Just to preface this, my therapist is mostly a CBT guy but will use additional approaches to find what works. This is very important to me because I had years of unhelpful to even harmful therapy from those who were not so flexible (despite claiming they were of course ... I mean seriously, who puts "inflexible" on their resume ).

I've mentioned before that when I hit bottom with the resulting depression and almost didn't make it, I found simple actions the only thing that helped at all. Working on my feelings and thoughts did not.

Things like going for a walk, eating properly, sleeping regularly, exercising, running small errands, and trying to go out into the world in safe settings.

This seemed like a good approach in general because it offered some tiny bit of respite from all my issues. And because I was getting no traction on the thoughts and feelings. But I could control my physical actions. So I would often recommend it to people, but not presume it would work for everyone.

I still would not presume. However I was a little surprised by something my therapist brought up the other session. Cognitive-Behavior Theory obviously is about tackling both cognition and behavior. But what surprised me, because it is not generally discussed, is that it isn't always that way. For mild to moderate depression the standard combination is recommended. For severe depression, only behavioral methods are recommended at first.

We set the cognitive aspect aside in the early days when it seemed to be making me worse. He apologized again the other session for not sooner realizing I was in that place.

I've always liked Marsha Linehan's DBT approach of trying a variety of things and seeing which ones work for the individual -- in lieu of adhering too much to grand theories. So I thought I'd post this little tidbit, since it doesn't seem to get a lot of air.