Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for addiction is all about identifying the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that trigger your addiction.
The more you understand your personal relationship with addiction, the better prepared you are to recovery from it and prevent relapse. Everyone approaches addiction treatment a little bit differently, which is great because it’s allowed us the opportunity to learn what works for most.
If you’re struggling with addiction, whether it involves drugs or alcohol, there’s one little thing you can start doing now to help yourself later … be mindful of what causes the urge to turn to your addiction.
Let’s take a closer look.
Thoughts, Feelings, and Behaviors
Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) focuses on exploring relationships among a person’s thoughts, feelings and behaviors. During CBT a therapist will actively work with a person to uncover unhealthy patterns of thought and how they may be causing self-destructive behaviors and beliefs.
It’s all about identifying your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that push you toward your addiction.
It doesn’t have to be specific in the beginning – that will come later as you become more familiar with your triggers.
- What were you feeling?
- Where were you?
- Who were you with?
Once you have identified a few of these, you can move forward with confidence and avoid things that trigger your addiction.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Addiction
There are some out there that choose to focus solely on the addiction rather than delve deep into the root of the problem. Without getting to the cause of the problem and working from that point on, there is no way to truly understand why the person became addicted.
Being able to deal with psychological and traumatic issues will only help the one in need of help to conquer their addictions and live a clean and sober life.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is a key tool in helping those with severe problems that can’t be solved by traditional treatments. Though it was original developed to treat eating disorders, cognitive behavioral therapy for addiction uses the same approach as psychotherapy to address a range of substance abuse problems.
The feeling of getting everything set up for you to use, is its own entity, just as the actual point of using, and the afterwards. The pattern of doing this on a daily basis becomes ingrained in the addicts mind. Hence why behavioral therapy is needed to help treat addiction.