Sunflower Wellness Retreat offers a comprehensive addiction treatment program, which includes cognitive-behavioral therapy. This type of addiction therapy helps patients retrain their behaviors to overcome the desire to use drugs or alcohol and to escape the damaging cycle of addiction and relapse.
What Is Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy?
Cognitive-behavioral therapy is one of the most effective therapies in treating addiction. All quality rehab centers offer a cognitive-behavioral therapy program as part of the treatment process. Essentially, CBT is a method of talk therapy. Patients talk to licensed therapists to find their own negative thinking patterns and triggers that cause them to seek drugs or alcohol.
Understanding one’s own thoughts and motivations are vital for freeing a mind on autopilot. This type of psychotherapy encourages patients to express their negative feelings and thoughts in order to obtain clarity on their distortions and illogical beliefs. This allows them to change their reactions with regard to situations and people. It also allows them to gauge their emotional responses better.
How Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy Treats Addiction
The primary goal of a cognitive-behavioral therapy program is to replace negative behaviors and thoughts with positive ones. These negative thoughts and thinking patterns tend to be the root cause of many cases of addiction. It’s generally accepted that mental disorders often come in pairs, which is why those suffering from addiction may also have anxiety, depression, or another disorder.
Originally, CBT wasn’t invented to treat addiction. The inventor, psychologist Aaron Beck, actually came up with the therapy as a method of treating patients suffering from depression and anxiety. Again, negative thinking patterns happen to be the root cause of both of these disorders. People who have them often turn to drugs or alcohol to suppress their negative thoughts. Another part of the CBT theory is the cognitive triangle. According to this, feelings, thoughts, and behaviors affect each other, but there’s no clear order or path in how they do so.
For example, feelings may cause thoughts, which manifest in behaviors. However, sometimes, thoughts cause behaviors, which then manifests as feelings and so on.
The goal of specialists in this program is to help patients see their negative behaviors. The next step is then to show them how to avoid triggers for these behaviors. The last step is to help patients cope with unwelcome feelings and thoughts without turning to drugs or alcohol.
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