Cognitive Therapy

What is Cognitive Therapy?

According to wikipedia: the objectives of CBT typically are to identify irrational or maladaptive thoughts, assumptions and beliefs that are related to debilitating negative emotions and to identify how they are dysfunctional, inaccurate, or simply not helpful. This is done in an effort to reject and transcend them with more realistic and self-helping ways.

An example from cognitive therapy may illustrate the process: Having made a mistake at work, a person believes, "I'm useless and can't do anything right at work." Believing this, in turn, tends to worsen his mood. The problem may be more worsened if the individual reacts by avoiding activities and then behaviorally confirming his negative belief to himself. As a result, a successful experience becomes more unlikely, which reinforces the original thought of being "useless." In therapy, the latter example could be identified as a self-fulfilling prophecy or "problem cycle," and the efforts of the therapist and client would be directed at working together to change this. This is done by addressing the way the client thinks and behaves in response to similar situations and by developing more flexible ways to think and respond, including reducing the avoidance of activities. If, as a result, the client escapes the negative thought patterns and destructive behaviors, the feelings of depression may, over time, be relieved. The client may then become more active, succeed more often, and further reduce his negative feelings.

Cognitive behavioral therapy is not an overnight process. Even after patients have learned to recognize when and where their mental processes go awry, it can take months of effort to replace a dysfunctional cognitive-affective-behavioral process or habit with a more reasonable, salutary one.

The cognitive model especially emphasized in psychiatrist Aaron Beck's cognitive therapy says that a person's core beliefs (often formed in childhood) contribute to "automatic thoughts" that pop up in everyday life in response to situations. Cognitive Therapy practitioners hold that clinical depression is typically associated with negatively biased thinking and irrational thoughts.

What you tell yourself determines whether you feel sad or worried, happy or depressed and the way you feel and what you tell yourself determines how you behave and can have an effect on the physical sensations in your body which in turn can affect your feelings, behaviour and thoughts. Thus we can get trapped in a vicious circle of negativity.

Everyone has an inner critic and everyone has an inner voice that is protecting, nurturing and has our best interests at heart. Become aware of your inner critic - its negative thoughts can happen so fast that most of the time we are completely unaware of them
Safety strategy
People react to events not by events themselves but by how think about it. How you think can effect how you feel and how you behave.

What makes us respond and behave in the ways we do is often not the situation or the words and actions of another person but how we perceive that situation or that persons actions. It is how we see something or someone and what we think about it or them that really influences how we feel. It is our thoughts and beliefs about an event that significantly influences our feelings and how we behave.

You can learn to catch these unhelpful thoughts and become aware of them and when you do get unhelpful thoughts coming into your mind all you need to do is acknowledge them - do not get involved with them or push them away - and then just let them go perhaps you may find it helpful to imagine putting them on a leaf and allow them to float down a stream or into a balloon where they can drift off into the sky. Or just watch them go, or give them a colour, shape, or a certain appearance, perhaps they are moving or still. And you can acknowledge the thought by saying something like "hello welcome thank you for coming into my mind and now I am letting you go" and use whatever method you want to just let them go. All thoughts are welcomed into the mind equally so that you do not judge the thought or your self for thinking the thought.

When we notice and acknowledge our thoughts and feelings with honesty and curiosity, even the most painful ones can seem less upsetting or intolerable. The more we try to control our thoughts and feelings the more stuck we get in sorrow. Just allow those thoughts and feelings to be as they are. Paying attention to thoughts and feelings moment by moment and without judgment.

The life we lead is based on assumptions. To change your life there needs to be a questioning of these assumptions.
Assumption: What your senses tell you is true

This is one of the easiest assumptions to question then demolish! You have five senses: sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste.

Let's image that you are sitting on a riverbank. What do you see?

Outside of yourself you see all the elements that make up the scene: the river, a fisherman, mountains, trees and so on.

