What are Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and Solution-focused Therapy?
The three main tenets of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) are that it is collaborative, helps you identify your automatic thoughts, and helps you try out alternative thoughts and behaviors in order to develop more flexible, optimistic, and effective coping strategies. As humans, we think, then feel, then act-in that order. But we may only be aware of one of these states. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) teaches you to become aware of how you think-what you say to yourself. Normally, we are not aware of our thoughts (cognitions) because they are automatic. Our breathing is also automatic and part of our autonomic nervous system which operates without our awareness or intervention (thank goodness!) Since our thinking is so rapid fire and unconscious, we have to train ourselves to become aware of our thoughts. Most of the time we don’t have a clue about what we were thinking when we experience an emotion or behave a certain way. We can start with our emotions or our behaviors, and bac
