Overview of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
Odyssey Behavioral Healthcare’s AVP of Clinical Services, Kate Fisch, LCSW, discusses cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT).
In the 1960s, Dr. Aaron Beck, known as the father of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), 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. Cognitive behavioral therapy 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 an evidence-based treatment for mental health conditions designed to change the damaging thought patterns and negative emotions 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 cognitive behavioral therapy have mental health conditions or eating disorders. Cognitive behavioral therapy can be an effective tool to help anyone learn how to better manage stressful situations, deal with emotional challenges, and improve their mental health and well-being. CBT can be utilized by mental health professionals in either individual therapy sessions or group therapy sessions.
Several studies show that cognitive behavioral therapy is a popular talk therapy alternative to medication when it comes to treating eating disorders and other mental health disorders like anxiety disorders. Studies have also found that cognitive behavioral therapy can be as effective in treating depression as prescription antidepressants. Unlike medication, which simply aims to eliminate the symptoms of the mental health conditions, cognitive behavioral therapy focuses on the whole person by addressing the individual’s underlying core beliefs, dysfunctional assumptions, and negative automatic thoughts. Helping individuals identify and change their destructive thoughts and behaviors sets cognitive behavioral therapy apart from other types of talk therapy like acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) and dialectical behavior therapy (DBT).
The basis of cognitive behavioral therapy is that situations themselves don’t upset people, but rather the meaning that people give those situations. If an individual has negative thoughts, they can’t see that their perception doesn’t fit. They continue to have the same thoughts and fail to learn new things. A depressed person, for instance, might think when they wake up that they can’t face going to work. They might believe that they feel awful and that nothing will go right. If they stay home from work because of these thoughts, they won’t find out if their beliefs are wrong. Their thoughts may develop further and lead them to believe that they’re useless, weak, and a failure.
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These negative thoughts can even trigger negative emotions and behaviors, making individuals feel bad about themselves. In this case, these negative emotions may also make them more likely to avoid going to work. This vicious cycle can occur with other mental health conditions, including eating disorders.
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Cognitive behavioral therapy helps clients recognize these patterns and teaches them to step away from their automatic negative thoughts and test them first. With the depressed individual, for example, cognitive behavioral therapy would encourage them to examine real-life situations to see what happens. The goal of cognitive behavioral therapy is to correct these distorted beliefs.
We utilize cognitive behavioral therapy in combination with other therapies to treat anorexia disorder, binge eating disorder, bulimia disorder, compulsive exercise disorder, other specified feeding or eating disorder (OSFED), purging disorder, unspecified feeding or eating
disorder (UFED), co-occurring substance use disorder, and dual diagnosis mental health disorders.
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