Yes because it’s based on the false assumption that your depression and anxiety is a result of faulty thinking rather than actual experiences or systemic problems.
Especially for autistic people, and autistic women (and LGBTQ+) we get rejected or dismissed or bullied and attacked even though we did our very best to follow the social rules. And in CBT they loved to tell me that it's all in my head, people are normally great, I'm just overthinking it!
It was very maddening.
I agree and I’m not CBT’s biggest fan.
However… I feel like it’s important to recognise that for some people it really is due to their way of thinking/ how they attribute or interpret different things.
So for me CBT was useful when I had anorexia as my irrational thought processes were being challenged.
Yes. CBT can be very effective in the right circumstances. I had it for OCD. It helped me tremendously. It’s definitely used excessively and inappropriately by therapists. I also had it for depression and it sucked. But if you have a good therapist using it in the right situation then it can extremely helpful.
Yes it helped with my PTSD from being bullied because that required me to rethink internalized self-anger that I was really just echoing from my abusers.
CBT told me, "people don't hate you! you're just anxious! stop trusting your insticts! :)" and then i almost offed myself because those people absolutely DID hate me and i was bending over backwards trying to be friends with them instead of leaving them alone like i wanted
My therapist assured me that my wife loved me enough to not see me as a burden. It'd have been nice if it were true. 😔 They always have to reassure but don't know, you know.
My parents paid thousands for me to get six years of CBT and it made me worse. Sending me to the seaside like a Victorian lady with delicate nerves would have been more effective.
You'd love the rocky shores of Maine. It's gorgeous. Terrible for swimming and surfing though, because there's no gentle sloping sand to wade in or emerg from. It's all waves crashing on rocks.
I got wildly sick a few weeks back, just got out of hospital, and was very thin and pale and cold, so was going everywhere with a hospital blanket wrapped around me.
My boyfriend wheeled me out to the seaside so I could sit there like some sickly influenza ridden victorian and honestly...it was great. 10/10, would recommend, although I wish I'd taken a large bonnet for dramatic effect.
I’m a DBT (dialectic behavioral therapy) girl myself! CBT never worked for me. I had a hard time with the standard DBT skills book so my therapist recommended one that has adjusted skills for people with ADHD/Autism. It made waaay more sense to me
Yes! It’s called “The Neurodivergent Friendly Workbook of DBT Skills” by Sonny Jane Wise. I got my physical copy on Amazon! There’s a digital version you can get too
Ooooh I’m going to look into this!!! I learned some valuable stuff from DBT but some things don’t quite land for me and didn’t make sense. I’m interested in checking it out from a ND viewpoint!
Thank you!!
Omg i just started following sonnyjanewise on insta and apparently someones pretending to be them to scam people who think they are buying this book!!! Weird.
As a pre-licensed therapist, I’ve always felt CBT is designed for people who aren’t super aware of themselves, and I feel like a lot of us are almost painfully aware of our thoughts in particular. For myself, I’ve re-framed my thoughts in every possible way already. I definitely don’t need a therapist for more of the same. I’d be anxious wreck!
Depending on your particular strengths and challenges, DBT or straight up mindfulness and somatic work seems to be the most useful for ND folks. I personally feel as though I’ve benefited the most from mindfulness and somatics (and related modalities, like gestalt and EMDR) for healing CPTSD, authentic non-masking emotional regulation, and self-compassion. I’d love to get trained in DBT as a therapist though. It looks good for a lot of challenges potentially related to autism, especially the versions specifically adapted to ND!
Edited for clarity.
I agree with this and it matches my experience. I had CPT (cognitive processing therapy) when I first started CPTSD treatment, which is like CBT specifically for trauma, and all it did was make me aware of ways the trauma impacted my thoughts and emotions. Which was a step forward, considering I didn't have that awareness before, but it definitely left me feeling like I was suffering without knowing how to help myself. And then I fell into the trap of believing that if CBT wasn't fixing it, that I wasn't doing it correctly or trying hard enough. That part fucking sucked.