But is this really what is going on? Light waves from the river, the boat, the mountains, the trees and all the other components of the scene travel at a speed of 299,792,458 metres per second. They then hit the photoreceptor neurones in the retina of your eyes. These then generate electrical impulses that go to the brain which then processes these impulses and creates the scene which you are viewing. If you then move your head then the brain has to update these images. If the fisherman moves his boat then more updating has to take place. To you this all appears seamless with no apparent 'break' in the action. This is because he brain updates the images so rapidly that you do not notice any breaks. It is similar to how you watch a film. A film is a series of still images flashed one after the other onto a screen at a speed of about 25 frames a second. You do not notice each still image. If the film is say, a boat crossing a river, then the illusion is created of continuous movement.

Are you seeing everything as it is in the present moment? The light from near objects reaches your eyes before the light from distant objects. At a speed of 299,792,458 metres a second the light from the mountains and the river get to your eyes very, very fast. This means that for most practical purposes this is not a problem. If you are playing tennis, for example, the time that the light from the ball takes to reach your eyes and then the time for the image to be processed by the brain and updated rapidly, followed by the time it takes for your brain to tell your arm to move is so fast that it does not prevent you from hitting the ball with your racket if you are a good tennis player. So, the illusion is created that everything is taking place in real time, when you can only ever deal with the past when it comes to vision.

If you move to a much wider scale - say when you look at the sky, then the stars that you see are so far away that the light can take years to reach your eye. Star distances are often measured in light years. A light year is equals 5.88 million million miles. This is how far light travels in one year at a speed of 186,282 miles per second or 299,792,458 metres per second. The star nearest our sun is Proxima Centauri which is 4.3 light-years from the Sun. The Sun is 93 million miles from the earth. This means that we can only see a star as it appeared at least 4.3 years ago. At these distances we are literally viewing the past.

The other illusion is that you are looking at something 'out there'. In reality, because it is the brain creating the images, all is happening inside your brain. There is no 'out there' at all. Even the fisherman is perceived inside your brain. Even though you may put your hand out and feel the cold of the river, you still can only see the river from inside your head.
Another strange effect to notice is that when our retina receives the light, the image that is formed is upside down. Our brain corrects this so that everything appears the right way up.

The sound that reaches your ears travels at 770 miles per hour, which is considerably slower than the speed of light. This means that, if the fisherman is singing, then the image of his mouth moving reaches you much faster than the sound. This effect can be noticed if you are a few hundred yards away from the start of an athletic race that is started by a starting pistol. As the gun is fired you see the smoke arise from the barrel before you hear the sound of the gun firing. The speed of sound can also vary according to temperature and the altitude. The higher and colder the air is, then the slower sound travels. The medium in which sound travels also affects its speed - whether this be water or glass for example.

You put your hand into the river. How long does it take for you to feel the river? As you touch the river, impulses travel through the nerve network in your body to your brain. Normally the rate at which these impulses travel is about 331 metres per second. This is a bit slower than the speed of sound at around 346 metres per second at 82 degrees Fahrenheit.

What at first appears to us as a simple situation - sitting on a river bank, seeing a scene, being aware of the smells, touching the water, thinking about what you are seeing, is an extremely complex mechanism. Energy in the form of light is being received by your retina, sound waves reach your ear drums, odour molecules reach your nose, nerve impulses enter your brain, electrical impulses occur in your brain that we call thinking. All these different forms of energy travel at different speeds - yet we view it all as if it takes place in the now or the present. It is our mind that processes all this information to create what appears to be 'reality' - yet the way we comprehend all this is an illusion created by us to make sense of it all. Indeed we must make sense of it all, otherwise it would be impossible to live in this physical world. We need to be able to walk, avoiding objects, react to the sound of a roaring lion so that we can take flight before it pounces and eats us.

It is our brain that makes sense of everything we see - but can we trust our own brain?

By Stephen Williamson

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