Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
Are You Looking for Actionable Steps to Improve Your Mental Health?
Do you find yourself becoming caught up in negative thinking spirals that you can’t seem to break out of?
Does it ever feel like you have little to no control over your thoughts, feelings, or behaviors?
Has your mood or anxiety taken up too much space in your life, preventing you from connecting with loved ones or engaging in meaningful activities the way you want to?
Are you tired and defeated from fighting an endless battle against your own thoughts and feelings?
It can feel exhausting and isolating living day to day when you are struggling with your mental health. You find ways to cope and make it through the day, although a part of you can’t help but believe that things could be easier.
When Thinking Goes Awry
The ability to think about the past, present, and future is what separates humankind from the rest of the animal kingdom. Unfortunately, it can also be your worst enemy when it comes to mental health struggles such as anxiety, depression, anger, self-esteem issues, or other struggles you may have. You may have noticed that when you're in an unpleasant emotional state, your thinking patterns tend to be quite different compared to what they are when you are calm and relaxed. One reason for this is that when the emotion center of your brain (called the limbic system) is triggered, it takes over the “thinking center” of the brain (called the prefrontal cortex). This has evolutionary benefits to survival, but can lead to unnecessary suffering and distress in modern day life.
It's all too easy for you mind to begin to see the world filtered through the painful emotional state you are in. For instance, if you are feeling anxious, the thoughts you have will likely remind you how unsafe you are. If you are angry, your thoughts will tell you how unfair and unjust the world is, and how the universe seems to have it out for you. With depression, your thoughts may suggest that it’s hopeless to try to improve your life and you might as well lay in bed and give up.
You Were Not Taught How to Cope
While fighting endless internal battles with your thoughts and feelings likely leaves you feeling alone and isolated, you are actually in very good company. In fact, in the United States alone, it is estimated that one in five adults (or 52.9 million people) are currently living with a diagnosed mental health condition.
Unfortunately, in Western society, our schools have not traditionally focused on mental or emotional health. If you are like most others, nobody ever taught you how to handle painful inner experience. You were probably never taught how to recognize and challenge distorted thinking patterns or how to sooth a dysregulated nervous system that causes overwhelming and unpleasant feelings or sensations. You are left to navigate the emotional impacts of a stressful world on your own. It’s all too easy to fall into patterns of coping with life's hardships in a way that invariably creates even more suffering. The good news is that with specialized cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), you can learn actionable skills that will lead to long term change and relief.
The Thought-Feeling-Behavior Cycle
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) was developed in the 50s and 60s as a response to less directive forms of psychotherapy that would take people years and years to complete. In these earlier forms of therapy, it was off limits to directly address one's present moment experience or symptoms. Rather, individuals would spend hours deciphering how their past experience has led to unconscious patterns, with the hope that understanding this would lead to behavioral change. While there can certainly be merit in discussing the past, CBT was the first treatment modality to recognize that by directly addressing present moment thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, people could make actionable, positive changes right now, with lasting effects.
CBT recognizes that your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are intimately connected. For instance, if you have the thought “what if something bad happens tomorrow”, you will likely feel anxious and stressed out, which will lead to some sort of coping behavior, such as avoidance or rumination (over analyzing all the bad things that could happen). These behaviors will lead to more anxiety in the long term, which will then perpetuate the cycle. In CBT, you will gain deep insight into the root of your suffering by exploring the relationship between your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors and learning how to make changes to each of these domains. This will allow you to break the cycle of suffering and lead you towards the long term sense of peace you have been looking for.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) Provides a Long Term Solution to Feel Better
It’s only human to feel stuck on something and need some extra support to get back to living to your full extent. The therapists at Beachfront Anxiety Specialists strive to create a warm, trusting, and collaborative therapeutic environment where you can feel emotionally safe enough to take a step back and identify how your relationship with your inner experience has been keeping you stuck. Not only will you gain valuable insight into the factors that maintain your sense of stuckness or emotional turmoil, but you will be empowered to make the necessary changes to fully engage in a rich and meaningful life.
We are highly trained and seasoned in using CBT to help our clients free themselves from various problems such as anxiety disorders, OCD, depression, relationship struggles, chronic pain, stress, identity concerns, and trauma. Therapists at Beachfront Anxiety Specialists strive to balance giving you all the space you need to process and talk through hard things, while being able to provide you with actionable, science-backed skills to attain the change you’ve been looking for.
