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Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
What Is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)?
In the 1960s, Dr. Aaron Beck developed this life-changing therapy. Since then, it’s become one of the most common evidence-based treatments for mental health conditions and eating disorders. CBT focuses on how thoughts, emotions, and behaviors relate to each other and how changing the way someone evaluates a situation can change their reactions. It’s a therapy designed to change the damaging thought patterns that some people develop about themselves. These destructive belief systems can lead to unhealthy coping strategies like substance abuse, self-harm, and eating disorders.
Cognitive behavioral therapy can be beneficial either by itself or in combination with other types of therapy in treating eating disorders and other mental health conditions. However, not all individuals who benefit from CBT have mental health conditions or eating disorders. It can be an effective tool to help anyone learn how to better manage stressful situations, deal with emotional challenges, and improve their well-being.
Is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) Effective?
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy’s Three Basic Principles
- Core Beliefs: Core beliefs are deeply held beliefs that an individual believes about themself, about others, and about the world. They learned these beliefs early in life and hold them as absolute. One example is an individual believing “I’m incompetent.”
- Dysfunctional Assumptions: Dysfunctional assumptions are rigid, unrealistic rules for living adopted by individuals. One example is the idea that “it’s better not to try than to risk failing.”
- Negative Automatic Thoughts: Negative automatic thoughts are thoughts that are automatic/involuntarily activated in challenging situations. One example is an individual automatically thinking “My friend didn’t call me today; she’s angry with me,” without a rational basis for that thought.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy at Shoreline
Therapies That Utilize Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
- Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT): DBT helps individuals improve their emotional health by addressing destructive/disturbing thoughts and behaviors while incorporating treatment strategies like emotional regulation and mindfulness.
- Multimodal Therapy: This therapy suggests that mental health disorders should be treated by addressing seven different but interconnected modalities: behavior, affect, sensation, imagery, cognition/thoughts, interpersonal factors, and biological considerations.
- Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT): REBT helps individuals identify their self-defeating thoughts, challenge those thoughts, and replace them with more adaptive beliefs.
- This type of therapy is a modality of CBT that targets obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and anxiety disorders. ExRP helps individuals with OCD and anxiety disorders address their intrusive, compulsive, obsessive, and ruminating thoughts.
CBT Techniques for Eating Disorders
At Shoreline, we use many specific approaches that fall under the category CBT, depending on each client’s needs. In every case, CBT focuses on helping clients deal with their underlying thoughts that cause mental distress and contribute to their eating disorders. The CBT techniques we utilize focus on identifying and modifying distorted thinking, behaviors, and emotional responses. Dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), a type of cognitive behavioral therapy, addresses how individuals think and behave. The CBT techniques utilized in dialectical behavior therapy include mindfulness, emotion regulation, and other techniques.