Tell me about your CBT

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Traditional therapy never really changed anything for me, although it did give me some insight in the way the social world is presumably supposed to work. I had thought years ago that I needed something more goal oriented. Now what I thought I needed is here and yet I hear people speak negatively about it. If you've had CBT, what was it like?

It didn't really work for me. But don't assume it won't work for you.

Basically a psychologist gives you coping techniques and homework assignments to push your limits.
For me it was for anxiety. You start slow and then your assignments get more challenging.

You report back to the psychologist and they give you more techniques and new assignments. It was suppose to break the anxiety response by communicating to myself ....I did _____ and I turned out OK. I would survive the assignment but still have high anxiety. The psychologist didn't know what to do...... that was before I was diagnosed with Asperger's.

I think the CBT is suppose to be slightly modified for people with AS.

Perhaps it was just because I react badly to criticism, or because I had CBT (a LOT of CBT) before I was diagnosed, but it was really horrible. It was like a verbal assault on my identity, being told over and over that I was wrong and had distorted thinking.

I got a lot out of it, but then it did break me down a lot as well.



I can understand this. You have to accept the shrink telling you that some of your ways of thinking are disfunctional. That isn't good for your confidence, initially.

In the end, breaking down my thinking helped me, because when I started going down the road towards having an anxiety attack, or getting depressed, I would start analysing myself and trying to figure out why it was happening. And that distracted me from thinking things like, 'x person hates me, I am useless to people, blah blah blah'. I don't let myself get too carried away with thoughts like that any more.

I was given 'homework' but it mainly involved writing down my thoughts. I wasn't really given 'challenges', like speaking to strangers in the street and all that rubbish.

The psychologist knew I had aspergers.

What is CBT?

I had it once, for hair-pulling, at 17 years old.

Now, I did not put in the effort I should have to really find out if the techniques would work...I think that as much as I wanted help, I was still too young.

However, my therapist DID teach me a number of meditative techniques that now allow me to break anxiety attacks most of the time before they get bad, and to avoid intensifying them when I DO end up having one. So I did get something worthwhile out of it in the end.

Whether I could have gotten more...honestly, I think I was still too immature to tell.

CBT = Cognitive Behavioural Therapy

CBT helped me with some things but not others. When I was really rigidly stuck in black and white thinking it helped to be able to recognize that. But the other day an OT was helping me with social skills and she started with CBT and we were identifying "I don't know what to say" as a hot thought or problem thought that we had to find a more balanced replacement for and I kept insisting that it wasn't a thought, it was a fact because I lacked the skills to know what to say. We ended up abandoning the CBT and just worked on learning the skills.

Cognitive behavior therapy.
I thought it might help me get some things done if I had some structure or someone broke things down for me in manageable units as I seem to be overwhelmed right away and give up before I start. This was long ago but when I was just out of high school I was in a group therapy (I was not yet diagnosed with depression,they just thought I had Schizoid PD but I didn't know that at the time)...anyway the subject came up that I was 18 and still didn't have my license. To get me to make the step of getting my learner's permit they wanted me to promise to the group that by the next meeting I would have that done. They knew me well enough at that point that fear of failure was limiting me. So I made the statement and they said I needed to go to each member of the group state their name and make the promise. I'm duty oriented so I got the job done because I'm generally more responsible to other people than myself. It worked at the time. I don't know if that counts as CBT. As far as telling me my thought processes were dysfunctional, my therapist had no problem telling me that.

I can completely relate to this. Towards the end of my course of CBT, I felt like the psychologist was trying to get me to think that some of the limitations I knew I had were irrational, when I knew they were just realistic. Of course you may be capable of some stuff you didn't think you were, but to be diagnosed with AS means you must have some real difficulties, ie. having trouble saying appropriate things.

The only thing thats ever helped me with that particular worry is realising that a lot of other peoples conversation is banal rubbish, so I shouldn't worry if everything I say is banal rubbish too.

CBT for ADHD helped me triple my output at work and saved me from getting fired. I mostly worked with timing and understanding the rhythm of my energy. It made a big difference.

As far as I know, CBT is traditional therapy. The other common kind is psychodynamic therapy and it's basically the Freudian approach of talking about your childhood, but that isn't used much anymore because it takes a really long time and is not as practical and goal-oriented as CBT, which is thought to work better and faster.

Personally, I've only had bad experiences, and I've seen 13 therapists over 20+ years.

I only had one therapist who actually gave me assignments, and to be honest I thought they were idiotic, like saying hello to people on the street (which I would never do because I think it's incredibly rude), and looking in the mirror and saying good things about myself (I'm not so out of touch that I don't know what is good and bad about myself.)

Most therapists use a more subtle approach, by asking questions about the things you say, to get you to question if you really believe those things (which they assume are distorted thoughts, even when they are just realistic thoughts). That doesn't work for me at all, because in practice all it does is substitute what the therapist thinks with what I think, and the therapist thought it would be good for me to get out and talk to people, when I actually found that to be so stressful that I eventually had a breakdown, and was much worse after the therapy than before it.

But, as others have said, it might help to deal with something very specific, like a phobia. I have no experience with that, so I don't know.

Is this anything like behavioral modification therapy?

I'm not sure. Maybe it's the same thing with a new label. I could certainly use help managing my life. I do better with a routine but find them hard to establish. I mean, I naturally fall into routine, but that doesn't mean they're necessarily productive.

Again, I'm not expert, but as far as I understand them, they are two different things. Behavior modification therapy is based on providing incentives to reinforce good behavior and sometimes -- though it's generally considered unethical unless the negative reinforcement is very mild -- punishments to discourage bad behavior.

It's used with LFAs, though it's controversial.

It's also how animals are trained.

Maybe I should give this a try.

That's what I figured. I've gone through behavioral modification, and I've gone through what's been described in this thread. Neither really helped, and the latter felt like a violation.