San Francisco CBT Series: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Part 2
San Francisco CBT Series: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Part 2
In the first part of this post on San Francisco CBT Series: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Part 1, I talked about how thoughts and negative thinking patterns contribute to and reinforce problems with depression and anxiety. In this post, I’ll talk about how people get stuck in a cycle of thoughts and how we can use cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) to intervene in the cycle to get unstuck from depression and anxiety and to make a positive change.
The Cognitive Behavioral Cycle helps explain it all.
The CBT cycle starts with a triggering event, which is a situation that occurs that causes a negative thought to get triggered up in our minds. Let’s take a look at this image to understand how the cycle works.
Cognitive Behavioral Cycle
Once a thought gets trigger, a feeling, emotion, or physical sensation, happens soon after. Once we have certain types of thoughts and feelings, these tend to guide how we act and so it impacts our behaviors. Then our behaviors, reinforce our thoughts, and we are in a cycle, stuck with the automatic negative thoughts we have. The more we travel this cycle, the stronger the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors tend to be, to the point that they can feel true and accurate, even if they are not. We are stuck in a look that repeats until we find a way to break the cycle.
With cognitive behavioral therapy, people can learn to identify, understand, and challenge the automatic negative thoughts, and be able to replace these thoughts with more alternative and balanced thinking. This helps to change the entire cycle, so one feels better, and can change their behavior to something more adaptive and positive. Since cognitive behavioral therapy is a very practical approach to problem solving, it becomes a tool that one can use in the moment to deal with issues that arise in a very realistic way. Because of the power of this cycle, once we get stuck in the loop, it is necessary to break the cycle in order to bring about positive change in our behaviors. The good news is that you can start to break the cycle by intervening in any one area. This disrupts the cycle, making it easier to make changes in the other aspects of the cycle.
One of the most significant steps in CBT is to identify the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that are causing problems in your life. Once we are aware of it, we can work to change it. But it can be difficult for us to be aware of our own automatic negative thoughts and the cycles we are stuck in. In therapy, I help people to identify the thoughts that are contributing to unpleasant feelings, and unhelpful behaviors, and how the cycle is getting perpetuated. Then I help people to change these negative and unhelpful thoughts so one can be released from this dysfunctional cycle.
It's all about thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.
As mentioned, cognitive behavioral therapy consists of three major components: thoughts, feelings/emotions, and behaviors. These three components play a huge role in how we deal with and react to situations. Our thoughts can be tricky. We think so many thoughts in a moment, that most of our thoughts are operating out of our awareness. They are like white noise in the background of our mind, and yet they have an impact on us. This is why it’s important to increase our awareness of our thoughts because only when we know the thoughts occurring in our mind, can we start to change them. When it comes to the feelings component of this cycle, its important to note that feelings includes emotions and physiological sensations in the body. This can be our heart beating faster when we feel anxious, or our face feeling warm when we feel angry. These emotions and physiological reactions have an effect on our behavior. Behaviors are actions we choose to take, but this can include avoiding people, places, or situations, that trigger us. For example, if going to a party brings up an overwhelming level of anxiety, one might choose not to go. The avoidance serves to temporarily allay negative thoughts and feelings, and this reinforces the negative thoughts that going to parties or social events are scary, or unpleasant, and makes one more likely to avoid future social events. And the awful cycle continues.
How is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy used in therapy?
One of the ways CBT is used in therapy is to first start by identifying each part of the CBT cycle. The thoughts are the most important part, and I help people to gain clarity on the automatic negative thoughts and thought patterns that are occurring. CBT utilizes a process called cognitive restructuring. Cognitive restructuring allows us to examine the thoughts one is thinking and to identify the distortions in the thoughts. You see, when thoughts are contributing to depression and anxiety, there is a very strong likelihood that the thoughts are distorted in some ways. There are many types of distortions in our thoughts.
Catastrophizing means thinking thoughts that are focused on the worst-case scenario happening. An example is, “If I make a mistake at work, I’ll get fired.”
Overgeneralization refers to taking a thought about one situation and applying it negatively to many other situations. For example, “she didn’t want to date me, so no one will ever want to date me.”
Fortune-telling is a form of distorted thinking where one predicts the future in a negative way. For example, “I’m going to fail.”
In talking through these distortions, I help people see how some of their thinking is not factual or based in reality. The purpose of cognitive behavioral therapy is to think more accurate and realistic thoughts, not just happy, positive thoughts.
The next step in cognitive behavioral therapy is to examine these negative thoughts and to look for the evidence that the thoughts are true, and not true. Now when I say evidence, I’m referring to facts, facts that mean our thoughts are true. If evidence is lacking, we can start to see the holes in these thoughts. We then weigh the evidence, and come up with alternative, balance thoughts, that are more likely accurate reflections of reality and the truth. Usually, these alternative, balanced thoughts trigger less negative feelings, and more positive feelings. Remember the cycle? With new alternative, balance thoughts, and more pleasant feelings, behaviors can also change to be more helpful and adaptive. And the cycle changes!
How can Cognitive Behavioral Therapy help me?
If you’re considering cognitive behavioral therapy, know that it can help in a number of ways. It can help you to recognize how distorted thinking are creating problems so that you can re-evaluate and change your thoughts. It can give you problem-solving approaches to deal with your problems. It can help you gain a greater sense of confidence in your own abilities. It can help you face your fears, instead of avoiding them, and to approach situations that once triggered a lot of distress, with a greater sense of competence. All this is to say, that the world opens up and opportunities increase when we have a way to improve our thinking.
FREE consultation call for Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in San Francisco, California
This blog post was part 2 of a 2-part series on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in San Francisco. If you haven’t already, you can read San Francisco CBT Series: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Part 1. You now have a much greater understanding of how negative thoughts can cause and contribute to anxiety and depression, and how cognitive behavioral therapy can help improve how you feel so you can be freer to live your life without the heavy burden of depression and anxiety.
If you’d like to see how Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in San Francisco, or online therapy in California can help you, please reach out to me. Contact me for a free 15-minute phone consultation and let’s talk about how depression and anxiety therapy in San Francisco can help you.
Specialties include therapy for depression, anxiety, work stress, relationships, and life changes.
In Case You Missed It! Additional Blog Posts in this series:
San Francisco CBT Series: Successful Goal Setting, Part 2
San Francisco CBT Series: Successful Goal Setting, Part 1
San Francisco CBT Series: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Part 1
