How Cognitive Behavioural Therapy Changed My Life
A slightly personal and bold way to start my new blog, but you have to start somewhere
Hopefully, I won’t be the first person to tell this story. Obviously, I won’t. In a nutshell, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), is a form of psychotherapy that focuses on how your thoughts, beliefs and attitudes affect your feelings and behaviour, as well as changing the way you think about things (yes, I did take that description from Google.) I have known a few people who exclaimed how CBT did not work for them and was a complete waste of time. For myself on the other hand, it was a completely different experience.
Here’s a bit of a backstory to understand why I was put through the process of CBT. Let’s put aside the stigma around mental health, for just one moment. My parents divorced when I had just turned 13 (Boxing Day 2012, to be exact) This lead to a downwards spiral of negative events. I developed traits of depression, anxiety, paranoia and sucidal tendencies. I am putting this lightly though, as I never had an official diagnosis from a Psychiatrist or Doctor, nor was I prescribed any medication.
About a year after the divorce, I ended up in hospital due to an unfortunate incident (which I’m sure is guessable at this point), that frankly did me no good. I was 14 years old when this happened, and to narrow it down, I was young and a very sad and lonely character. I was not very good at communicating about how I was feeling, and this just build up leading to a bad decision I wish I never made.
I had two rounds of counselling after that. The first lot of sessions lasted twelve weeks, the second being six weeks. These were unsuccessful to say the least, if anything they made things a lot worse.
At the age of sixteen, after many doctors trips, phone calls, letters and assessments throwing me round in circles, it was confirmed. I would start Cognitive Behavioural Therapy at my nearest mental health hospital.
The first thing that went through my mind was ‘what?’ What the hell is Cognitive Behavioural Therapy? I was completely and utterly clueless. “This isn’t supposed to happen? Where’s my medication? How am I going to get better?” Was all I could think, and I was very naive to say the least, but my opinion changed very quickly.
My first session of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy was very simple and straight forward. Getting to know my key worker as well as him getting to know me. I left the session feeling pretty unsuccessful, with the whole “here we go again” mindset, but that was my main problem; my mindset and the way I thought. It seemed to work simply, in a way which was “I’m unhappy, there’s nothing I can do about it” in my brain, there was no way of breaking the link (I believed anyway) and it was a constant cycle of refusing to step out of my comfort zone.
It was only until a few months into my CBT sessions when things really started to change. I became more open minded, and rather than deliberately choosing to ignore my mental state and accept help, I let people in slightly.
It would be a bit personal and most likely a hard piece of work to sit here and type everything that went on in my sessions with my key worker and everything we discussed, because quite frankly everyone has different reasons for having CBT, so it would also be quite, if not completely pointless.
The whole process did involve questioning everything. Everything was “why do you think that is going to happen?” or “what is it that makes you think that?” To start with, I got a bit pissed off. Someone constantly questioning your reasoning and just sitting there thinking ‘because I said so that’s why!’
As I mentioned before, this changed as I became more and more open minded. I cooperated (that is a key word right there) and started thinking “why DO I think that?” and“why DOES this happen this way?” It took a lot of time, like anything else, but talking, listening and questioning my own thoughts lead from one thing to another, and I was discharged from the Mental Health Services a year and a half later.
Going back to the main key word: cooperation. This was the whole reason Cognitive Behavioural Therapy worked for me. I stopped being ignorant and instead of accepting this was the way things were, I opened my mind, listened to other people who were trying to help me and stepped very far out of my comfort zone. It did take hard work and dedication, to completely change my ways of thinking, as well as it taking a big push from those around me. Mainly though, it took myself to stop accepting these negative thoughts and tweak the way I thought about life and everyone/everything around me, because life is precious, and I needed a kick up the arse to realise this.
Obviously, it is not the same for everyone, I cannot express that more. This was just my personal experience. People have different ways of finding their safe haven and getting helped, and this was mine.
A few years down the line my mindset is completely different to how it was a few years ago. I am less ignorant towards my own thoughts, more accepting that things can be changed. It surprises me how this all changed due to my parents, one man and my own brain.
I used to be very enclosed about my CBT experience and my mental health, but have now come to accept that by expressing these experiences and my past, it can help people, and help get the word out about how effective (in my opinion anyway) Cognitive Behavioural Therapy really is.
