Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

Profile of a giant human head formed from earth. A hole in the head reveals clouds and a tree. A human figure, dwarfed by the earth head, faces away.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, also known as CBT, is a psychological intervention that helps an individual recognize and understand the impact of their thoughts and feelings on their behaviors.

CBT may be used alone or together with other therapies to deal with a mental health condition.

What is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy? – Mental Health Center Kids

The CBT triangle, also called the cognitive triangle, is a tool that illustrates the relationship between how we think, feel, and behave. It’s one of the essential components of cognitive behavioral therapy.

The tip of the triangle represents our thoughts, while the bottom right and left points represent our feelings and behaviors, accordingly.

The CBT Triangle: What it is and How it Works – Mental Health Center Kids

Trauma-Focused CBT (TF-CBT)

  • Created for children who had experienced abuse. Expanded to help children and youth who had experienced any form of trauma; includes the family.
  • One skill from this therapy I still use with all ages is the Trauma Timeline where we create a timeline of major events which we intentionally process as potential roots to current distress and dysregulation.
  • Also has emphasis on grief – which helps!
AuDHD_Therapist ND Affirming Mental Health on Instagram
How This Type of Therapy Can Be Helpful for ADHD

CBT, like any form of therapy, can sometimes be misused to correct or reframe someone’s thinking in a way that’s invalidating or even gaslight people into doubting their own reality, especially when therapy isn’t done in a collaborative way with client

Because it focuses on cognitive distortions or thinking errors it can be easy for us to jump to the conclusion that our thoughts must be wrong especially if we’re being told that by someone we trust which is something those of us already dealing with cognitive challenges are susceptible to.

Used properly though, CBT should be collaborative and based on hypothesis testing.

How This Type of Therapy Can Be Helpful for ADHD – YouTube

CBT and the CBT triangle can be useful tools, but they can also be problematic for neurodivergent, traumatized, and marginalized people.

Table of Contents

CBT: You’re wrong for being upset about your oppression and neglected pain. You’re overreacting. Stop it.

Mindfulness: You can’t control the future. Be in the present. Oh, you’re in pain 24/7 INCLUDING the present? Uh…take a deep breath?

Alana Saltz on Twitter

CBT and Autism

Reflections on CBT and autistic thinking: Webinar for professionals03 02 23

Autistic children are anxious.

We treat them using CBT.

They learn to mask their anxiety, so the adults believe they are improved.

When the masking wears off the adults see the anxiety again and belief it is a relapse. – The relapse is the relapse of the masking.

If the children’s feelings are not important outcome of therapy, why do we send them to therapy?

Reflections on CBT and autistic thinking: Webinar for professionals03 02 23 – YouTube

For me, a CBT focus in itself is unhelpful. All it does is point out more things I “should” be masking and teaches me to put more effort into masking rather than understanding myself and others properly. It taught me that the things I do and think are “wrong”, which increased my anxiety and convinced me I was making up my feelings and problems.

Quote from Scottish Survey of Autistic Adult’s experiences of counselling, 2020 by Sonny Hallett

I call CBT: “The therapy where you look at yourself in a mirror and lie to yourself”.

One of my Icelandic clients, 2023, Reflections on CBT and autistic thinking: Webinar for professionals03 02 23

In CBT I learned a lot of new technical words. After CBT I had the feeling there was something more wrong with me. I even felt that I was doing something wrong.

One of my Icelandic clients, 2023, Reflections on CBT and autistic thinking: Webinar for professionals03 02 23

When autistic young people who present internally go unrecognised, they are likely to be struggling with anxiety, depression and other mental health problems, as well as poor self-esteem (Livingston and Happé, 2017). This can be due to feeling different from their peers, not receiving the right support for their needs, or feeling forced to mask their difficulties. Unrecognised autistic people who present internally may also have difficulty developing a sense of their own identity (Mogensen and Mason, 2015) and can develop unhelpful coping strategies such as self-harm, eating disorders or self-medicating with drugs or alcohol. They may be offered therapies such as CBT for their mental health without these being adapted for use with autistic people, meaning they are often ineffective.

Autism, Girls, & Keeping It All Inside

Clinical studies show Daan’s experiences are far from abnormal. Therapy that is focused on battling “irrational beliefs,” such as cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), doesn’t work as well on Autistic people as it does on neurotypicals.[72] One reason for that is many of the fears and inhibitions of Autistic people are often entirely reasonable, and rooted in a lifetime of painful experiences. We tend to be pretty rational people, and many of us are already inclined to analyze our thoughts and feelings very closely (sometimes excessively so). Autistics don’t need cognitive behavioral training to help us not be ruled by our emotions. In fact, most of us have been browbeaten into ignoring our feelings too much.

