Through this series we’ve touched on the basics of how CBT works and what to expect if you seek help from a therapist who uses it. The question I always ask when I start working with a therapist is, “How will I know when it’s helping?” With CBT the answer is pretty obvious. You’ll know… Read More Therapy Tuesday: CBT – Seeing Improvements
You’ve worked with your therapist to isolate the thoughts and emotions that are kicking you around in your life. You’ve probably spent a few sessions discussing how you feel, what brings on certain thoughts, and beginning to understand how those drive your actions. Stress about paying bills? Let’s just stack those bills off to the… Read More Therapy Tuesday: CBT – Choosing an action
Now that you’ve worked with your therapist to identify the thoughts you find yourself struggling with, you’ll move forward to identifying the emotions you feel with those thoughts. Using the example I started last week, a fear of public speaking, we’ll look at how this step works.
In a CBT session the focus is on a target area. How a patient thinks, feels, and reacts to a situation or thought is causing problems in their life. There may be multiple target areas, but usually only one is addressed in each session. The first step in CBT is to address core beliefs about… Read More Therapy Tuesday: CBT – Core Beliefs
Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is a form of therapy that first formed in the 1960’s. Aaron T. Beck noticed that his patients seemed to have ongoing internal conversations with themselves, their thoughts were not controlled, and often had a strong impact on the patient. His goal was to empower patients to reframe their thoughts and responses,… Read More Therapy Tuesday: Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy
Over on Twitter I ran into Kasey, who is training to become an EMDR therapist. I thought it’d be a great wrap-up to hear from someone on the other side of the therapy session. (Even in training, there’s a ton of insight and such). She was nice enough to agree, so please, do give her… Read More Therapy Tuesday: EMDR Guest Blog: Kasey Klein
When you listen to a song, you don’t listen to a single note. You may be able to separate the sounds of a particular instrument, but even then, you listen to the score played by that device. Instead of separating each note into a separate memory, our minds link the items into a sequence and we hear a song.… Read More Therapy Tuesday: Gestalt Therapy – Part 4 – Continuity
Since it has been a while, here are the previous posts about Gestalt Therapy. Therapy Tuesday: Gestalt Therapy – Part 1 Therapy Tuesday: Gestalt Therapy – Part 2 – Proximity Similarity is the second principle of perception you’ll find yourself using if you work with a Gestalt therapist. When I last posted about Gestalt Therapy,… Read More Therapy Tuesday: Gestalt Therapy – Part 3 – Similarity
Gestalt therapy rests on five principles based on how people perceive the world around them. The idea is that the mind recognizes patterns, and these patterns fall into groups, or principles. The five patterns are: proximity, similarity, continuity, closure, and connectedness.
Gestalt therapy originated with Frederick and Laura Perls in the 1940’s. This particular discipline doesn’t involve attempting to interpret the past, but instead it focuses on present events. This was the first form of therapy I experienced. I think it set me up to delve into DBT therapy later because of how it approaches the… Read More Therapy Tuesday: Gestalt Therapy – Part 1
Kambry Ellis 