If you’re facing challenges with your mental health or overall wellness, cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) can be a powerful, evidence-based solution. Finding a qualified CBT therapist near you is more accessible than ever, especially with Royal Life Centers offering comprehensive mental health services across the United States. Our nationwide network of treatment centers provides personalized, private care for a range of mental health disorders and addictions. In this article, we’ll explore the benefits of CBT and how you can begin your healing journey through Royal Life Centers.
What Is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)?
Cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT, is an evidence-based psychotherapy that offers treatment and healing for a wide range of issues. Behavioral issues, mental health disorders, and neurodevelopmental disorders can all benefit from CBT. Notably, CBT is sometimes considered the base root of behavioral therapy, since dialectical behavioral therapy stems from it. While DBT places a greater emphasis on emotional regulation, CBT focuses on the broader interplay between thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. At its core, CBT empowers individuals to reshape their mental habits, leading to improved decision-making, healthier reactions, and better outcomes in daily life.
How Are Our Thoughts, Feelings, and Behaviors Related?
A key principle of CBT is the interconnectedness of our thoughts, emotions, and actions—often visualized through the CBT triangle. This model helps individuals understand how each component influences the others. For example, if you interpret a situation as rejection, that negative thought may lead to feelings of sadness or insecurity, which in turn could lead to avoidant or self-sabotaging behaviors.
In CBT sessions, therapists guide you to explore these patterns and make intentional changes. By adjusting negative thinking, clients can often experience noticeable improvements in their mood and behavior. Whether you’re struggling with anxiety, depression, trauma, or substance use, CBT provides practical tools to regain control over your mental health.
What Can CBT Treat?
Cognitive behavioral therapy is an evidence-based therapy that is suitable for people with a vast array of issues. Because it focuses on root issues and not specific disorders, it’s an effective treatment program for most people. To elaborate, CBT is scientifically proven to improve the psychiatric conditions of people with very different disorders. Even those without a mental health disorder diagnosis benefit from understanding how their behaviors are connected to their internal processing. For example, behavioral issues, neurodevelopmental issues, and emotional concerns (like self-harm or anger) can all be treated by CBT.
Anxiety
Anxiety is an emotional response that leads people to feel worried, stressed, nervous, and fearful. It is an intense issue that an estimated one-third of people will deal with. Anxiety can be experienced by otherwise healthy individuals, but it can also be present through anxiety disorders. This is a heading of mental health conditions that include generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), social anxiety, separation anxiety, phobias, and panic disorder.
Depression
Depression is another name for the mood disorders called depressive disorders. Like with anxiety disorders, there are a number of conditions that fall under the heading due to their shared traits. These include major depressive disorder (MDD), seasonal affective disorder, persistent depressive disorder, and bipolar disorder. As far as the shared symptoms, depression is known to evoke low mood, sadness, hopelessness, and loss of interest. People with depression are often trapped by their negative thinking about the present and future. Due to the deep exhaustion that is also a symptom, individuals may hide away from the world and lose relationships.
Trauma
Trauma is an experience that is emotionally distressing, frightening, and makes you feel helpless. It’s possible to undergo trauma at any age. The main characteristic of trauma is a challenge that’s beyond your ability to escape. For example, individuals can experience trauma through war, natural disasters, abuse, violence, or accidents, although there are many more reasons. One of the dangers of trauma is the risk of it leading to a trauma-related disorder, which is when one has ongoing symptoms from their experience. Some trauma disorders are post-traumatic stress disorder and acute stress disorder.
Co-Occurring Disorders
Co-occurring disorders, also called dual diagnoses, are conditions that occur together in one person. They usually worsen each other to lead to an overall unhealthy experience. For instance, a person can have more than one mental health disorder, like anxiety and depression. It’s also possible to have both substance use disorder (SUD) and a mental health disorder. Co-occurring disorders often develop from each other, such as when self-medicating your symptoms leads to substance abuse. Co-occurring disorders can be significantly improved by treatment that addresses them as connected issues.
How Does CBT Work?
Cognitive behavioral therapy is a psychotherapy program that follows its own basic models and principles. Of course, at the core of CBT is the CBT triangle, also called the cognitive model. Addressing the link between thoughts, feelings, and actions is a pivotal piece of the treatment method. Additionally, individuals dive deep into different negative patterns they might have. These include cognitive distortions, ingrained beliefs and worldviews, and behavioral habits. It’s hard work to enter CBT because it requires deep restructuring. However, it is truly necessary and immediately beneficial. If you take CBT through Royal Life Centers, your therapy will be led by a licensed mental health professional. Those who are qualified to lead psychotherapy have backgrounds in psychology, counseling, and social work. At Royal Life Centers, we employ staff that are both knowledgeable and empathetic about the challenges of poor mental health.
The Importance of Treating Mental Health
Having poor mental health affects all areas of life. Just as the CBT triangle shows how thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are connected, your mental health is connected to your physical and spiritual wellness. We treat our guests’ mental health through comprehensive programming that addresses all interconnected issues. Royal Life Centers is a holistic treatment provider that helps people improve their quality of life by focusing on areas of pain and illness. As a result, they form greater self-reliance and better relationships with others.
Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and other behavioral and cognitive therapies are among the most effective psychological treatments available for a wide range of mental health challenges, including depression and anxiety, eating disorders like bulimia nervosa, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). As a widely recognized type of talk therapy, CBT focuses on identifying and changing unhelpful thought patterns and behaviors, helping individuals develop healthier coping strategies and improve emotional regulation. In clinical practice, CBT techniques such as exposure therapy, systematic desensitization, and cognitive processing therapy are commonly used to treat both emotional and behavioral symptoms.
Find a CBT Therapist Near Me
As mentioned, Royal Life Centers only employs fully licensed experts in the mental health care field, including registered psychologists and clinical counselors. To work through CBT at one of our treatment centers is to experience having a team around you as you heal. We believe in fully supporting our guests in their mental health, regardless of whether they come to us with mental health disorders or not. In fact, our holistic treatment model prioritizes mental wellness for every guest. All of our programming includes this element. We’d love to talk to you through what finding a CBT therapist near me looks like. Even better, we would be happy to show you so you can experience healing for yourself! Please reach out to us today and request an appointment.