What to Expect in Sessions with Us
In our sessions, you and your therapist will work closely together to unpack the relationship between your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Our therapists are highly skilled at fostering a warm and safe environment from the very first session, and we will conduct a thorough psychological assessment to ensure you are receiving high quality and comprehensive treatment. Over the course of the first several meetings, you and your therapist will get to know each other, assess your symptoms, and develop actionable treatment goals. You will learn how various CBT principles can apply to your specific symptoms, background, values, and context.
Once we have a solid understanding of how your specific mental health concerns are presenting, we will work closely with you to develop a treatment plan that tailors high quality, science-based interventions to your specific needs. High quality CBT involves addressing your concerns in a holistic way. You will learn how various states of emotional suffering hijack your ability to think clearly, and how to take power back to live a more fulfilling, authentic life.
In CBT , we strive to help you become your own CBT therapist by teaching and practicing science-backed tools to help you move forward in your life. While treatment looks differently for everybody, some of the core CBT skills include:
Practicing ways to hack your behavior to boost your mood and think more clearly.
Learning science backed tools to help cool down your nervous system and take the edge off of bigger emotions.
Experimenting with new ways to "think about thinking" in order to fundamentally change your relationship with negative or unhelpful thoughts.
Learning how to step back from painful thoughts and feelings to gain new perspectives.
Gaining insight into the various ways your emotional mind takes over your thinking mind.
Developing and practicing tools to shift to more accurate and healthy narratives.
Customizing Therapy Techniques for Your Needs
At Beachfront Anxiety Specialists, we never take a cookie cutter approach to your treatment. We view our roles as active collaborators and coaches as much as we are therapists. Our job is to help you feel empowered to take control over your mental health by providing tools, insights, and gentle guidance. You are always in the driver’s seat of your treatment, determining where we go and how fast you’d like to get there.
While CBT can be an incredibly powerful ingredient to improving your emotional and psychological well-being, our therapists are also highly trained in several other evidence-based modalities to help you meet your goals. We are able to weave in mindfulness, self-compassion focused therapy, acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), and exposure and response prevention (ERP). These approaches are powerful supplements to CBT by helping you accept what cannot be controlled, grounding yourself in the present moment, soothing your nervous system by learning how to offer yourself kindness and warmth, and to systematically overcome your fears. Together, you and your therapist can integrate other evidence-based interventions to help you move forward with life.
You May Still Have Questions About Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
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CBT is an investment in your long-term sense of self and peace of mind. The goal of CBT is to help you develop mastery over your psychological symptoms, empowering you to become your own CBT therapist. Unlike traditional forms of talk therapy, CBT is active, collaborative, and goal-driven. Typical courses of treatment usually last between 6 to 12 months, although this can vary from client to client.
Our fees reflect the depth of our training and clinical expertise and allow our therapists to maintain smaller case loads so we can devote more attention to each of our clients. While we are not in-network with any insurance company, we do offer superbills which you can submit to your insurance company for out-of-network benefits.
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We work closely with our clients to help them gently face their fears one step at a time. An exposure exercise should never feel overwhelming or too scary, and you are always in charge of the process. The exposures will also be in service of your deeply held values, so it should be something that naturally you already want to do! We work to strategically face down OCD or anxiety in bite sized pieces, where you will feel empowered by developing wins under your belt as you chip away at the hold your symptoms have over you. We also teach powerful skills that will help you navigate internal discomfort with ease. These are tools that you will be able to take with you and use for the rest of your life.
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Traditional talk therapy is typically non-directive and non-structured. People bring up problems and struggles into therapy, where they feel heard and validated. While this tends to help people feel better in the short term, traditional talk therapy usually doesn’t lead people out of stuck cycles. At Beachfront Anxiety Specialists, not only will you feel truly heard and understood, but you will learn and practice actionable skills that you can begin applying immediately.
You Can Improve Your Mental Wellbeing
If you would like to schedule an appointment or discuss any questions you may have regarding Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), contact us below. We try to get back to all voicemails and emails within 24 hours. Before starting therapy, we always offer free 20 minute phone consultations to make sure we’re a good fit to work together.