Cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) is a form of psychotherapy that helps individuals become aware of disturbing, disruptive, or destructive patterns or habits in their life. Often, these repetitive actions have a negative effect on their present emotions and behavior. From there, they work out ways to change them.
Essentially, this type of therapy combines both psychotherapy and behavioral therapy to pinpoint these faulty emotional, behavioral, and thinking patterns in a person’s life. It’s a way to replace negativity with positive behavior, emotions, and thoughts.
If you or someone you know has a mental disorder or trauma, you can visit websites like jacksonhousecares.com to learn more about your therapy options, including CBT.
This guide can also equip you with some basic things you should know about this particular treatment.
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Forms Of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
There are different ways through which therapy can tap into a person’s emotional, behavioral, and mental needs. A licensed professional can recommend self-help practices or a structured form depending on your particular situation, needs, and preferences.
Here are commonly used forms of cognitive behavioral therapy approaches:
- Multimodal: Therapists adopt this approach to tackle seven connected aspects, namely imagery, interpersonal factors, cognition, behavior, biological considerations, affect, and drug effects when analyzing and working through a client’s psychological issues.
- Dialectical Behavior: This approach involves the therapist addressing disturbing or destructive behavior using strategies like mindfulness and emotional regulation.
- Rational Emotive Behavior: This one focuses on looking into illogical beliefs and challenging them. The goal is to change these beliefs to more reasonable ones after recognizing them.
- Cognitive: In this approach, therapists help patients identify distorted emotional, behavioral, and thought patterns and focus on improving them.
As much as these approaches vary, they all have one objective: to relieve the patient from the mental health issues they’re experiencing in a lucid, proactive way.
Benefits Of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
For people with mental disorders or trauma, CBT provides a framework from which they can safely analyze the patterns brought about by their circumstances and fix them in observable, sustainable ways. This leads to much better outcomes in their care plans.
Some of the benefits of CBT include the following:
- Instills optimism in people: Those who have gone through trauma or deal with mental disorders find it hard to get the appropriate support from the people around them. It leads many to believe there may not be much hope in their case, leaving them discouraged. What CBT does is help them reframe what they think they know and understand into something that’s more conducive to their actual wellness. They get to process the fact that their experience may not be the totality of reality, after all. This is often the key to helping them find hope.
- Helps you relax: Both trauma and mental health issues cause so much pressure on individuals on top of the struggles they’re already facing. Fortunately, CBT can equip them to better handle stressors and have a better grasp of dealing with their problems. The strategies therapists use to help you address your needs actually provide you with key principles for managing your responses to everything that presses on you or threatens to hold you down. Once you learn how to cultivate them in your daily life, you’ll find yourself more prepared to face what life brings to you. In turn, your quality of living gets better over time.
- Boosts your self-esteem: As in previous points, having trauma or mental issues can make it difficult to feel hopeful or optimistic. But with CBT, you can keep these notions of helplessness from locking you into a cycle of self-defeat, changing patterns that are not conducive to your holistic wellness and rebuilding a healthy, positive view of yourself. With a better self-image, you’ll be more willing to give yourself a chance at growth and improvement. You’ll realize your potential to achieve much more than you’ve ever imagined. There’s a lot of power in your thoughts, and once you can harness it for your betterment, the journey to wellness and wholeness becomes much easier.
- Enables you to frame things more realistically: As earlier highlighted, this type of therapy encourages individuals to practice greater control over what they perceive, understand, feel, and think. This goes a long way in helping clients make clearer, more proactive choices for their daily lives. And that is often the key many people with trauma or mental issues need to process their experiences and improve their lives.
Aside from these long-term benefits, CBT also has its more practical advantages:
- It’s considered effective as a treatment in the field. Results are usually seen within a short period of five to 20 therapy sessions, depending on a person’s specific situation.
- It’s relatively affordable compared to other types of therapy.
- It’s a good choice for those whose mental health diagnoses don’t need extensive medical intervention.
- You can choose between a face-to-face or online therapy session for your CBT program.
- It’s one of the most effective therapies for clients who need work with managing disruptive behaviors.
- It teaches clients management mechanisms they can practically use in their daily life.
Alongside other prescribed treatments, CBT may provide you with what you need to improve yourself amid mental health struggles.
How Much Does CBT Usually Cost?
Like most forms of healthcare, getting CBT requires a considerable amount of investment. The reason is that the practitioners have to spend a lot of money training, maintaining their licenses, and simply running their practices. They may charge for the time they spend with their clients and the amount of work they do during sessions, as well. Nonetheless, what you receive in terms of the benefits to your overall quality of life makes up for the cost. For most places in the United States, that can go from USD$100 to USD$200, with an average of USD$130.
When going through a CBT program, you have to visit the therapist once a week or once every two weeks. The cumulative number of sessions ranges between six to 20, depending on your unique mental health needs. The sessions usually last for about half an hour to one.
The total amount you’ll pay may depend on the state you live in, the professional who’ll work with you, and the number of sessions you take. Some professionals include peer support group meetings in the package, so that may be an additional charge if you choose to avail of this service. It’s best to consult with your healthcare team to know how much you’re expected to invest in getting CBT.
What Should A Person Undergoing Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Expect?
The therapist’s aim when taking you through CBT is to help you understand your thoughts and how they influence your behavior. The procedure usually goes like this:
- Assessing and identifying your thought patterns: Knowing what feelings, situations, or thoughts are causing the destructive behavioral symptoms you exhibit is the goal. This means your working therapist must ask you a series of questions first. These will go through all the feelings and thoughts that have prevailed in your life recently, seeing if there are links that connect them to the behaviors ailing you today. Identifying these things is an excellent way of helping you attain self-discovery and become conscious of what’s actually happening inside you.
- Developing coping skills: After identifying the patterns behind the maladaptive behaviors, the therapist will start teaching you management techniques you can apply in real-life situations. For instance, if you’re dealing with anger issues, they can help you assess your triggers and find ways to navigate around them without resorting to outbursts. If it’s a drug addiction problem, they can provide you with strategies to stay sober and avoid situations that lead to a relapse. You basically learn to face your mental illness or trauma head-on and keep it from getting in the way of your wellness.
- Goal-setting: Once you start applying the techniques they’ve taught you, the therapist will move on to helping you set attainable goals for your continued wellness, both short and long-term. For example, if you are dealing with an alcohol abuse disorder, you can strive for a short-term goal of staying dry for a week. The long-term goal would then be avoiding binge drinking for a whole year. Ideally, the goals should be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-based for them to be worth the effort.
- Self-monitoring: When you’ve been making a lot of progress through your program, you and your therapist will start assessing how well you’ve hit the objectives for your care plan. This way, you’ll know if all the effort you’ve put in is giving you the results you want. You’ll be asked to track your symptoms, behaviors, and experiences and relay them to your therapist. This will help them adjust your plan to better accomplish your goals.
Get Started With CBT Today
If your care team or trusted physician has already recommended it to you, start searching and getting referrals for the best possible providers in your area. With all these facts in mind, you may see it as a viable course of action for getting the support you need. Take your time and weigh your options. Above all, don’t hesitate to talk to the experts for more advice.
