Like a bridge, CBT helps to transport you from one automatic cognitive belief or learned behavior to a more true, positive, and adaptive one. The first part of the work is simply catching the negative thoughts in the moment and noticing them — without judgment. Most of the thoughts driving how we feel move too fast to notice; they arrive already believed.
From there we test them. Not with forced positivity, which nobody believes anyway, but with genuine curiosity: is this true, is it always true, and what would I say to someone I loved who told me this about themselves? Alongside that sit behavioral experiments — small, specific changes in what you do, chosen because avoidance is what keeps most anxiety alive.
The CBT offered here is integrated rather than by-the-book. It sits alongside guided imagery, visualization and mindfulness, because thinking your way out of a dysregulated body rarely works on its own.
What a session involves
Sessions tend to have a shape — opening mindfulness exercise, reevaluation of prior session or review of recent thoughts, images, cognitions, emotions, sensations, or events, collaborative agenda setting, intervention and skills practice together, and a closing mindfulness exercise, potentially followed by homework from the Mental Health Resource Library for practice between sessions.