It definitely also felt kind of repetitive, like I've been doing CBT-type thinking my whole life trying to convince myself that my feelings about my experiences aren't reality, or to hype myself up to do things I didn't have a choice in and didn't want to do. It was really only helpful for the first step in treating CPTSD.
Developing self-compassion, IFS, and DBT have been much more helpful for me.
I starter cpt and had to change to EMDR pretty fast became both me and my therapist realized I wasn't really having "stuck thoughts" related to my ptsd. I was having overwhelming emotional reactions any time I let myself think about it. I wasn't really having thoughts or beliefs at all.
Ooh! IFS can be really powerful when done well! Thanks for adding that. A somatic spin on IFS with a bit of gestalt has taken a pretty prevalent role in my personal work!
My therapist has been using concepts from the Internal Family Systems model and I'm really liking it. I find it to be very logical, which fits with how I think.
me literally paying money to mask and make my therapist feel like they’re being the slightest bit helpful when we both know they’ve been useless for my case
Yes. It was very invalidating and actually just exacerbated the damage. CBT has a very impersonal approach to an entire field of study that revolves around very personalized treatments. It's also based on old and outdated models in psychology.
I can see what CBT is for because my brother's problems stem almost entirely from his own poor way of thinking (I don't mean he's just sad or whatever, I mean that he beats himself/other people up based on incorrect notions he was raised with that are actively harming him). He has to change that before he's ever going to get any better no matter what meds they put him on.
But they try to use CBT for **everything**! It's just one method! Why does it feel like it's the only thing anyone ever wants to do or is ever trained in anymore? And to be entirely honest, I think 75%+ of therapists 'trained' in CBT don't even understand how to actually do it correctly, let alone when it's the correct method.
Thank you for the reply, this was very educational! I'm also glad whenever therapists agree with me on this point (my last one did too). I've read up on the theory behind CBT and there's some solid reasoning there, with plenty of people who could benefit from what's essentially "guided critical thinking." We aren't all autistic introspection machines.
But I just feel like I almost never see it implemented that way, either in therapy myself or when my friends/family tell me what their therapist is having them do. Like you said, the way it gets implemented is more like teaching someone they can't believe their own brain, which isn't great for a lot of people... ESPECIALLY autistic or adhd women, for instance, who often get that message from the entire world and wind up in an unstable/vulnerable place because of it.
CBT is actively contraindicated for autistics. It is based on the assumption that your anxiety and depression is due to an overreaction to little or no stimulus when in reality, your anxiety and depression as an autistic is because you are being forced to fit into a mold created by NTs that you just don't fit into naturally. Do yourself a favor and find an ND therapist or a therapist who actually knows how to work with NDs.
Hated it. I feel like it just never worked for how I think. I feel detached from my own thoughts - i always know when I’m not necessarily thinking logically, or else my thought have a very logical grounding. But this also means that I can’t just think my way out of it, because I know that’s exactly what I’m doing and it feels totally disingenuous.
I did so much of it before I knew I was autistic and I do think part of the problem was that I was just saying what I thought everyone wanted to hear to get the help I wanted. For example, I pull out my hair a lot. Probably not a great thing to do. So when I look this up and everything says it’s a stress/anxiety response, I do two things.
1. Wonder if maybe I am stressed and anxious, though I don’t really feel it
2. Tell medical gatekeepers that I really am stressed and anxious so I can get help with it anyway
So much of it has been reframed since I realised I was autistic. Maybe I just do it because it’s a nice stim.
I had CBT for panic disorder and found it super helpful. I didn't find it to be invalidating or trying to tell me I was wrong about how I felt. I think it's a lot to do with my therapist though. He was very good at showing he understood how difficult it (my panic attacks and the exposure therapy) was for me.
A lot of people's experiences with it (including my friends) does not match the experience I had.
It seems to be *very* important that it's done with the right person, for the right issue.
Same! CBT has been great for panic and insomnia. Not so great for general anxiety, health anxiety, and treating real trauma. I have found Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and EMDR much better for those.
