How does cognitive behavioral therapy help with healing depression and other mental illnesses?
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It teaches you how to think about and understand your thoughts and emotions objectively, and overcome any flawed thinking that creates/exacerbates your mental health issues.
For example, someone with depression might exhibit ‘personalization’ which is where they take any menial event to be a personal attack on themselves. They take everything *personally*. If someone cuts them off in traffic, they might immediately think that the person cut them off because they are not important and no one cares about their well-being. However, the reality of the situation might be something like the person had to rapidly change lanes to avoid debris on the road and it actually has nothing to do with them.
Or another example, if someone is taking too long to reply to a text message, the person with depression might just automatically assume it’s because that person hates them and doesn’t want to talk to them, when the reality of that situation is that person was just outside doing yardwork and simply didn’t have their phone on them.
Or if someone is deathly anxious of giving a class presentation because they think people are going to remember any little hiccup or mistake forever and it’s going to be a permanent source of ridicule, CBT teaches them to think rationally about the situation which leads to the understanding that no one is going to remember their presentation after like 2 days even if they do mess up a little, which radically lowers the stakes of messing up that you built up in your own head.
CBT teaches people to think critically about their emotions and thoughts and identify problematic thinking that is causing or exacerbating their issues, such as dealing with ‘personalization’ issues such as the ones exemplified above.
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