Cognitive therapy is a form of psychotherapy that helps people learn how to change their cognitive patterns. It often involves changing thoughts and beliefs about oneself, one’s future, and the world around them. Cognitive therapy can treat depression, anxiety disorders, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. You should consider three points when deciding whether cognitive therapy will work for your condition: 1) cognitive distortions, 2) cognitive errors, 3) cognitive restructuring skills.
1). Cognitive Distortions: these are ways in which we distort our thoughts or perceptions — they’re not based on reality but rather what we’ve been trained to believe as true or untrue from past experiences. Common examples include overgeneralization, mind-reading, fortune-telling, labeling/mislabeling, emotional reasoning, and catastrophizing.
2) Cognitive Errors: cognitive errors are cognitive distortions that we often make without realizing it. These include filtering, discounting the positive, and magnifying the negative.
3) Cognitive Restructuring Skills: cognitive restructuring skills are ways of re-evaluating cognitive distortions and cognitive errors. The process often involves identifying the distortion or error, determining what type it is (i.e., overgeneralization), generating a less distorted thought, and considering the evidence for each perspective to help determine which one is more accurate.
In conclusion, cognitive therapy is one way people can address cognitive distortions.