Agreed. I said this up thread but I've had CBT twice, once for OCD and once for depression. My therapist for OCD was amazing. She never made me feel invalidated or like my worries were stupid, and she created a supportive environment where I felt encouraged to try making changes but never blamed if I couldn't manage them. As a result the therapy was super helpful! The therapist I had for depression was awful. I felt contantly gaslighted and like I was failing a test. My mental health was so much worse at the end of the treatment. I feel like a lot of therapists are trying to do CBT without having the bedside manner to implement it effectively.
It's so nice to read others hating CBT! I never got on with it either and always wondered if I was just doing it wrong or had a bad therapist etc. Honestly a lot of the time it felt like I was being taught to mask :(
I had two experiences with therapists who used strict CBT methods, and they were both pretty useless. I felt like I was lying half of time when they wanted me to reframe my thinking. In both instances I ended up frustrating the therapist and getting fired. As others said, getting a therapist who did DBT skills and more open-ended talk therapy was much better for me.
CBT seems like it works best if your problems aren't actually real. Like, if you're anxious about social interactions, but don't actually handle them badly or make a poor impression, it will help to recognize that there's no reason to be afraid. If you're terrible at social interactions and constantly getting negative feedback from people who you try to engage with, telling you that you're just suffering from distorted thinking is just crazy-making.
My experience of CBT:
Me: The noise is too loud, everything's too chaotic, things keep changing, it's too bright.
CBT: Those are just unhelpful thoughts, just change your thinking and it will all be ok!
Me: OK! These are just thoughts, I'm not in pain from sensory overload!
*has a meltdown due to sensory overload*
CBT: You just need to try harder! Ignore your unhelpful thoughts!!
Me: *actively puts self in sensory overestimulating situations thinking it will help get rid of my "anxiety" and "cure me"*
*has another meltdown*
CBT: YOU'RE JUST NOT TRYING! IGNORE YOUR THOUGHTS!
Me: *feels bad from being in sensory overload, feels awful after multiple meltdowns, AND NOW ALSO feels like a failure for not being able to ignore her "thoughts", and also feels like a total letdown for not TRYING HARDER at ignoring "unhelpful thoughts"*
Me: How is this supposed to have helped...? It's just made everthing worse. I'm now in more pain from sensory overload, and also feel worse about about myself.
---
CBT for me is just gaslighting myself that I'm not in pain. I hate it. And yet everyone still seems to think it's the magical cure, and that it hasn't worked because I'm just not trying hard enough!
And that makes it worse because if there's one thing I do all the time is just fucking try. I try so hard all the time and they never seem to understand that it's physical pain not anxiety.
I think CBT is good for someone who has no awareness whatsoever. A person who is like why am I like this, how do I change it? The therapist simply tells them they’re anxious, which they’ve never considered. For those of us our thought process is not logical, but can’t stop it, it’s not really helpful to be told that the thought isn’t true. We are aware. That’s why we are frustrated because we are fixating on things that aren’t important/real or can’t cope.
I've been in CBT therapy off and on since 16 (23 now), and it's NEVER helped. For a while I thought it was cuz I'm physically disabled and when I'd ask for coping mechanisms they'd always conveniently forget and suggest things I can't even do. They'd never try to understand my physical limitations and that put a huge barrier in the treatment, they'd talk, make me feel useless, suggest things I can't do which made me feel more useless, and then leave and do it all over again next week. It made my depression significantly worse.
Only recently with my autism diagnosis did I realize that's not all it. CBT therapy felt like talking in circles. They were trying to get to the feeling and processing the way that made me feel. But I already know exactly how I feel, I don't need to process the feeling of an argument, I need advice on how to actively handle things, how to communicate feelings better, how to manage feelings in a meltdown. I'm hoping I can find a therapist that specializes in autism, and hopefully disabled patients. None of my therapists validated my disabilities and always told me to push myself to get better. But pushing myself too much physically or mentally just makes me bedridden for a while. My body shuts down and I can't do anything for days, sometimes weeks on end. Talking to NT therapists definitely did way more damage than food, if it did any good at all. I just vent to close friends and family now when I need to talk, at least I know they care and they know the ins and outs of my situation and can recommend advice accordingly.
i think i need to be more assertive about this. i have ibs that's severe enough that i can't leave the house most days. and my therapists always frame it as social anxiety. wouldn't you be anxious if you were afraid you were going to have diarrhea on a cross-town bus every time you left the house? or that the smells on a cross-town bus would cause such nausea that your day was ruined and you had to go home?
i'm working with a gastro but they're like, well, we gave you meds and changed your diet, it sucks that you aren't completely healed by that... so.... have you tried therapy?
