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Changing your mind: How cognitive therapy can dissolve anxiety (and a bunch of other stuff)

by Anne Ford

Several years ago, a friend of mine—let’s call her Becca—answered a personal ad on a whim. What caught her eye were the two words at the end: “No therapy!” It turned out that she was seeking someone as opposed to sifting through the endless emotional detritus of the past as she was. They’re now married. Very happily.

When Becca told me the story, at first I was wary. I thought she was setting herself up for an obvious fall—a relationship with a guy who wasn’t willing to process emotions and talk things through. How screwed up was that? But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I could sympathize with their aversion to traditional therapy. After all, four years of what I call the watch-and-weep school of psychology (i.e., you pay someone to make vaguely supportive noises while you sob) had done little to ease the anxiety that had hovered over my shoulder ever since graduating from college and moving to the big city. Four years, with nothing to show for it. Now that was screwed up.

Fast-forward a couple years—after I’d fired my therapist, after I’d found a new one, after I’d been introduced to a book with a goofy title (more about that in a minute). I had gotten out of my ill-paying job, lost some weight, and begun to establish a freelance career. The book I’d read that had jump-started this shift wasn’t anything by Deepak Chopra, Shirley MacLaine, or the Dalai Lama. It was a self-help volume called The Feeling Good Handbook, written by David D. Burns, M.D., one of the fathers of something called cognitive therapy.

* Click here to buy The Feeling Good Handbook through ChronicBabe's Amazon Affiliates Link, and a donation will be made to help support the Babe! *

What is Cognitive Therapy?

Cognitive therapy, or CT, is a world away from watch-and-weep. It’s not concerned so much with processing the past as it is with figuring out how to make things better for yourself in the present. To do that, a cognitive therapist helps you figure out how your thought patterns influence your emotions. It’s not a particular event that makes you feel anxious or depressed; it’s the way you interpret that event.

For example, you’re walking down the hallway at work and greet someone who doesn’t reply. You might automatically think, “What did I do to upset him?,” “Bill is such a jerk!,” or “No one at this company likes me.” Depending on which thought goes through your head, you feel guilty, angry, or defeated. Cognitive therapy teaches you to assess the rationality of these automatic thoughts and to substitute realistic ones, such as “Bill might not have heard me say hello,” or “Bill might be angry with me right now, but that doesn’t mean our relationship is doomed.” With practice and patience, the realistic responses become second nature.

One of the major differences between cognitive therapy and traditional therapy is that CT is active. Between sessions, your therapist might have you do homework assignments—exercises designed to help you test your negative thoughts and determine if they’re valid. For example, someone with social anxiety might assume that the following automatic thought is true: “I’m so anxious around other people that if I went to a party, I wouldn’t have any fun.” CT would encourage her to test this assumption by going to the party and rating her anxiety level, then comparing it to the amount of fun she has. She might discover that it’s possible for her to have some fun even if she’s feeling slightly anxious. Once she accepts that fact, her anxiety level will probably fall.

Research Backs it Up

Sound too easy? More than 300 clinical studies have shown that CT can be at least as effective as medication for many different conditions, including depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, eating disorders, insomnia, social phobia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and even borderline personality disorder. It’s not just “the power of positive thinking.” It’s learning the skills to identify the negative thoughts that have sway over your emotions and assess their validity. Once you know how to help yourself understand on a gut level that that nasty little voice in your head doesn’t know what it’s talking about, your mood will undergo a radical change for the better. As Dr. Burns has written: “Cognitive therapy is an elegant, mind-blowing, startling approach.”

It certainly has been for me. If I were stranded on a desert island with only one book for the rest of my life, I’d make it The Feeling Good Handbook. After so many years of vague, goal-less therapy that left me increasingly frustrated and despairing, CT’s straightforward, down-to-earth approach feels like a lifeline. Now when I feel anxiety’s clench in my chest, I don’t assume that I’m doomed to panic. I get out my handbook, and I get to work.

* Click here to buy The Anxiety and Phobia Workbook (the Editrix's fave) through ChronicBabe's Amazon Affiliates Link, and a donation will be made to help support the Babe! *

Want to find a cognitive therapist? The Academy of Cognitive Therapy can refer you to one in your area; so can the International Association for Cognitive Psychotherapy. Besides The Feeling Good Handbook, these sites recommend books such as Dennis Greenberger and Christine Padesky’s Mind Over Mood, Edmund J. Bourne’s The Anxiety and Phobia Workbook, and Reid Wilson’s Don’t Panic. And several books, such as Ellen Catalano’s Chronic Pain Control Workbook, offer a CT perspective on managing chronic illness.

Anne Ford is no kind of health professional whatsoever. She is, however, an editor and writer whose work has appeared in the Chicago Reader, Chicago Social, Crain’s Chicago Business, and the Chicago Tribune. Guess what city she lives in?

Help the Babe

Use the search box below to find any of the books mentioned in this article. Clicking through to Amazon.com via this search box means that a portion of the proceeds from everything you purchase on this visit will go to support ChronicBabe. Thanks!

Posted: 8/1/2005 in Cool Tools | Also posted in: Coping
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