Cognitive Behavior Therapy for Women’s Health Issues

Cognitive behavior therapy is an evidence-based highly effective therapeutic treatment for anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder. Essentially, at our office, our team will work together with you to identify unhelpful thought patterns that keep you feeling stuck in anxious feelings, hopelessness, or fear.

Once we name these unhelpful thoughts, we can find evidence to challenge them and create more helpful reframes. Most importantly, these cognitive reframes are authentic to you. Over time, the goal of CBT introduces the helpful cognitive reframe to replace the unhelpful thought pattern and change your neural network.

We value a trauma informed approach to CBT. Your thoughts are not irrational-they exist for a reason, and are often rooted in traumatic experiences. They are keeping you stuck, and by viewing them as unhelpful we can help you find more healthy and helpful reframes to move forward.

What are Unhelpful Thought Patterns?

Problematic or unhelpful thought patterns that keep you in a loop of feeling stuck. These may sound like:

Magnification and minimization/disqualifying the positive:

Minimizing positive events, personality traits, or accomplishments while magnifying negative events or personality traits

Ignoring important parts:

ignoring important facts/details of a situation

Catastrophizing:

Going to the worst possible outcome of a situation

Overgeneralization:

If something bad happened one time, we assume it will happen again and again.

Oversimplifying/Magical Thinking/“Just World” Belief:

Good things should happen to good people, bad things should happen to bad people. Why is something bad happening to me if I am a good person?

Personalization:

The belief that you are responsible or at fault for events outside of your control

Jumping to conclusions/Fortune telling:

Assuming the outcome or meaning of an event/situation without evidence; predicting the future

Mind reading:

Assuming others’ thoughts about you are bad/negative without evidence or knowledge

Emotional reasoning:

The belief that feelings are facts; Tip: feelings are always valid- they are not always factual.

“Should” statements:

The belief that things, events, or people should be a specific/certain way. Tip: Helpful reminder that should statements create shame and self-criticism/ judgment.

All or nothing thinking/Rigid thinking:

Thinking in rigid or absolute terms, using words such as “forever”, “always”, “never” or “every”

What is Cognitive Reframing?

Cognitive reframes are helpful replacement thoughts for stuck points or unhelpful thought patterns. Reframes use evidence to challenge the unhelpful thought patterns, which help rewire the neural pathways over time and replace the “stuck” thought.

To create evidence, we use a reframe chart to help gather evidence and organize our thoughts.

Items we can discuss to use in creating reframes may include:

• The situation or event leading up to the unhelpful thought

• Your emotions coming up associated with the thought

• Rating the intensity of the emotions both before and after the cognitive reframing exercise

• Finding factual evidence that supports the unhelpful thought

• Finding factual evidence that challenges the unhelpful thought

• Identifying all relevant cognitive distortions

• Validating your feelings with self compassion and understanding

• Introducing flexibility into your thought pattern

• Identifying phrases that help increase your distress tolerance

  • “I can get through this.”

  • “This is temporary.”

• Identifying phrases that help increase your feelings of acceptance

  • “I accept that this is my reality just for today.”

• Recognizing dialectical thought processes where two opposite feelings or thought patterns are both true at the same time

CBT Therapy Helps Us Understand the Cycle Of Thoughts, Feelings and Behaviors

Brain imaging scans tell us that humans have about 6,000 thoughts per day. Incredible! However, we can’t expect all of those thoughts to necessarily be helpful. Our thought patterns influence our emotions which impact our behaviors. If we are stuck in a negative feedback loop with unhelpful thought patterns, our emotions will be more intense (ex. Anger, rage, hopelessness) and our behaviors may not align with our values system.

Now, imagine your emotions are like the volume on a stereo. By changing the feedback loop to include a new more helpful cognitive reframe, our emotions may dial down (ex. anger and rage are replaced with frustration and the intensity of hopelessness is much less) and our behaviors are more in alignment with how we view the world, treat others and treat ourselves.

CBT Therapy Helps Get You “Un-Stuck”

CBT can help break the cycles of unhelpful thought patterns, rewire the way our brain thinks by creating new neural pathways, and helps turn the volume down on intense or unpleasant emotions. CBT doesn’t completely get rid of unpleasant feelings and that is not our goal in working together. CBT is able to help you thrive in the midst of painful feelings and difficult situations while managing your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors in a more helpful way.