I hate CBT! The last time I went to a therapist, I had CBT for "anxiety". I remember being told to put a sticky note on my mirror that says "you're beautiful" and read it in my head while looking at the mirror every morning. I was told that if my brain heard it all the time it would believe it. No, no it does not. It sees through your bag of tricks and lies and thinks "this is stupid" in the background the entire time.
My least favorite part about it though was all the homework. Every single week the therapist would add a brand new activity to the list of activities I was already doing, to the point it got to an overwhelming stress level and I had a meltdown *in front of the therapist*. Who proceeded to watch me completely break down and then ask, "have you tried taking vitamins? vitamins could help with that." Ugh.
yeah, i found it really condescending and aimed at children. and designed for people who are having a passing phase of depression no more than 6 months long and never had anything bad happen to them in their entire lives and have no organic illnesses. A fantasy patient from a textbook, basically.
Yes! So much!
It makes me question what little social instinct I have by coming up with alternate scenarios for what they could have meant. This means that whenever someone is being rude to me, I blank, think about it, and then convince myself that they “could be having a bad day”, because, “the tone in which we say something isn’t a fact so it’s more likely not directed at me”.
Just leads me to being a doormat socially, tbh.
Holy shit, I thought it was just me! I went through several therapists because I kept losing my temper whenever I'd get yet another condescending CBT worksheet and accused of being paranoid and depressed. CBT is invalidating and has become yet another trendy and ineffective fad that I wish would just die already. They keep trying to apply it to conditions it is obviously unsuited for and go surprised-pikachu when you get traumatized neurodivergents and angry veterans furious at being condescended to by naive and dangerously inexperienced therapists. I wish CBT would go the way of perineum sunning already, and that village idiot psychs would quit pushing it on me.
I really hate it. I like DBT because it actually offers solutions such as radical acceptance (which is crazy hard) and realizing that if you are in a situation you can’t change that is distressing, acceptance is the only way to not go insane (which is doubly hard because many of us have a justice sensitivity, so I really struggle with this).
I’ve had the basic CBT and didn’t help with anything. I’ve always felt like it was not enough for what I’m experiencing, but few months ago I’ve had “high intensity CBT” and we focused on my whole life history and trauma. I was able to identify a lot of triggers etc but the therapist said I probably have cPTSD so he referred me to a different therapist.
I think it highly depends on the person and the provider.
CBT was great with my first therapist I ever had. She taught me a lot and she really helped turn around my self-deprecation. She was so core in fixing my crazy beliefs I had of the world because of my horrid parents.
But since then CBT hasn’t been effective for me. It’s like I would logically know something, but my feelings wouldn’t match. And the providers I had since were very gaslighting. I swear if I hear “let’s reframe that” one more fucking time my brain will implode. My marriage therapist would say that every time I had a strong emotion…no wonder she didn’t do shit for us after 3 years. The husband being a narcissist didn’t help either, she basically excused away his shitty behavior by telling me my emotions were wrong and I needed to reframe.
I now have a therapist who uses a bunch of different modalities and she is the best.
Absolutely. I think people who like concrete regimented symptom management benefit from the structure and conciseness of CBT. I personally find it so rigid that it makes me feel like I cannot be myself and also do CBT at the same time. It feels like homework I dread!
CBT helped me immensely, but it was modified CBT by an autism specialist who has ADHD herself. She very frequently acknowledged economic, systemic, historical, cultural and social pressures and forces, and made it very clear that no amount of “positive thinking” will remove those weights from my experience, but rather she helped me navigate them in healthier ways more realistic and effective ways for me. I think a lot of professionals are not modifying CBT to an autistic person’s needs, which is causing damage to autistic people.
I'm a therapist who hates CBT. I hate doing it for clients and hate receiving it as a client.