Recently, Daan switched therapists. His new therapist had only taken one continuing education course on Autistic adults in her entire career, but that still made her better informed than most providers. She sent Daan to get assessed, and began to read up on how to alter her therapeutic practice to fit him better.

“My new therapist admits there isn’t much research on helping Autistic people work through trauma,” he explains. “But she at least got me evaluated. And that has unlocked a world of understanding for me, because it’s helped me talk to other Autistics online.”

Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity

If you suspect you have an unhealthy relationship to drugs or alcohol, it will be important to identify a treatment method that suits your neurotype, or find a mental health provider who has experience with Autistics. Since a growing body of research suggests cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) approaches don’t work as well for Autistics as they do for neurotypicals, CBT-based addiction treatment might not be a good fit—at least not without modifications. One exploratory clinical study published in 2019 did find that when mental health providers were taught about how to communicate effectively with Autistic patients (a skill set most providers lack), the cognitive behavioral therapy they offered did help Autistic adults with their substance use disorders.

Unfortunately, most care providers are not well informed about how Autistic people think and communicate, and there is very little published research into which addiction treatment programs consistently work best for adult Autistics. Many of the effective treatment plans that do assist Autistic adults involve making sure our health care, housing, and other material needs are also being met, in addition to ensuring we are plugged into a network of supportive people. Often the fears that CBT therapists train their patients to view as irrational (if I say the wrong thing, I’ll lose my job and wind up on the street!) are completely rational for Autistics, and rooted in genuine experience.

Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity

Therapy based on these models can be

  • Unhelpful (when models point to wrong targets in therapy)
  • Increase problems (when models point to wrong targets in therapy)
  • Increase self-blame (blame themselves when therapy doesn’t work)
  • Increase anxiety (because situations never get easier, it teaches doubting your feelings, thoughts)
Reflections on CBT and autistic thinking: Webinar for professionals03 02 23 – YouTube

The major problem for CBT is it assumes disordered thinking which can be altered.

DaisyGirl on National Autistic Society’s chat, 2014

CBT and Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria (RSD)

If a patient does not benefit from medication, they have little control over an episode of RSD once it begins. The incidents have to run their course. Some people with ADHD, however, report that getting interested in something new and fascinating can help to end an RSD episode more quickly than it would otherwise. In my clinical experience, neither coaching nor traditional psychological or behavioral therapies — like CBT or DBT — offer any prevention or relief from impairments. Nonetheless, many people report that it is very helpful for them to know that this highly disruptive experience is real, common, and shared by other people with ADHD. “It helps me to know what is happening to me and that it is ultimately going to end.”

What Is Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria? ADHD and Emotional Dysregulation

Cognitive behavioral therapy might allow people to better understand their triggers, and equip them with healthier coping mechanisms when they feel an RSD episode coming on. However, CBT and other therapies are considered less effective for RSD than they are for other mental health conditions, in part because of how quickly an episode of RSD can be triggered. Although therapy may be helpful, mindfulness can also help people with RSD control their emotional reactions.

Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria: What You Should Know About ‘Emotional Sunburn’

CBT and Chronic Illness

For example, I was repeatedly made to do CBT for my insomnia (at least 4 times until now) but except for the first time, which was before my fibromyalgia was triggered, it never really worked. In fact, the last time (about 6 months ago), it very nearly broke me. That is when I started questioning whether generic treatments like this will work for people with chronic conditions (especially with various co-morbidities) without individual attention.

5 things I’ve learned from #NEISVoid (No End in Sight) – A Painful Identity

CBT and Oppression/Minority Stress

The “CBT Triangle” is a visual which shows how our Thoughts influence Feelings which influence Behavior:

  • Basis: thoughts create our reality.
    Change your thoughts, especially “faulty beliefs” + your feelings and behavior will improve = problems solved.
  • While CBT can be helpful with skills like “reframing thoughts”, it fails to be inclusive of ‘problems’ caused by systemic oppression (which cannot be overcome by simply changing our thought patterns).
AuDHD_Therapist ND Affirming Mental Health on Instagram

Therapy is one only option: While many folks have felt supported in therapy, not everyone can access it, not everyone wants to access it, and for some people, it simply hasn’t been helpful. Most dominant therapeutic techniques were developed with a white Eurocentric understanding of psychology and trauma, and approaches such as CBT can cause more harm to marginalized people.

Barriers to Intervention — Project LETS

Further reading,

Interoception
Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria
Body Scan
Minority Stress
Trauma

Published by Ryan Boren

#ActuallyAutistic retired technologist turned wannabe-sociologist. Equity literate education, respectfully connected parenting, passion-based learning, indie ed-tech, neurodiversity, social model of disability, design for real life, inclusion, open web, open source. he/they