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Between the event and our response, lies the mind.

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Cognition is the process of thought. At any given time, there will be many different thoughts jockeying for position in your mind. Many pass through automatically without you even being aware of them, but they can still deeply impact how you feel and how you behave.

For example, in depression, people have learned to accept these automatic thoughts. They will often misjudge a situation and develop a negative cognitive bias toward themselves, their environment, and their life. Some therapies for depression focus on helping the patient to understand themselves and their reactions better. Psychoanalysis is one such therapy.

Psychoanalysis, as well as humanistic and other insight-oriented therapies, maintain that the road to healthier behavior is through increased self-understanding of motives and conflicts. Rather than focus on insight, cognitive and behavioral therapies focus on action. Both cognitive and behavioral therapies hold the view that gaining insight into the source of problems does not necessarily change behavior and thought patterns. Even though you fully understand why you are behaving in counterproductive ways, your self-defeating patterns may continue.

The goal of cognitive therapy is to modify the way we think. Cognitive therapists believe that if negative thinking patterns can be learned, they can be unlearned.

In cognitive therapy, the therapist really works hard not to be the authority figure but instead to be the partner— or collaborator— with the client, and to work with the client in a mutually respectful interaction, to try to get at what's really going on as a truth seeker, but also trying to put a lot of control into the client's hands, so that they can learn skills to address their problems themselves and not rely on the therapist for interpretations or understanding.

Therapy involves teaching the client to pick out negative automatic thoughts and cognitive biases for a closer examination. Empirically testing the reality of the upsetting cognitions allows the patient to identify the distortion and replace it with the correct emotional response.

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Compared to traditional forms of psychotherapy like psychoanalysis, cognitive behavioral therapy is designed to be short term. And it's because that it's so structured and focused on real problems in the moment that it can move the person forward very rapidly toward relief from their symptoms. And that's probably because people are learning skills that they can take with them into the rest of their life to combat new episodes of depression or anxiety that might come about.

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Systematic desensitization is a method for gradually exposing a person to an environment or a specific situation that typically creates anxiety for them.

So desensitization therapy often begins in the therapist's office, and later the patient may be exposed to the real life situation. But if the anxiety-arousing situation is too expensive, difficult, or embarrassing to recreate, virtual reality offers a form of computer assisted systematic desensitization.

The patient is immersed in a three-dimensional virtual world that, despite being computer generated is sufficiently lifelike, to trigger the physiological indicators of anxiety. The patient is progressively exposed to the feared object or situation until the anxiety diminishes. The relative ease of virtual reality has begun to attract the kind of extremely phobic people who in the past were unwilling to seek treatment. But how do they deal with major depression where the cause is more murky, or with generalized anxiety disorder, in which anxiety has no focus?

Cognitive behavioral therapy has actually been shown to be very effective for even quite severe depressive disorders, anxiety disorders, and very helpful on a wide range of disorders. So most cognitive behavioral therapists would believe that they could be helpful to people almost no matter what they're suffering, unless perhaps, they're psychotic and completely out of touch with reality.

Cognitive behavioral therapists believe a lot in homework— that you don't really solidify any gains by simply talking to a therapist for an hour in the office. But that you really have to take these skills that you're trying to learn home and practice them, also try out little experiments to see if these new skills really can work in the natural situation. So a lot of the homework assignments involve gathering information, like keeping diaries of the thoughts that you have in certain situations, so you can tune into those automatic thoughts and begin to understand what your running commentary is.

I'm here today to talk to you [MICROPHONE FEEDBACK] about cognitive behavioral therapy.

CBT has been shown to be effective in treating a wide range of disorders including major depression, anxiety, borderline personality, and eating disorders. And it may even prevent depression and positively alter your brain chemistry in the same way antidepressants do.

Still, CBT is not right for everybody, and results may vary. If you lack a certain type of motivation, a different type of therapy would be a better fit. If you are experiencing certain types of mania, schizophrenia, or suicidal depression, you must seek therapeutic help through other means. Thank you.

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