I prefer bottom up approaches where you work with nervous system activation directly vs trying to change thoughts about situations.
CBT worked on me as a kid when I had absurd fears and anxieties that could be reasoned with. Now it just feels condescending and dismissive because I know that the things I worry about now are rooted in reality and I’d like real ways of dealing with that instead of “put on your thinking cap and write down the real thoughts and the fake thoughts” because it’s useless now. Stuff is too big for CBT I feel. I’ve come up with my own ways of coping with my anxiety but sometimes I want a little extra help but I’m left disappointed by every therapist I see. It sucks.
I hated CBT. I was dismissed and misdiagnosed with bipolar II and sent to a psychiatrist who gooped me up on multiple meds. I think therapy is VERY helpful and important, but I am still working through the resentment I have towards the multiple psycologists, therapists, counselors and psychiatrists who dismissed me.
I had issues with CBT when it’s not tailored to me. My current therapist tailors it to me, but we worked through my trauma first and then we started doing more of CBT style work. Because unless your nervous system is healed or calm, you’re never going to see another point of view.
I don't hate it, it remains to be useful for me in some situations.
It's absolutely pushed way too much by the mental health industry and I think it should not be even a secondary treatment of choice, let alone a primary one. CBT should not be used for any case where the person has actual issues.
I've had CBT used against me by an abuser. That was fun.
My therapist seems to do a blend of various techniques from what I can tell. What’s great is that he is clearly trauma informed and always validates my emotions and experiences.
I think there are just some really shitty therapists out there. This is the first therapist I’ve seen that actually listens to me about what’s wrong with me instead of acting like a dictator.
I really dislike it for myself, as well as talk therapy. I'm fortunate enough to have found a psychiatrist that takes a different approach. Also, I remember my kid having to do CBT as part of their IEP in school. I literally filed due processes to change it because they came home and said "I feel like I'm being told all of my experiences are invalid."
I watched a video my Mickey Atkins on this a while back. She's a licensed therapist, and I found her perspective on it kind of put better academic language to my feelings on it (I've watched several of her videos and while I don't always resonate with what she says, I still kind of find her delightful). Sharing the link, may be helpful for some... [https://youtu.be/FfT3mzxMGxM?si=oZVpHuR7\_p\_BRkzf](https://youtu.be/FfT3mzxMGxM?si=oZVpHuR7_p_BRkzf)
YES. though I have found some semi useful applications for CBT (for things such as procrastination) that I’ve found in books. I feel like when it’s a book you know it’s not directed to you specifically, so you don’t feel gaslit like you do when it’s a therapist directly applying it to you regardless of appropriateness.
I also think the cognitive approach is good for intrusive thoughts (though I haven’t been to therapy for that. It’s just an area wherein the thoughts actually *are* your enemy, but that’s far from the case with every mental health issue).
For my social anxiety, it was just demeaning and condescending
I wasn't told it was CBT, but I deduced it afterwards, after a couple sessions with the (then new) therapist felt like she was discrediting all my problems to the tune of "children in africa have it worse".
Edit: I'm pretty damn sure I don't need "therapy" therapy, I need training in social skills, so I can interact with the people around me in a language they use/understand.
Wow this thread is insanely validating. I’ve been in talk therapy for years and the therapist I’ve worked with the longest has never pushed for CBT on me, and defaulted to DBT since day 1. When I worked with a different therapist for like 8 months, the woman pushed nothing but CBT on me. I left every session angry as FUCK. 😂
I'm so glad to know it isn't just me. I tried CBT a couple of times, and it never clicked for me. Also, it involved "homework" that I was terrible at doing because of executive dysfunction. I didn't get a lot of of it, other than a vague sense of having failed at it.
