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Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
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Understanding our dreams or understanding our habitual behavior can certainly help us understand why we face
challenges in our lives but this knowledge alone will not help us deal with the challenges. If our hope is to
change the way we are feeling, to end our suffering, we need other tools to assist us in changing our habitual
patterns.
The eightfold path that the Buddha described twenty-five hundred years ago proclaimed we needed to do things
right: right thinking, right speaking, right actions … Conversely, what can make life more difficult is wrong
thinking, wrong speaking, wrong actions … Correcting these wrong habits is where the tools of CBT are very
useful.
CBT is a merger of two distinct therapies. Dr. John Bush explains [1] the two precursors
to CBT.
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Behavior therapy helps you weaken the connections between troublesome situations and your habitual reactions to
them. Reactions such as fear, depression or rage, and self-defeating or self-damaging behavior. It also teaches
you how to calm your mind and body, so you can feel better, think more clearly, and make better decisions.
Cognitive therapy teaches you how certain thinking patterns are causing your symptoms - by giving you a
distorted picture of what's going on in your life, and making you feel anxious, depressed or angry for no
good reason, or provoking you into ill-chosen actions.
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Together these two therapies form a powerful, clinically proven approach to achieving a more satisfying life.
CBT is very different from psychoanalysis, which can take years of work, and has, in Dr. Bush's words
"not much science behind it." Even the early client-centered therapies of pioneers, such as Rogers, were
based on the personal intuition of the therapist. The clinically proven benefits of CBT have caused it to
become the preferred approach to dealing with emotional and behavioral problems.
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