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I'm quite excited about CBT, but I think it's kind of a half-way-there step towards meditation/mindfulness, and in my personal case it actually was counter-prod
by mercer 9y ago
I'm quite excited about CBT, but I think it's kind of a half-way-there step towards meditation/mindfulness, and in my personal case it actually was counter-productive in a way that meditation hasn't been.
The core difference, I'd say, is that with CBT there is still too much emphasis on your thoughts. You're taught to use your own thinking to counter those thoughts, which is a bit like pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps.
In my case, that made an anxious mind more anxious, because the anxiety itself is usually irrational and caused by thoughts.
Again, I'm quite excited by CBT because I do think it can be very effective. But I'm even more excited about some of the 'newer' approaches under the CBT umbrella that don't suffer from the flaw of still relying on your irrational mind to solve irrational problems.
- visarga 9y ago> But I'm even more excited about some of the 'newer' approaches under the CBT umbrella Can you give examples?
- mercer 9y agoIt's a while back that I did my research, but I think it was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectical_behavior_therapy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectical_behavior_therapy that struck me as a kind of progression toward even more of the mindfulness/observational approach, and away from using your thinking to solve your thinking. I also find https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acceptance_and_commitment_therapy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acceptance_and_commitment_ther... an interesting approach. Either way I wouldn't argue that those approaches are better in all cases, but rather that they appear to draw even more from (Zen?) Buddhism than CBT does, and that for an atypical, anxious mind like mine they seem to work in a way that CBT doesn't. In fact, I've found that my anxiety was often worse when I actively applied CBT when I was in therapy.