CBT - yes or no?

In case you don’t know, CBT is Cognitive Behavioural Therapy.  The basic premise of the therapy is to identify your core beliefs about yourself, others and the world, change them and that will begin to impact your behaviour.  And then once you’ve done that, you will overcome your mental health problems.

Sounds nice and neat - doesn’t it?  Except I fell at the very first hurdle - identifying my core beliefs about myself.  What on earth were they?  And how did I discover them?

I have tried doing this particular therapy a number of times and it has never been successful for me.  Some things I thought I might identify with and tried to use them to begin changing my mental health and life.

But for me, I just couldn’t gel with the actual therapy.  For many years I kept trying to go back to it and hoped things would change this time and I could “get” the whole point of how it worked never happened.

Part of the problem I think, is that there are so few sessions with the therapist.  Because it’s assumed that once you’ve done know what to do, you can follow the process and change other mental processes.

For me, because I really couldn’t figure out my core beliefs about everything it became totally null and void.  It could never have worked for me, but I believed I was the problem and if I kept trying, eventually it would.

I do know that for some people there is success in this therapy.  But it is not the only therapy in the world so I didn’t have to try again and again for it to work.  I just needed the right sort of therapy that actually made sense to me and I could work with.

TREASURE 

Understanding that CBT doesn’t work for everyone and realising that I was NOT the problem has been a massive blessing for me.  And I have discovered what actually works for me.