Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) is by now the most common, most researched, and most relied on approach by western clinical psychotherapists.
What is CBT?
CBT combines two traditions of therapy approaches.
Cognitive therapies which focus on the thoughts, images and meanings humans create and perceive.
Behavioural therapies which focus on the actions and observable behaviour humans show.
Together their goal is to influence emotions by reviewing and correcting thoughts and behaviours towards more realistic or helpful ones. For this to work, CBT assumes that our thoughts, feelings, behaviour, and body are an interactive system. When one part changes (e.g. thoughts), it will lead to a change in other parts (e.g. behaviour, body and emotions).
This interactive system can be illustrated in a diagram.
To reach its goal, CBT uses various cognitive and behavioural interventions, ranging from questioning the validity of thoughts, keeping a thought diary, to gradually exposing oneself to fearful situations.
The client and therapist are actively collaborating, but it is the client who learns skills by practicing them routinely in daily life.
For what is CBT helpful?
CBT is helpful for a range complaints. In fact, it is often the first-line recommendation for widespread issues such as anxiety, phobias, depression and panic. Over time, CBT developed multiple strains and is increasingly customised towards other complaints and specific situations, such as for internet-based sessions (iCBT), Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (TF-CBT), or for children Cognitive Behavioural Play Therapy (CBPT).
In its original form, CBT is already quite successful in treating most issues clients present. However, other approaches merged with CBT over time, due to its useful and simple toolkit as well as practical applicability. Modern approaches that have developed include Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), or Positive Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (PCBT), which is what I studied and have been trained in. Up until now, CBT has been looking mostly on what is wrong, and what needs to be fixed. Positive CBT however adds the missing part: What is actually right, and how can we get more of that? Instead of looking only at what we don’t want, we should also look at what we actually strive for and where we want to see ourselves. In the end, our garden shall not only be “weed-less”, but have some beautiful flowers and trees, which in turn attract butterflies and bees. Not only that, in a beautiful garden there is not much space anymore for weeds to grow.
Conclusion
CBT is a powerful, evidence-based, and commonly practiced psychotherapy approach, having experienced huge popularity in the past decades. It assumes that our stressful emotions can be changed, by changing the thoughts we have and behaviours we do. Since its emergence, many subvariaties of CBT have been developed, and in one form or the other, we will encounter some parts of CBT within most western psychotherapy sessions.