Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is one of the psychotherapy approaches that treatment centers use to help people suffering from substance abuse and addiction recovery. Normally, cognitive behavioral therapy treats anxiety disorders, depression, mental disorders, and phobias. However, it is becoming the basic treatment therapy for people suffering from drugs addiction or alcoholism with time. Typically, CBT is used in treating addiction or alcoholism in a treatment center or an addiction recovery program. Essentially, CBT helps the patient develop the ability to identify and counter the self-defeating thoughts and actions that tend to cause addiction or substance abuse.
What is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy?
Cognitive-behavioral therapy is a type of therapy treatment that essentially recognizes that a person’s feelings or behaviors result from thoughts, other people, events, or situations. According to cognitive behavioral therapy, you might not change your current circumstances, but you can change how you perceive or think about them. Therefore, cognitive behavior therapy helps you change how you behave or think to improve your general situation. Normally, cognitive behavioral therapy will help you achieve the following.
- Improve your self-control and take control of your urges
- Recognize factors or situations that might lead to drug usage or alcohol consumption. Essentially, you get the capability to avoid pit holes that might drag you back to addiction.
- Avoid circumstances and instances that tend to trigger your urge for alcohol or drugs.
- Develop a coping strategy that you can use to keep away from alcohol or drugs
- Withstand conditions and problems that might lead to substance abuse or alcohol usage
In essence, the primary goal of cognitive-behavioral therapy in the treatment of drug abuse and alcoholism is to help improve coping skills, teach new coping skills, improve motivation, help change old habits and learn better ways of managing painful feelings.
Types of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
Cognitive-behavioral therapy exists in the following categories.
- Rational behavior therapy
- Cognitive therapy
- Rational living therapy
- Dialectic behavior therapy
- Rational emotive behavior therapy
How CBT for Drug Addiction Works?
Are you wondering how CBT will treat your alcohol or drug addiction? Well, cognitive behavioral therapy is administered through two main components. These are functional analysis and skills training. To better understand how everything patches together, let us look at each of these components.
Functional Analysis
As the naming suggests, functional analysis is the CBT process that involves evaluating a person for the causes and consequences of their behavior. Normally, it is a joint operation between the therapist and the individual under treatment. In this component, the therapist tries to get the patient to identify the thoughts, circumstances, and feelings that lead to their drug abuse or alcoholism. Typically, this helps decide the risks that the patient is bound to face in case of a relapse. During the functional analysis of a patient, the therapist gets to know about the patient through questions designed to get them thinking. In addition, the patient gets to express their thought process regarding how they feel before they engage in substance abuse. Some of the questions that a therapist might ask include:
- How do you feel before you use the substance?
- What happened before you took the substance?
- What were you doing right before you used the substance?
- Were there negative consequences from your actions?
Functional analysis can also help the therapist to identify the reasons behind the alcoholism or substance abuse. This is easily achieved by getting the patient to examine their thoughts, emotions, and actions before the substance abuse
Skills Training
Normally, difficult life situations are some of the major factors that cause substance abuse and addiction. For instance, when a person is struggling with depression, anxiety, poverty, or illness, they might decide to engage in substance abuse to manage their situations. With skills training, the patient is first taken through a process that unravels what they have learned and then gives them new training that helps them cope with difficult situations without substance abuse. This mostly involves:
- Helping the individual shed the bad habits and learn new constructive skills
- Educating the individual on substance abuse to change how they perceive drugs
- Teaching the patient new tactics that can help them cope with situations that lead to drug abuse
- Teaching the patient to develop stress tolerance to avoid the usage of substances
In essence, CBT helps addicts develop mechanisms that are critical in maintaining sobriety. In addition, it helps the patient to complete the recovery process in a better and stronger way. For more on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, contact us today at 833-364-0736.