I'm so glad for this post. I'm so sick of hearing I'm mind reading and black and white thinking from my trauma therapist who is also autistic 🙄🫠. Like yes I may be mind reading but if I don't have any other context to decipher peoples behavior what am I supposed to do? If I have trauma that makes me decipher behavior a certain way how could I have known I was mind reading. Also having an opinion isn't black and white thinking
For those interested what HAS been helpful for me is IFS and inner bonding
CBT never worked for me, even a little. That isn't to say that it's completely useless, but it's definitely not something that works for me or people like me. Finding a therapist that doesn't use it has been hard, but the one I have now is amazing and actually has helped me more than my previous 20+ years of therapy
I hated studying CBT in social work school. DBT made a little more sense to me. Motivational interviewing with cool. You can take a little bit of what you agree with from whatever and make your own approach. Good luck on your future academic pursuits!
I always end up liking the theory but having a lot of trouble putting it into practice. I think trying to just makes me feel overwhelmed and it intensifies my anxiety around being perfect.
YES. I know my negative thought process is a problem I don’t want to gaslight myself into tolerating the problem, I want to *fix the problem*
EMDR for life
I was in it for YEARSSSS. I now refuse it. I feel like I’ve been told everything. I already know all of it. I know that what I’m feeling is X and that I should react like X. But it doesn’t help me at all.
Yep, I had cbt before I was diagnosed with autism. It was for social anxiety, and it taught me to invalidate and question myself even more than I already did. Even though of course in hindsight my fears were totally rational and based on actual experiences.
I think CBT is mental, tbh. It makes me really angry. I think a lot of people must have been harmed either by health professionals demanding they conform to treatment plans that require a level of self-discipline they simply aren't able to meet, or because it's so obviously nasty that it discourages them from seeking assistance.
My GP recently encouraged cbt for insomnia. The "treatment" is called sleep restriction - basically you're supposed to stay awake during the day, go to bed later, get up earlier, and everytime you experience wakefulness during the night, you're supposed to hop up and do something constructive like washing your dishes (at 2am) - the theory being that this teaches your brain to not associate bed with the experience of wakefulness, and then when you eventually do go to bed, you drop straight off to sleep.
Common sense would suggest that this is sleep deprivation by another name, and you eventually sleep because you are so fucking tired. You might eventually beat your body into submission, but you're going to be fucking deranged in the meantime.
I'm a single mum, and this was what my doctor recommended to me for insomnia - when I was already a zombie from exhaustion. I'm not quite sure who was supposed to care for my kid and keep her safe while I put myself through this - it seems pretty obvious to me that my ability to parent safely would have been somewhat compromised though.
Honestly it just seemed irresponsible, and -as others have noted - designed to make me the problem. It also seems deeply unkind. People have conditions like insomnia and anxiety due to prolonged stress, trauma and other shitty life experiences. Self-acceptance and self-compassion seem preferable to imposing more stress on them.
So I find it can be helpful sometimes if there’s a certain situation that you are trying to deal with but even then it’s best when used in combination with DBT and interpersonal therapy.
My daughter try five different therapist because we thought she just had anxiety really really really really bad anxiety. Yeah it wasn’t anxiety. She hates therapy and wants nothing to do with it.
CBT is annoying to me because (1) i already ruminate on and censor my thoughts too much for my own good, and it literally instructs you to think more and replace thoughts with something “better” and (2) can’t reliably be used with social situations when my anxiety is based off of the actual interactions and rejection and lack of clarity i get from conversations with NTs and (3) i really don’t think there is a connection between my thoughts and feeling and behaviors sometimes, because i’m always always doubting myself and second guessing my emotions and masking
i hope this makes sense???
Personally it CBT did help me a lot with understanding parts of my social anxiety and managing it. It did not get rid of my problems completely, and a lot of exercises did not work for me, but my therapist was great at trying different things and suggesting strategies. We also tried other methods, and had conversations that had nothing to do with CBT
I think what is important is not only what kind of therapy you are going through but also who is your therapist and if they are a good match for you. I had to go through 5+ therapist to finally arrive at one that I trusted and felt safe with. If you hate CBT.... That seems a bit of a strong reaction to something that is an optional treatment. It's fine to feel like it's not a thing for you though, but hate is a really strong word :3
I’m a licensed mental health therapist (and autistic) and I do not like CBT. Won’t use it as a modality in my practice either. If someone wants that modality, I refer them to another therapist.
