Living with a mental illness can be distressing, especially if it significantly affects your life. Many psychotherapy techniques try to resolve the life impact of mental conditions rather than addressing the thought processes that cause this impact in the first place. Cognitive behavioral therapy takes a different approach and has proven effective in helping people make permanent positive changes to their thought and behavior patterns. Find out how your thoughts affect your behavior and why you should undergo cognitive behavioral therapy in Boynton Beach, Florida at Summit Detox.
What Is CBT? What Kind of Therapy Is It?
Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is a talk therapy based on the principle that cognitive or mental processes, such as recollection, thinking, and reasoning, determine your behavior. Thus, you’re likely to engage in harmful behaviors if you have cognitive distortions or destructive reasoning.
CBT aims to stop self-destructive tendencies by resolving distorted thinking patterns. CBT therapists guide you to self-reflect and identify your negative beliefs. They also help you reframe these beliefs so they don’t drive you to engage in harmful habits.
CBT techniques can help you develop problem-solving skills and improve logical thinking that quickly resolve triggers before negative emotions and thoughts form.
What Are the Benefits of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy?
Cognitive behavioral therapy is one of the most preferred therapeutic approaches for helping clients change their lives. Some benefits of CBT include:
- Improving rationality. People with distorted thought patterns often don’t behave rationally. Negative thoughts cloud their judgment, making them misinterpret situations and wrongly blame themselves or others. CBT reframes your beliefs, helping you get a full perspective on matters and take appropriate actions.
- Enhancing self-perception. Negative thought patterns create a distorted view of self, which affects self-worth, self-esteem and self-confidence. During therapy, you’ll develop positive thoughts and beliefs that change how you view and treat yourself. This process of self-discovery helps improve your sense of self-worth, giving you the courage to pursue relationships that serve you and the confidence to create a more fulfilling life.
- Giving hope for the future. CBT gives you the tools to change your thoughts and actions, which can make the future seem brighter. The therapy prepares you to face challenges in your life with the confidence that you can overcome them and have a great future.
What Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Can Help With
CBT was developed in the 1960s by psychiatrist Aaron Beck as a treatment for individuals dealing with emotional health problems resulting in depression and anxiety. Today, CBT treatment techniques are backed by decades of scientific research. Cognitive behavioral interventions can treat:
- Anxiety disorders, such as generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder and phobias
- Mood disorders, such as bipolar disorder and major depressive symptoms
- Eating disorders
- Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD)
- Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)
- Chronic pain resulting from trauma such as accidents or physical abuse
How Does CBT Therapy for Substance Abuse Work?
Studies show that CBT is currently one of the most effective forms of therapy for treating alcohol and other drug use disorders.
Substance use disorder is a mental health condition that affects your ability to control or stop using legal or illicit drugs. Symptoms of SUD can range from occasionally misusing prescription drugs and going on alcohol binges to addiction, a condition that makes it impossible for you to go without using drugs.
CBT can help you see the way substance abuse affects your daily life. During therapy sessions, you’ll examine the personal, relationship, social and professional impacts of your drug use. You’ll also identify the origins of the thought patterns that drive you to misuse drugs. Identifying these thoughts helps you develop more positive thought processes that make drugs less appealing to your mind.
CBT is also useful for relapse prevention because it helps you eliminate sources of bad behavior from your environment. For example, changing friends you used to do drugs with and avoiding places such as bars can reduce the chances of a relapse.
What You Can Expect at CBT Therapy Sessions
Cognitive behavioral therapy is structured and uses a systematic process for improving thoughts and behavior. Your therapy sessions will involve:
- History-taking. Initial CBT sessions delve into your history to analyze your distorted thoughts and beliefs and the harmful behavior patterns they produce.
- Guided discovery. Your therapist challenges your thought patterns and offers different viewpoints that can provide clarity on your current situation.
- Goal-setting. Setting SMART goals helps you identify where you want your thoughts and life to be and gives you step-by-step instructions on how to get there.
- Restructuring. This is a reframing process that helps you do the work of changing negative thought patterns.
- Exposure therapy. You’ll slowly be exposed to triggers that cause negative thoughts and actions so you can practice the coping skills learned during therapy.
Why Try Cognitive Therapy?
Mental health conditions like depression and substance use disorders take a toll on your life. Getting stuck in a cycle of being triggered and resorting to harmful behavior can make you feel tired, helpless and hopeless.
Undergoing cognitive behavioral therapy is one step toward making positive, long-term changes in your life. Individual therapy sessions give you a nonjudgmental and supportive ear and provide useful feedback and guidance.
It’s easy to become so entrenched in poor life habits that you become clueless about what exactly you’re doing wrong and how to change it. Your therapist’s objective view can give you a different perspective on your life. CBT improves your self-awareness, giving you the tools to see which areas of your life aren’t working. Therapy sessions challenge your perception of yourself, your loved ones and the world. Consequently, you can come out of treatment with a changed view of life, making you more compassionate and positive toward yourself and others.
CBT treatment also equips you with techniques you can use to ensure you never sustain negative thoughts and behaviors at any stage of your life.
Get CBT Therapy in Boynton Beach, Florida
The mental health professionals at Summit Detox have helped South Florida residents turn their lives around through cognitive behavioral therapy for substance abuse treatment. You can benefit from medically assisted detox and engage in various holistic therapies at our residential drug treatment in Boynton Beach, FL.
Contact us at (888) 995-5265 to learn how CBT and other forms of therapy can help you build effective coping strategies against mental illness and drug abuse triggers at our Boyton Beach rehab.
