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Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
What it is, and why it works better than traditional therapy or drugs.
Many people suffer from the experience of being suddenly overwhelmed as they are gripped by an overwhelming emotion and their thoughts take them to dark places. For some it may be panic attacks; for others it may be episodes of crippling insecurity; for yet others a variety of phobias cause them to restrict their lives in order to avoid the triggering phenomenon.
Before we examine what Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is, we need some context.
When we think of talk therapy we usually imagine a situation where the therapist works with the client over a long period of time to try to understand the cause of the client’s problem. This psychoanalytic approach was pioneered by people like Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. Their general approach was adopted by most therapists thereafter, despite having no empirical evidence to support its efficacy.
Furthermore, although Freud’s case studies tend to feature patients who were “cured” as a result of psychoanalysis, Freud himself believed that the most important thing for patients was to understand why they were suffering; any cure was merely an incidental outcome and not at all the goal of the analysis.
Unfortunately, the amusingly baroque theories Freud and Jung variously constructed…