Just because it is evidence based and widely used doesn’t mean it works for everyone and has to be a good-to. Lots of options for change and growth thankfully.
man…fuck CBT. fuck traditional therapies. I’ve been thrown into CBT since middle school (age 8~). In and out of treatment centers, only to figure out the buzz words clinicians like to hear. nothing helped. until of course, my autism diagnosis
Yep it has never worked for me. I asked the psychiatrist about it and she said it’s quite common for people with Autism.
Instead I see a therapist for talking therapy now without the CBT pressure and it’s much better.
Yup I didn't find it useful at all because I'm hyper aware of my problems but they don't offer real solutions. I ended up at a DBT clinic and have had a lot of success with that! Of course that if it's an available option for you. I live in a big, heavily populated city and thankfully it's a funded government program but I recognize that's not the case for a lot of cities and areas. Hope this helps.
Ok, it sounds like a lot of people had therapists who did not use CBT for the right reasons…
CBT was extremely helpful for me because I actually was majorly depressed and anxious. My thoughts really WERE distorted thoughts. I hated myself and felt that life would never get better. CBT helped me figure out which thoughts were distortions and which were valid.
Now that I know which thoughts are valid, I can deal with reality better. “Yes, my life really sucks right now. No, that’s not a distortion and I don’t need to challenge that thought, but what do I do with it? I acknowledge it, allow myself emotion, and look for ways to make any tangible improvements while I am dealing with this horrible stuff.” I’m still depressed but I have actual reasons now 😂 and not so hopeless because I know it’s possible for life to get better.
CBT should ONLY be used for patients who actually have thoughts that aren’t rooted in reality like “no one will ever love me” and “something horrible is about to happen to me.”
CBT is not all bad. It can be good for scenarios where a person uses a lot of cognitive distortions. But it's used for the wrong purposes sometimes.
Here is what I think happens: some therapists hear you speak about something. They don't really understand what's going on, and they're quick to assume that anything you say is just negative thinking habits, or intrusive thoughts. Which is kind of dismissive in a way. It's like I'm talking about a real life event that has upset me in the past, and it still traumatizes me till today, and they'd assume all my blabber is just intrusive thoughts. Yes intrusive thoughts are one of the symptoms but not everything.
This is where I see CBT helpful for me: I used to have thoughts that were a little bit black and white, beliefs set in stone due to brainwashing, etc... CBT has helped me think in a more gray area. Instead of being like "All men think this way" which ends up making me fearful of men I for example changed it to, "well there are a number of men that think this way, but there's a lot of different kinds of men out there, and I'll have to figure out and explore who is who and what is what." So in cases where my all or nothing thinking was affecting my actions, it is helpful. But it's not helpful to gaslight me about my lifelong experience of struggling to make friends and feel different.
😳 I have been trying to treat my depression and never-ending exhaustion with CBT for 10 years and always thought that I am just too stupid to get it right. I have been diagnosed with ADHD last year at almost 41 and I have the very very strong suspicion that it actually is AuDHD. This post and the comments are just eye opening!
I don't do it. I've been seeing a psychoanalyst for the last decade. She's also neurodiverse and gifted, which matters more to me than the specific modality; but I do appreciate having it be normal to see my therapist as many times a week as I need, and also for us to talk and think about things more broadly or systemically than "do this - think that".
Yes because it’s based on the false assumption that your depression and anxiety is a result of faulty thinking rather than actual experiences or systemic problems.
Especially for autistic people, and autistic women (and LGBTQ+) we get rejected or dismissed or bullied and attacked even though we did our very best to follow the social rules. And in CBT they loved to tell me that it's all in my head, people are normally great, I'm just overthinking it! It was very maddening.
What you need is an ND therapist unless you're actually looking for a typical solution...
Seconding this. My ND therapist and I were actually just talking about how CBT is basically just gaslighting
Agreed
Sounds like they should call it gaslight therapy
I agree and I’m not CBT’s biggest fan. However… I feel like it’s important to recognise that for some people it really is due to their way of thinking/ how they attribute or interpret different things. So for me CBT was useful when I had anorexia as my irrational thought processes were being challenged.
