Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

How CBT Works

CBT isn’t generally used to be a long-form therapy. This makes it ideal to incorporate in addiction recovery programs since inpatient treatment is generally a short-to-medium term commitment. As a therapeutic method, CBT helps therapists and counselors quickly get to the root of the problem in a patient’s life. It is also a very cause-and-effect focused form of therapy, which can lead to tangible changes in thought processes that lead to problematic behavior.

The reason it is so important to focus on destructive thought patterns is due to the fact that it is so hard for a patient to recognize those thoughts outside of a therapeutic environment. Feelings of stress, frustration, and anxiety make it difficult for loved ones to positively engage and communicate with someone suffering from substance abuse.

CBT helps people overcome several key hurdles that get in the way of the path to recovery, including the following:

• Low self-esteem
• Feelings of anxiety
• Aggressive behavior
• Poor perception abilities
• A state of depression

Recognizing Negative Thought Patterns

The key component of CBT is to recognize, address, and work to change negative thought patterns so that they don’t control a person’s behavior. The root of a person’s addiction can often be mixed within these negative thought patterns, and so learning to break that cycle of destructive thinking is of the utmost importance.

These are 5 of the most common types of destructive thought patterns that CBT teaches to recognize and change:

• Overgeneralizing: This occurs when a person looks at a bad thing and then apply that one negative instance to their whole life. This leads to immense overreactions that take over a person’s life, such as thinking that people who are mad at them once will always hate them.

• Oversimplifying: This is when someone takes a strictly white-and-black, or some other binary view, of a situation. If someone views the world this way, then they begin to think that things are great or terrible, and this usually leads to people thinking things are often terrible because they can’t be perfect.

• Overloading responsibilities: This is when a person considers everything around them to be within their control, regardless of whether they have any control or not. This is a constant source of guilt since they assume that everything wrong must be their fault.

• Abstraction: Abstraction, or selective abstraction, occurs when someone continually focuses on the things they perceive they do wrong, to the point where they disregard any logic about their own self-worth.

• Overfocusing on the self: This is when a person always thinks that people around them are thinking about them or focusing on them in some way, which leads them to self-focus on their own failures.

Each of these thought patterns is commonly found in people who struggle with addiction. After all, addiction is a behavioral disease that is heavily impacted by elements of shame and regret, and those feelings can be twisted within negative thought patterns until they manifest as something much more destructive.

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