What Is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy & How You Can Use It Starting Today
We are all thinking thoughts throughout any given day. Some of those thoughts will be positive or neutral and others thoughts will feel negative and intrusive. Some of our thoughts may even be harmful or immobilizing. It’s the negative thoughts that keep us stuck or reactive. Negative thought may also be known as cognitive distortions. What if there was a practice you could access to train your mind to override negative reactive or immobilizing thoughts. Well, there’s a therapeutic tool that is meant to help you retrain your thought process. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is essentially the practice of isolating harmful and immobilizing unhealthy thoughts in order to redirect from harmful thought patterns into neutral thought pattern that can help to reorganize thoughts, emotions, and actions.
Maybe you’d like to feel more control over your thoughts, emotions, and actions. You can use cognitive behavioral therapy in order to gain emotional freedom and engagement in your life in a new way. In the paragraphs below, I’m going to share tools and approach for practicing Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) work independently. You most definitely can opt to work with a therapist for support but a therapist is not necessarily a requirement to start rewiring your thought process.
Why Use CBT
CBT can be a great and meaningful way to sort out complex distortions or negative thoughts. With CBT you essentially neutralize difficult and harmful thoughts. Once your create an alternative thought that is neutral to your harmful thought you can gain a different experience with your emotional response also becoming neutral. Turning harmful or immobilizing thoughts to neutral thoughts changes your emotional reaction to neutral as well. With neutral emotional reactivity you gain more space for progress to do things differently. Having a neutral or positive emotional reaction can allow you to take actions in ways that maybe you wouldn’t be able to tolerate well in the past.
CBT creates room to change behavior patterns by starting with a neutral or positive reframe for your thoughts. This style of coping practice can give you more emotional flexibility and increases the likelihood of change in your life.
How To Use CBT
CBT may be ideal to be supported via therapy with a clinician but in some cases it’s completely possible to practice CBT independently. Some methods that may help individual practice include journaling and creating more clarity on one negative cognitive distortion at a time. Once you isolate the relating thoughts, aim to create one overarching thought to rework. You may initially have several overlapping thoughts; try to use the information from your thoughts to create one main thought so you can prepare to be focused on one thought being corrected versus trying to correct several thoughts simultaneously.
Once you have your key thought confirmed, you can look for different ways to neutralize the thought. Think of other ways of looking at the thought where you don’t feel reactive or threatened. Think of ways of seeing the thought where it becomes manageable for you emotionally. Think of the thought as something that offers you information without judgment or reaction. Once you locate your neutral thought take it for a spin and see how you feel using your new thought patterns. If the thought process still feels triggering you may need to alter the specific word choice until it works or to reach out to work with a therapist for collaboration. If you feel a little unsteady that’s normal in the beginning but over time it may be easier to trust your neutral thoughts over your emotional thoughts with intention and practice.
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