Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) is a therapeutic model with the aim of reducing emotional suffering by reducing unrealistic thoughts and beliefs (called cognitive distortions), and harmful behaviors.
Cognitive-behavioral therapy has been shown to have high efficacy in treating a variety of mental health disorders, including depression and anxiety. In fact, the National Institute of Health refers to CBT as the current gold standard of psychotherapy.
John Mathews, LCSW at Virginia Counseling, has been practicing psychotherapy in the Greater Richmond area since 2009 and draws heavily from cognitive-behavioral therapy in his work with clients.
Cognitive-behavioral therapy gained prominence during the “cognitive revolution” of the 1950s, lead by early proponents Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck. CBT therapists seek to provide tangible skills (coping skills) to help their clients with emotion management and emotional regulation in the immediate-term. This contrasts with earlier, longer-term therapeutic models like Freudian psychoanalysis, which seeks to resolve emotional distress through the processing of past experiences and events.
You may be interested to know that cognitive-behavioral therapy has roots much further back in time than the 1950s. In developing their early CBT models, both Ellis and Beck drew inspiration from Stoicism, an ancient Greek school of philosophy that flourished in the 3rd century BC. Stoics believed that the proper use of logic and ethics were the key to a good life, and that suffering occurs when one’s beliefs or expectations stray from reality or are unjust in nature.
All or nothing thinking (also known as black and white thinking)is a cognitive distortion that causes a person to see something as all good or all bad, with no in-between (Burns, 1981, 40–41; Beck, 2021, 253). This is one of the most common cognitive distortions, and also one of the most damaging. Examples of all…
Jumping to conclusions is a cognitive distortion, or a faulty pattern of thought, in which a person makes unhelpful assumptions that are not supported by evidence (Burns, 1981, 40–41). These “jumps” are leaps into the unknown. Jumping to conclusions is a particularly common cognitive distortion because we all must draw conclusions based on partial or…
Blaming is a cognitive distortion, or a faulty thought pattern, that causes a person to wrongly assign the responsibility of a negative outcome either to oneself or another. This cognitive distortion occurs when one wrongly blames another for one’s own actions, or when one wrongly assumes responsibility for others’ actions. Examples of blaming others Often,…
The CBT triangle (or cognitive triangle) is a model for illustrating the relationship between thoughts, behaviors, and emotions. This model acts as a map for understanding the relationship between these three points (thoughts, behaviors, and emotions), and how we can make changes to habits of thought and behavior to help us feel better. This relationship…
Overgeneralization is a cognitive distortion, or a faulty thought pattern, that causes a person to generalize the outcome of one or several negative events to all similar events. It is the error of drawing a big conclusion from a small sample (Burns, 1981, 40–41; Beck, 2021, 253). We all have to make inferences and assumptions…
Mental filtering is a cognitive distortion that occurs when you filter out positive information and only focus on negative information.