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Disclaimer: One of the main reasons I started this blog is to share the benefits of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. I am not a therapist and I am not dispensing medical advice. If you find these concepts intriguing, you should either read David Burn’s excellent book Feeling Good or seek professional counseling.

So, what is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)? CBT is a type of psychotherapy developed by Aaron T. Beck. The key principle of CBT is that all of our emotions arise from our thoughts. All of our emotions. So, if you’re feeling happy, angry, or sad — those feelings started with thoughts in your mind.

This is all fine and well when our thoughts are reasonable and free of distortion. But what happens when our thoughts are distorted? Distorted thoughts (or “thinking errors” or “cognitive distortions”) also give rise to emotions — usually anger or depression. For example, if you meet a stranger and think to yourself, “Oh no. This person thinks I’m stupid,” you will feel sad. (We will explore why that thought may be distorted in future articles.) Another example of a cognitive distortion is: “I’m a failure. I never do anything right.” (Actually, there are two distortions in that thought, as we’ll see later on.)

The tricky part of all this is that these cognitive distortions are so automatic and happen so reflexively and quickly that we’re not conscious of them. You may think, “Oh, I don’t say horrid things like that to myself,” but, sadly, most of us do — we’re just don’t know it. We know we get discouraged, or feel depressed, but we don’t realize that we’re creating those emotions with our thoughts. Remember: all emotions arise from our thoughts.

Fortunately, with practice, we can dismantle and avoid these cognitive distortions. And that means we can head off the suffering we cause ourselves. In future articles, I will discuss techniques to help “debug” our thinking and offer exercises you can try at home. Some of these techniques will be from the world of psychotherapy and others will be from Buddhism, which is a philosophy that harmonizes beautifully with CBT.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 22nd, 2007 at 9:06 am and is filed under Buddhism, Cognitive Therapy, Emotion, Mind. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.