WHAT IS COGNITIVE-BEHAVIORAL THERAPY?

Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) is designed to help you learn to alter your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors to achieve a sense of balance. By targeting the way you react to situations, CBT can help you respond more effectively and deliberately in challenging situations. CBT can even help you learn to feel better when you are unable to change situations happening around you.

HOW DOES CBT WORK?

CBT therapy provides a simple way of understanding, naming, then challenging situations and problematic responses to them.
Cognitive-behavioral therapy emphasizes the three main components implied in psychological problems: thoughts, emotions, and behaviors.

By breaking down your difficult feelings into these component parts, it quickly becomes very clear where and how to intervene when an issue arises. If a certain negative or intrusive thought seems to be causing a domino effect of negative emotion and resulting behavior, the best solution might be to carefully and deliberately reexamine that thought. If it’s a behavioral pattern that seems to be responsible, then it’s likely that a new behavioral response to the situation could be helpful.

More often than not, all three components are interwoven together throughout difficult problems and feelings. That’s when it can be helpful to have the guidance of a trusted professional to help walk you through the processing of YOUR specific situation and YOUR specific needs.
Cognitive-behavioral therapy exercises are designed to intervene on all three psychological components simultaneously.

For instance, when uncontrollable worry or anxiety is the problem, CBT exercises can help to identify more useful and grounded thoughts, which will in turn lessen the anxiety.
The resulting reduction in anxiety makes it easier to engage in more skillful behaviors to proactively address the triggering problematic situations.

KMC Counseling offers Cognitive-Behavioral therapy sessions for adults, teens (13+), couples, and families.