Aug 14, 2013
CBT
I had my first chance to practice CBT for real today with a patient. It was amazing!
For those of you who don’t know much about it, CBT stands for Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. The premise is that your thoughts lead to feelings which can lead to actions. If your thoughts are negative, they can lead to a downward spiral of depression, anxiety, or other difficult feelings.
CBT is a way to combat these feelings by changing your thinking patterns. Basically, if you are having a negative thought like “I got a bad grade, now I might fail,” that can lead to other thoughts like “now I won’t get where I want in life” or “I’ll be a failure.”
CBT helps you to think about how some of these thoughts are irrational. For example, if you start thinking “I got a bad grade, now I might fail,” you can think to yourself “well, I got bad grades before and pulled them out to good grades” or “it’s true I might not get an A in this class, but I’m still on track for my career goals.” Thoughts like this help you to realize it’s actually not the end of the world, which helps you feel a lot better.
It’s good practice for anyone really, and it really helped the person I worked with today. I could definitely see myself doing a lot of this in my career. It was great!