. But if the root of the problem is unprocessed emotions causing negative thoughts then you need something that can target the emotional intelligence, and not the cognitive intelligence

Is ACT the same as CBT?

your thumbnail says COGNIVITE not COGNITIVE

I’m here to referred you to #drobudu who genuinely help me to defeat HSV completely

I saw a DBT therapist, which is a spinoff from CBT, for my depression and anxiety. I was referred to her because my primary care physician knew I absolutely hated therapy and he thought I'd like this therapist. He was right and I loved the therapy too. DBT is typically used for things like addiction or borderline personality disorder, but she very effectively helped me. Today, I highly suggest CBT to people for depression and anxiety.

THIS IS PERHAPS A STUPID QUESTION.
WHAT'S WRONG WITH A GUY WHO DOESN'T PREFER YOU LOOK AND FEEL NICE & CLEAN (NAILS & FEET UNDONE DIRTY, ASHY AND ALL)
BUT HE WANTS YOU TO GO GET A MENTAL EVALUATION !
OH IT'S ABOUT BUDGETING HOUSEHOLD EXPENSES RIGHT,
WELL WHAT IF YOU'RE NOT GOING TO THE SALON REGULARLY AND YOU'RE SELF RELIANT ON YOUR OWN ABILITY TO SUCCESSFULLY PRACTICE YOUR OWN BEAUTY AND HEALTHCARE REGIMEN AT HOME !🤨 EXPLAIN PLEASE WHAT THE PROBLEM IS….. ARE WOMEN THESE DAYS JUST NOT ON THE SAME MENTAL HEALTH LEVEL AS THEIR PEERS AND MATES OR SPOUSES.
ARE YOU DONE WITH RELATIONSHIPS,
PLEASE BE HONEST AND PRECISE ABOUT YOUR THOUGHTS AND FEELING'S.
THANKS.

CBT really highlighted to me how different depression can be for different people. I had two counselors who found that CBT was impossible to apply to my case because my depression does not come with maladaptive thought patterns. Rather, it comes with severe cognitive difficulties that cause there to be very few thoughts in general.

The research shows all therapy works fairly well. The mediating factor is best thought of as residing within the overall therapist’s skill itself, not their approach. 🙂

Mental health awareness? I'm aware that the culture I live in has usurped my hard won mental health.
P.S. DBT is better than CBT. However it is simply no lucrative enough to train practitioners in it. There are long waiting lists. I am boycotting big pharma for medicalizing mental illness.