Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) is a therapy that can help you manage your problems by changing the way you think and behave, says Melanie Gordon.
CBT – Cognitive Behavioural Therapy – is a type of therapy that provides psychologists with another way to consider behavioural, emotional, and social issues. The focus is on addressing, challenging, and changing the emotional issues that are presented or unwanted and how we view the world around us. This is particularly poignant at this point in our history as COVID-19 is sweeping through the world and changing the parameters on how we work, live, and educate. With CBT we can look at changing a negative situation we are faced with into a positive one and can look at issues in the present time and not in the past. The intention is to improve the current state of mind and not delve into past issues which often only rakes up a lot of unwanted baggage. This particular therapy looks at the future and how to improve life from this point onwards – the emotional management of the now, this present time and looking into the relationships between behavioural situations and the thoughts that go with them. The focus is on ways to make a happier and more successful life, taking away depression and anxiety, which a lot of us suffer with, especially at this difficult time.
The psychological drama of the now can bring out our compulsive and unwanted behaviours, making things more difficult as we feel blind to our own ways of perception. We lose our peace of mind and our conscious intelligence to explore the demons within us, making it difficult to go back to the person we were before we became lost. Social media can have some part to play in this, showing unrealistic ways of living or how we perceive supposedly better lives being led by others. This can lead to a sense of loss of self. We have sometimes lost the art of a simple life in which we are the creator of with our own colour, personality and vision. The way we view the world can now become so muddled that it is harder to see the wood for the trees and you may feel a sense of estrangement to leave the world of social requirements to get back to your identity. We should never put limits on our achievements as human intelligence is so vast that it is only a tool for a further thirst for knowledge.
We need to get back to knowing ourselves with the confidence and clarity and knowing what is in our hearts with objectiveness. Cognitive therapy is about humans being humans and how to look after ourselves in a humanitarian way so we can find our answers within ourselves and find the identity we are striving for to make a stable platform we can use for furthering the knowledge of the self.
A peaceful life is what we strive for and we can achieve that by accumulating information about ourselves to add structure and become a product of your own making.