25 Tips for Cognitive Behavior Therapy Practitioners [25 Effective Tips for CBT Therapists]

25 Tips for Cognitive Behavior Therapy Practitioners [25 Tips to CBT Therapists]

Practicing Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) seems pretty straightforward: you explain to the client how thoughts lead to feelings. You examine the client’s beliefs. You show them how they are distorting their thoughts, leading to negative feelings. You help the client change their thoughts. You ask them to implement a few behaviors. Easy, right? Even though CBT has a clear premise, conducting it is much more of an art than it is pure science. Here are twenty five tips to make sure your CBT treatment is a success.

This video focuses on these 25 essential tips for practitioners from goal settings to termination of therapy. If the therapists are able to inculcate these skills/tips, they will be successful in their CBT practice.

CBT typically includes these steps:

Identify troubling situations or conditions in your life. These may include such issues as a medical condition, divorce, grief, anger or symptoms of a mental health disorder. You and your therapist may spend some time deciding what problems and goals you want to focus on.

Become aware of your thoughts, emotions and beliefs about these problems. Once you've identified the problems to work on, your therapist will encourage you to share your thoughts about them. This may include observing what you tell yourself about an experience (self-talk), your interpretation of the meaning of a situation, and your beliefs about yourself, other people and events. Your therapist may suggest that you keep a journal of your thoughts.

In guided discovery, the therapist will acquaint themselves with your viewpoint. Then they’ll ask questions designed to challenge your beliefs and broaden your thinking. You might be asked to give evidence that supports your assumptions, as well as evidence that does not.
In the process, you’ll learn to see things from other perspectives, especially ones that you may not have considered before. This can help you choose a more helpful path.

Identify negative or inaccurate thinking. To help you recognize patterns of thinking and behavior that may be contributing to your problem, your therapist may ask you to pay attention to your physical, emotional and behavioral responses in different situations.

Reshape negative or inaccurate thinking. Your therapist will likely encourage you to ask yourself whether your view of a situation is based on fact or on an inaccurate perception of what's going on. This step can be difficult. You may have long-standing ways of thinking about your life and yourself. With practice, helpful thinking and behavior patterns will become a habit and won't take as much effort.

Activity scheduling can help establish good habits and provide ample opportunity to put what you’ve learned into practice.

Behavioral experiments are typically used for anxiety disorders that involve catastrophic thinking.

Before embarking on a task that normally makes you anxious, you’ll be asked to predict what will happen. Later, you’ll talk about whether the prediction came true.

Over time, you may start to see that the predicted catastrophe is actually not very likely to happen. You’ll likely start with lower-anxiety tasks and build up from there.

CBT is a popular treatment that can be applied to a wide range of issues, including the management of bipolar disorder.