How Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Can Help

Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is a type of mental health therapy that helps individuals intentionally use their thoughts to guide their feelings and behaviors. This approach focuses on helping individuals first become aware of unproductive thoughts, and then change those thoughts to ones that positively influence their behaviors and emotions. For example, someone may habitually have the thought, "I can't do anything right." This thought may then contribute to low self-esteem and other symptoms of depression or anxiety. This is just one example of how a thought can impact mental health. Given that so many disorders and problems in everyday life involve thoughts and their associated feelings and behaviors, CBT is used to treat a wide range of mental health concerns.

Cognitive behavioral therapy is an evidence-based practice, meaning that clinical studies have been conducted to prove its effectiveness. This is in general, an important consideration when choosing a form of therapy. More specifically, CBT is a good choice for individuals when unproductive thoughts have become deeply ingrained in their belief systems, and they may not even be aware they are having these thoughts or of how much they are affecting their mental health. This is why seeing a trained CBT therapist, who can provide support and guidance, is helpful. A CBT therapist helps identify and bring attention to thought patterns and then helps individuals come up with alternative replacement thoughts. And as more attention is given to these replacement thoughts, new neural networks in the brain are strengthened and help support the expression of the new healthy thought patterns and behaviors. Once individuals have met their goals in therapy, the hope is that they can become in a sense their own therapist, as they are better able to recognize their thoughts and know how to adjust them when needed.

Please contact us to receive help through our cognitive behavioral therapy services in Fresno.