Actively choosing to use what I know

Hey Tay, talking about the feelings wouldn't come under CBT. If you actually experienced abandonment in your life you formed these feelings and more likely than not you didn't get a chance to process them. These feelings will stick with you then until you express and process them. If you leave them there they will continue to trigger you. Express and process them and they will dissipate.

I don't think that you necessarily need to talk about how unlovable you think you are in therapy. You just need to express those feelings. We feel many things that aren't true. In order to work on these things they must be identified and expressed because they certainly affect our thoughts and behavior.

I guess with the CBT there is the model and then the way that it is practiced. I have heard many comments from people who are told their thoughts are irrational and that they must change. These comments are in this thread right here. Of course there are therapists who practice it well!

It is well known that CBT (or any specific therapy) doesn't work for everyone. That is, in part, why there are so many different varieties of psychotherapy. A person does well in therapy when they have both a therapist who is a good fit for them and an approach that is a good fit for them. Recently I was talking to my psychology professor (a practicing clinician) about the data regarding CBT as a therapy for depression. She said that CBT works best for depression when the client has a certain style of automatic negative thinking and cognitive distortions. She said this thinking style is very common in depressed clients, but it is not found in all people suffering from depression. She said these are the people for whom CBT is not a good fit and they do better with other types of talk therapy. I asked her what the ratio was, and she said about 75% of clinically depressed have the negative and distorted thinking style and can benefit from CBT. (I wasn't sure if this figure was based on her experience as a clinician treating depressed clients or based on studies.) Just want to emphasize that our discussion was specifically about treatment for depression.

Yes, this is what I have observed as well. Emotions often precede thoughts. Just think about the evolution of the brain. The parts of the brain where emotion arises are the most primitive regions of the brain (present in lower animals), whereas the thinking center is the cerebral cortex, which evolved much more recently, and is a defining characteristic of the human brain. We experience emotion, and our thinking center steps in to manage the feelings, make sense of them, process them, etc.

That said, there is a body of literature too that looks at whether the negative thinking style seen in many depressed clients is an effect of the depression or a cause. There are data that show that people who are not depressed can have a negative thinking style, and this is a very high risk factor for later experiencing depression. So, it does seem in at least some people, the negative thinking contributes to the depression (rather than just being caused by the depression). I think there is no "one way" it works in everyone, and there are a number of different paths to depression (as well as effective treatments).

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i'm late to this thread (been avoiding it!) but i'm at a place right now where i really appreciate the title & what you've had to say, FG. even though i haven't processed the trauma in detail (at all) just yet, i still find it useful to use my skills of compartmentalising so it doesn't taint the rest of my week. i relate strongly to the urge to "wallow" (and relate strongly to that word!) but i told myself about two weeks ago to just pull myself together, and i've had a very productive and satisfying two weeks. austin-t calls it containment and thinks it's a great skill that i've been able to master, but now i have to work towards letting it out a bit during therapy instead - which will be hard, i know, but will be healthier than being emotionally contained in therapy and dysregulated during the week.

i had a very cut/dry therapist before i met austin-t; we did CBT and it was awful. but i know the approach itself works very well for me, and i specifically requested it again with austin-t (i go in and say "i want serious CBT this week!") and because he allows room for emotions to be processed when i want to i've gained more in the 8 months i've been with him than the 6 years combined i'd been with any other therapist.