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CBT: A way to reshape your negative thinking and reduce stress - CNN
Nov 27, 2021 2 mins, 24 secs
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That's the basis of cognitive behavioral therapy, which burst onto the psychological scene in the 1960s and has been gathering accolades ever since.

Therapists typically assign "homework," so it takes active participation on the part of the client, and it doesn't address underlying issues such as childhood trauma or systemic problems in families.

But for those willing to put in the work, cognitive behavioral therapy can be just what the doctor ordered.

I'm trying to train a person to do all the things that I know how to do in their own lives, so that when we stop meeting they can continue doing it without my help.

CNN: In CBT, how do our thoughts affect our actions and feelings?

Fournier: Most folks go through life thinking that the way that they feel or the things that they wind up doing are directly influenced by what has happened to them in their lives.

It's our interpretations of those events that lead us to feel certain things and behave in certain ways.

One of the first things we would have people do is just notice their thinking.

I really have to evaluate whether I want them to be in my life."

CNN: Most of us aren't terribly aware of thinking such negative thoughts, just the bad feelings.

And it's not just people with a clinical diagnosis that make errors in thinking -- we all do that.

Some of those thoughts might be logical fallacies.

What type of homework do you assign?

Fournier: Cognitive behavioral therapy does involve homework, and a lot of that homework is paying attention in a new and different way to what you're doing, how you're feeling and what's going on in your mind.

What were you doing and thinking?" And then those would be the things that we would start to focus on in treatment.

What about the behavioral side?

Carpenter: CBT is predicated on the assumption that thoughts, behaviors and emotions are intertwined: "My thoughts influence my feelings, my emotions influence my behaviors, and it's all interrelated."

As a therapist, that gives me three pathways I can use with individuals to help effect change -- via thoughts, emotions and behaviors.

Take depression, for example.

And so in anxiety, the treatment is helping them gradually reapproach the situations they've previously been avoiding.

For people experiencing high levels of stress, well, some of those things are changeable in people's lives, but some of them aren't, especially during the pandemic.

We can help them take a look at their thoughts and behaviors during those periods to see if there are ways to change those thoughts to reduce their stress.

But what we can help them do is change their relationship to what happened to them, by changing their thinking about the traumatic experience.

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