Hi, guys and welcome to today’s session. My name is Gilles Brideau. I’m a therapist, hypnotist and coach that works in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada.
I thought I’d do a quick video today on what is CBT or Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. It’s one of the things that I get asked often about from clients in terms of what exactly it is, how it can help, and what kind of issues does it help. I’m going to hopefully address some of that in a very simple way today.
The first thing is what it is exactly. CBT is really a brief intervention that usually lasts between 6 and 20 sessions that teaches strategies and skills that are problem-focused and goal-oriented. It’s a way of looking at problems based on an ABC model. I put the model here underneath. Understand that people really believe that activating events will lead to consequences, so they usually skip the B part, which is the belief. Here’s what I mean. I’ll give you a couple of examples. Let’s say you leave your house today and you go outside, and you have a flat on your car. Understand that that activating event, which is having a flat, has no specific meaning to you at all. It doesn’t say anything about you, the type of person you are, or whether or not you’re [inaudible 00:01:34] or late for work. It doesn’t say anything specific about you. It is simply a neutral event. The activating event will lead to a consequence.
For some people, they leave their house and they go outside, and they see this activating event and they go, “Why does this always happen to me? It’s like the world’s punishing me in some way.” The belief that everything is happening for a reason … There’s an overgeneralization, which is a thought distortion. But the thinking leads to … the thinking or the belief that the person has leads them to feeling the consequence. That could be, “I feel sad. I feel depressed. I feel anxious.” Anything like that.
Let’s go for scene number 2. You go outside. Again, the activating event is our neutral stimuli, so you go outside and you have a flat. In scene two, let’s say our reaction is this. “Man, this stuff always happens to me. Now I’m late. Now I got to change a flat and all this kind of stuff. You get really, really angry. The consequence is anger, frustration, irritation. Again, the activating event has remained neutral. It’s simply a flat tire. But the belief in the second scene is that the world or everything seems to be against me, that it is unfair. Anger is the emotional response to perceived injustice. It’s not fair that I have this stupid flat and that I’m going to be late for work and that I’m probably going to get fired, or whatever it is. You could see how the thinking might get quickly out of control, which again will lead to the consequence which is, in this case, feeling irritated or angry.
Scene 3, you go outside and you have a flat. In this scene you go, “Oh, man. I wonder if my neighbor’s up. Maybe I can go call him. I better call my boss because I might be a little late. I can get through this. It’s not that big of a deal, and I’ve changed tires before. Although I might be a little bit late, I know I could put some extra time after work or whatnot.” The belief in this case is this isn’t a big deal. I can handle what’s going on. The consequence in this case is that the person remains calm and stays focused on the goal, which is getting to work on time and becoming proactive in resolving the problem. You could see that what really influences the C or the consequence, in this case the emotions, is how we think about the event.
In all three cases, that intrinsic belief that the person has about whether or not they could deal with the situation and the meaning of the situation. In cognitive behavioral language, we look at different things called thought distortions. It’s how a person will interpret the world that they live in, and as a result, it will affect their quality of life substantially. In other words, if you think everyone is always out to get you or that you’re always being judged, you’re never good enough, all that kind of stuff, you could imagine how that can really lead to people feeling really low, low self-esteem, depression, anxious, angry, all that kind of stuff.
CBT is a model in which the therapist and the person work together collaboratively to come up with solutions to what their thinking is. A lot of times it involves some psychotherapy homework. With our clients, we ask them to fill out a daily mood log. The daily mood log registers a specific event. How I say it to clients is, “Whenever you feel off, whenever you don’t feel like yourself and you feel off, I want you to keep track of that.” Let’s say you had a poor interaction with the neighbor or the landlord. The next task would be to circle what the emotions are. I felt sad, or I felt angry, or I felt upset, or I felt anxious, or I felt overwhelmed, whatever the emotions are. Then quickly jot down what you were thinking specifically at that moment. Maybe the thoughts … Again, that ties into our belief. Maybe the thought is, “It seems like this guy always [inaudible 00:06:19] out to get me,” or, “It always seems like bad things happen to me.” Or it might be, “Nothing ever goes right for me.”
When they list this, then we have different techniques … actually in the model that I use, there are over 50 different techniques to deal with anxiety and depression. Things as simple as the survey method, where you would poll a couple of your friends and seeing if that is really based on reality or not. All these techniques … I usually say to clients, “That’s why there are 50, because some will work really effectively and others won’t.” It’s this interplay between me and my clients to get to a better way of thinking that will lead to better outcomes.
What can CBT help with? The ones that are most common for me is it helps people with anxiety and depression. Post-traumatic stress, there’s a lot of new research that’s coming out on the effectiveness of cognitive behavioral therapy on post-traumatic stress. I’ve often used it with substance abuse. I’ve paired it with other techniques such as narrative therapy, and in my case with hypnosis as well, and have had excellent outcomes in terms of helping people make changes. Obsessive compulsive disorder. You can see that CBT is a modality that is recognized scientifically as being one of the best ways to deal with problems that you would see a therapist for.
That’s it. That’s just a quick snapshot as to what CBT is all about. I hope that this has been helpful for you. As usual, I invite your questions or thoughts, comments. Let me know if I can answer your questions in any way. I would welcome those comments and thoughts at any point. With that, as usual, have a great day.