CBT
Find Out How This Therapy CanStart Changing Your Negative Thoughts To Positive Ones
Helping You Find Success With CBT
Do You Struggle With Negative Thoughts?
Negative, self-defeating thinking often fuels depression, anxiety, eating disorders, low self-esteem, anger, ADHD, and relationship problems. And, it is negative thinking in the first place that often leads to these struggles. Negative thoughts can cause countless problems throughout your day, cause conflicts and impact all aspects of your life. It’s possible that you are concerned about your self-image and routinely fear what other people think of you. At work, negative thinking may make it difficult for you to believe in yourself when faced with difficult tasks. Perhaps negative thoughts cause you to feel overwhelmed with anger or frustration. If you are married or in a relationship, negative thinking may be causing tension and conflicts between you and your partner.
The good news is that there is hope. You created these thoughts, which means you have the ability to reframe them. And, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) can help you do that. CBT is a proven, effective approach used to treat a variety of issues. It can help you modify your unhealthy thoughts and build confidence.
Understanding CBT
During CBT sessions, you’ll have the opportunity to talk with an experienced therapist about your daily activities, emotions and behaviors. When negative thoughts arise, your therapist can walk you through a process to modify the thought. This process includes:
- Identifying the feeling associated with the thought. You may feel angry, sad, worthless, lost or confused when faced with problems throughout the day. Your therapist can help you identify and understand the dominant emotion tied to the problem/situation.
- Determining the severity of the feeling. With the help of your therapist, you can analyze how severe the emotion was in relation to past experiences.
- Modifying the thought. Your therapist can offer you unbiased ideas about how to transform the negative thought. Specifically, you and your therapist will work together to objectively look at the situation and investigate a different, more positive way to view the experience.
In addition, clients often take an active role by working to improve their thoughts through CBT homework. You can keep a log or journal of your thoughts and emotions to share with your therapist during sessions. When children or teenagers participate in CBT, our therapists typically use therapeutic aids like drawings or dolls that model the thought process. These aids help younger clients express how they feel in a creative way, sometimes shedding light on deeper issues they may be experiencing.
After a few sessions, your therapist may shift the focus from thoughts to target your negative belief system. This shift can empower you to believe in yourself and start building a healthy foundation of confidence.
How It Works
Find Confidence And Optimism In Your Life With CBT
In a safe and confidential environment, your Personal Growth Counseling therapist will work with you through the CBT process of modifying your individual thoughts. As homework, your therapist will typically ask you to take note of five prominent thoughts you have and reframe them each day. When you run into major issues throughout the week, your therapist can help you modify those tougher, lingering thoughts.
Another useful technique our therapists use in CBT sessions is generating a list of positive affirmations. During this activity, you will create a list including the qualities you like about yourself. This list serves as a proactive effort to enhance positive thoughts. When you start to feel overwhelmed with self-defeating thoughts, this list can help you remember to assert all of your great characteristics.
You and your therapist will also work to ensure you maintain healthy sleep patterns. We need adequate sleep in order to function best during the day. No matter how your negative thoughts arise, they often may take a toll on you when you are trying to fall asleep or wake up in the morning. During CBT sessions, you can learn how to fall asleep on a positive thought, which will allow you to start your day feeling refreshed and confident.
Once you start to feel better after modifying your individual thoughts, your therapist will work with you to transform your overarching beliefs about yourself. When you start to build a solid foundation of confidence in yourself, you will have the resilience to tackle future challenges as well as work on improving other areas of your life, such as your family relationships and career goals.
Even though your negative thoughts may overwhelm you now, you can conquer them and move forward with confidence. CBT has been scientifically proven to improve healthy brain activity. With the help of an expert therapist at Personal Growth Counseling, you can start to focus on your amazing qualities and set goals to live a fulfilling and joyful life.
Your Path To A More Positive Future Starts Here
If you are ready to start thinking positively and reaping the rewards of a happy, confident and peaceful life, we invite you to call us. We will do a complimentary 20-minute phone consultation to discuss your needs and answer any questions about how CBT can help you.