Arguing about CBT w/ T

Which reasons don't relate to distorted thoughts?

Learning to recognize, put a name to, and work with feelings

Anxiety/fear is not necessarily a thought distortion

those things "could" happen but by learning to stay present/in the "now" one can work to mitigate their likelihood.

I'm a slob and don't clean so when I see the accumulated mess I worry I'll become an old lady, no friends, living in filth.

Action follows thought and feeling

"Maybe I'm just stubborn, but I felt like she wasn't getting that I feel this way. Even if maybe logically I'm not as useless/stupid/a failure as I think I am, I feel like I am, and I felt like she was trying to use to tough love/logic to reverse my thoughts, but it wasn't working. I guess I just wanted her to listen to me instead of pulling out her CBT stuff."

My T has used CBT/REBT approaches with me a great deal of the time. I quoted what you said above because you said you "feel" these things about yourself. Your T is trying to get you to see that those really aren't feelings; those are beliefs about yourself. They are your thinking, not your feeling. That was an important distinction for me because he taught me that I acquired those thought/beliefs about myself many, many years ago, and they were mistaken beliefs that I bought hook, line, and sinker about myself based on how the dangerous and abusive people around me treated me, what they told me about myself, and what I believed I had done to justify the treatment I received.

Realizing and acknowledging that my beliefs about myself and other people in those regards were mistaken and being able to pinpoint how those beliefs developed allowed me to rethink them. It took time, LOTS of time, but I have been able to restructure my thinking into more reality-based, present-time ideas that are so much healthier. I had to let go of those old beliefs that I truly, truly thought were accurate and be willing to learn the truth about myself (which was really that I'm a pretty decent person--strangely it was frightening to admit that or see that about myself).

CBT gets touted as a short-term therapy and very surface-level for only dealing with present day issues, but that has by no means been my experience. My T would say that is a textbook definition/description of CBT done very lock-step and structured, but it has not been the reality in complicated cases of abuse and shame and PTSD. It can take a very long time to explore where that old mistaken thinking came from and learn to restructure your own thinking. But once you can get your thinking to line up with reality, the pay-off is that your emotions/feelings are no longer based on mistaken ideas about yourself and the world around you, but about a clearer concept of who you are and what you have experienced in your life.

Be patient with yourself as you work through this. Rome wasn't built in a day as the old saying goes. My T has a book that he kept pushing me to read. In fact, he didn't even ask me to read the whole book, but two or three chapters in the middle of it. The title is The Anxiety & Phobia Workbook. I don't really have anxiety or phobia issues, so I was resistant to picking it up, but I finally did. In the middle of that book are two chapters about mistaken beliefs and cognitive distortions (I don't have the book in front of me right now to tell you exactly the chapters or titles, but they are pretty easy to find). You don't need to read the whole book at all. What this book does so well in those two chapters is has you explore what your mistaken beliefs are AND where do they come from. It is a quick, concise, non-convoluted overview of those CBT/REBT-type concepts that finally validated where my thinking had come from. I finally sat down and really worked at these chapters kind of over and over again and really journalled deeply about those beliefs and my history in regards to them. And over time, it started making some sense to me and my thinking slowly, very slowly, started to restructure about my past and myself.

Were you trying to sell me on CBT?

Have you actually spent all this time on this forum and not realized that many, many people have no clue that their thoughts are distorted? That seems to be one of the biggest issues I see here: people who believe in their whole hearts that what they are thinking is actual fact and reality when in actuality their thinking is completely messed up by whatever in their life has gotten them into this state. The therapist's real challenge is getting people to recognize their mistakes in thinking so that they aren't slaves to that distorted thinking any longer.

People go into therapy knowing they are miserable or lonely or depressed or manic or anxious or whatever, but generally they are not at all aware that all of these feelings they are having are the direct result of their mistaken thinking about themselves.

So, I'd say people generally go into therapy because they don't like how they are feeling, and it is usually in the process of therapy that they realize how tied they are to their screwed up thinking which is often the result of years and years of going through all sorts of yuck in their lives.

Why would you go to therapy for this thought? I'm talking about problems that you go to therapy for.

That sentence was about hoarding?

And the thought distortions that go along with this problem is that the person believes they should not express their feelings or that something terrible will happen if they express their feelings.

When I am feeling self-hating, I have a slough of reasons. None of them seem distorted to me. All of them seem pretty logical and reasonable. I duck and weave every CBT technique that tries to get me to change my thinking. I can handle persuasive arguments, but Jedi mind tricks? No.

I am very grateful that my therapist, who specializes in CBT, is comfortable with other stuff.

franki, I wouldn't like what happened to you either. When my therapist does start with the CBT stuff, it makes me think she's like a robot, just parroting what she's learned. Like I'm just another patient with regular, mundane problems--who can be easily re-programmed using a standard script.

just sayin' - I felt kinda judged

And then sometimes someone has physical symptoms of anxiety completely in the absence of an underlying trigger or thought. They may be in therapy not to self-correct thoughts, but to simply learn how to relax.

Alexithymia doesn't sound that common. I have talked to so many people who follow the path that I have described. There are hundreds and hundreds of stories here.

It's not rare at all, though.

Some people are born nervous.

A lot of people go to therapy not because they've been abused or because they've lived a crappy life, but because they just have a messed-up brain (raises hand).

So today I saw my T for the first time in a month; we had a double session. I told her I had been feeling depressed, hopeless, couldn't get out of bed for a couple days this week b/c of my job situation. I also eventually told her I had been having suicidial thoughts and she kept asking me to elaborate but I didn't want to.
She specializes in CBT, and we started talking about my thoughts regarding how I feel about myself, ie worthless, stupid, hopeless, etc. She said they were cognitive distortions and pulled out her list of cognitive distortions and started saying what type of cognitive distortion I had. Then (and she ALWAYS does this) she asked, "Well, if one of your friends was unemployed, would you tell them they were stupid and useless?" and of course I said no. She is always asking me this question: "Well, if someone else were jobless/didn't have a PhD/received a bad grade would you think they were stupid, etc?" And the answer is always no, I wouldn't,and then she always asks why I think this way about myself if I don't hold other people to the same standard. I understand where she is coming from, but it doesn't change my belief about myself. I feel like she is trying to logically talk me out of how I feel about myself, but it's not working, and I told her that her "technique" wasn't helping.