Understanding CBT
How CBT supports your life
There are moments in life when it feels like your thoughts are running ahead of you — shaping your mood, your reactions, and at times even your sense of self before you have had a chance to pause and make sense of what’s happening.
We might all notice this when a single thought spirals into anxiety, when a difficult interaction lingers longer than expected, or when you find yourself stuck in patterns that feel both familiar and hard to shift.
If (like most people) you have ever wondered, “Why do I keep thinking like this?” or “How do I actually change this?” — you are already brushing up against the core of what Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) has been exploring, refining, and evolving over decades.
The Evolution of CBT
CBT isn’t a fixed approach to supporting mental health, but a family of therapies that have evolved over time to better meet the complexity of the human experience. Understanding these evolutions (referred to as Waves) can help us recognize which tools might resonate the most with what we are currently navigating.
First Wave: Behavioral
Assertion: What we do shapes how we feel
Early behavioral therapies focused on observable actions. The idea was simple but powerful: if we can change behaviors, we can influence emotional outcomes
Grounded In: Conditioning, reinforcement, habits, and exposure
Second Wave: Cognitive
Assertion: What we think shapes how we feel
This is what most people think of when they hear “CBT”. This waves emphasizes identifying and restructuring unhelpful thought patterns
Grounded In: Cognitive distortions, challenging and reframing thoughts
Third Wave: Mindfulness
Assertion: How we relate to our thoughts matters
More recent mindfulness based therapies expands CBT by recognizing that trying to fix every thought is not the goal, but rather changing our relationship to them
Grounded In: Acceptance, values, emotional regulation, and present moment awareness
Bridging the Gap — CBT alongside trauma informed and integrative approaches
While CBT is highly effective and empirically supported, it becomes even more impactful when integrated with approaches that account for the nervous system, lived experience, and internal complexity. Integrative approaches that work well with CBT include:
Trauma Informed Care
This approach shifts the question from “what’s wrong with me?” to “what happened to me?”
Rather than viewing thoughts, emotions, or behaviors as irrational or distorted, this lens recognizes that many of these responses were once adaptive — developed to help you navigate overwhelming, unsafe, or unpredictable moments.
Emphasis: Safety, choice, collaboration, and discovering the once adaptive nature of thoughts that once protected us
IFS (Internal Family Systems)
This approach introduces the idea that the mind is made up of different parts, each with its own role, perspective, and intention.
Instead of eliminating or correcting difficult thoughts or emotions, IFS invites us to build a relationship with them
Emphasis: Each part has a positive intention even if its strategy is unhelpful in the moment, healing occurs by accessing the Self (a grounded, compassionate internal state that can lead with clarity and care), and the understanding of protective voices developed for rational reasons
Somatic Awareness
This approach recognizes that our experiences are stored both cognitively and physiologically
Rather than leaning only into insight, this lens encourages us to lean into what makes the body feel safe
Emphasis: Interoception (awareness of internal bodily states), the utilization of grounding practices for the body, support of the nervous system as a foundation for cognitive and emotional processing
Off The Page: Actioning The Insights
Supporting yourself through challenging moments
Sustainable practice creates sustainable results
When combining these approaches listed above, we create a more flexible and compassionate framework for navigating challenge:
CBT helps us identify and shift patterns
Trauma Informed care helps us understand where they came from
IFS helps us to relate to them with curiosity instead of judgement
Somatic Awareness helps us to regulate our bodies so change can actually occur
Take a look below to see strategies from each CBT wave listed about to discover how this can be of support to you this week:
First Wave: Behavioral
Behavioral Shift: If you feel stuck, focus on action as opposed to analysis. When the motivation feels low, shift the focus from “feeling ready” to “taking action anyway” by choosing one small activity to commit to. Allow action to arrive prior to feeling motivated and discover if the small action feels motivating.
Second Wave: Cognitive
Thought Check: When you notice a strong emotional shift, pause and ask: “Is this based on a fact, or a story that my mind is telling?” The intention here is not to invalidate your experience, but to widen your perspective on how you are understanding external triggers.
Third Wave: Mindfulness
Cognitive Defusion: This ACT strategy creates space between you and your thoughts. Instead of “I’m a failure” pivot to “I’m having the thought that I’m a failure”. You can also repeat the thought in a silly voice or imaging placing the thought on a passing cloud. This is a valuable strategy as thoughts can lose their power when we stop treating them as absolute truths.
Thank You
Thank you for joining me this week! I’m excited to keep sharing insights from my work, research, and personal journey with you.
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