Cognitive Therapy Works
Tuesday April 4, 2006
Cognitive Therapy really does work. I found this out for myself one day when I found myself getting upset over something my husband had done and I decided to put the exercises I had learned to the test.
Comments
Cognitive Therapy or common decency and common sense?
I do believe cognitive therapy is useful for some people, but I’m not one of them. I have not only read Dr. Burns book, as well as other books, but I have even worked with a coginitive therapist, filled out the forms, tried all the exercises, and it hasn’t helped.
For me, I have come to believe that the emotional patterns that can come up to overwhelm are simply not cognitively based. Since I have suffered from depression all my life, it is probable that some of these patterns were created prior to the learning of language. This possibility is mentioned in the “emotional deprivation” schema in the book “Schema Therapy” by Young, Klosko, and Aaron Beck.
In a case like this, I can spout verbal refutations indefinitely without even identifying the underlying core experience. Just because I can prove “logically” that I shouldn’t be feeling this way doesn’t help me stop feeling overwhelmed, confused and self-destructive.
I think depression can be multi-level and complex. My journey out of depression has been much more about learning to feel the emotions and to tolerate them, rather than to come up with arguments about why the emotions are invalid and in some sense try to deflect or repress them.