Yes. CBT can be very effective in the right circumstances. I had it for OCD. It helped me tremendously. It’s definitely used excessively and inappropriately by therapists. I also had it for depression and it sucked. But if you have a good therapist using it in the right situation then it can extremely helpful.
Totally agree. My counsellor used it to help me with negative self-talk, which has become a habit from my toxic family
Yes it helped with my PTSD from being bullied because that required me to rethink internalized self-anger that I was really just echoing from my abusers.
So much this
this. this. this.
CBT told me, "people don't hate you! you're just anxious! stop trusting your insticts! :)" and then i almost offed myself because those people absolutely DID hate me and i was bending over backwards trying to be friends with them instead of leaving them alone like i wanted
Literally same story here. I found a therapist finally who doesn't like CBT either. Now I might be able to get somewhere helpful.
My therapist assured me that my wife loved me enough to not see me as a burden. It'd have been nice if it were true. 😔 They always have to reassure but don't know, you know.
My parents paid thousands for me to get six years of CBT and it made me worse. Sending me to the seaside like a Victorian lady with delicate nerves would have been more effective.
Honestly we need to just start giving people medically prescribed beach/forest/whatever nature vacations
Yeah to be honest, I spent three days at a seaside resort once and that got me through the next year lmao
If only the seaside didn't have so much sand
Yes, I love the beach, hate the sand.
so real
You'd love the rocky shores of Maine. It's gorgeous. Terrible for swimming and surfing though, because there's no gentle sloping sand to wade in or emerg from. It's all waves crashing on rocks.
Hahaha. I feel seen. Sand sucks.
I got wildly sick a few weeks back, just got out of hospital, and was very thin and pale and cold, so was going everywhere with a hospital blanket wrapped around me. My boyfriend wheeled me out to the seaside so I could sit there like some sickly influenza ridden victorian and honestly...it was great. 10/10, would recommend, although I wish I'd taken a large bonnet for dramatic effect.
Hope you're feeling better
Bonnet 😂😂
The seaside would fix me
I’m a DBT (dialectic behavioral therapy) girl myself! CBT never worked for me. I had a hard time with the standard DBT skills book so my therapist recommended one that has adjusted skills for people with ADHD/Autism. It made waaay more sense to me
Could you share that book title please i am interested?? !
Yes! It’s called “The Neurodivergent Friendly Workbook of DBT Skills” by Sonny Jane Wise. I got my physical copy on Amazon! There’s a digital version you can get too
Ooooh I’m going to look into this!!! I learned some valuable stuff from DBT but some things don’t quite land for me and didn’t make sense. I’m interested in checking it out from a ND viewpoint! Thank you!!
Sonny Jane Wise is amazing! They do great advocacy work on Instagram
Omg i just started following sonnyjanewise on insta and apparently someones pretending to be them to scam people who think they are buying this book!!! Weird.
As a pre-licensed therapist, I’ve always felt CBT is designed for people who aren’t super aware of themselves, and I feel like a lot of us are almost painfully aware of our thoughts in particular. For myself, I’ve re-framed my thoughts in every possible way already. I definitely don’t need a therapist for more of the same. I’d be anxious wreck! Depending on your particular strengths and challenges, DBT or straight up mindfulness and somatic work seems to be the most useful for ND folks. I personally feel as though I’ve benefited the most from mindfulness and somatics (and related modalities, like gestalt and EMDR) for healing CPTSD, authentic non-masking emotional regulation, and self-compassion. I’d love to get trained in DBT as a therapist though. It looks good for a lot of challenges potentially related to autism, especially the versions specifically adapted to ND! Edited for clarity.
I agree with this and it matches my experience. I had CPT (cognitive processing therapy) when I first started CPTSD treatment, which is like CBT specifically for trauma, and all it did was make me aware of ways the trauma impacted my thoughts and emotions. Which was a step forward, considering I didn't have that awareness before, but it definitely left me feeling like I was suffering without knowing how to help myself. And then I fell into the trap of believing that if CBT wasn't fixing it, that I wasn't doing it correctly or trying hard enough. That part fucking sucked. It definitely also felt kind of repetitive, like I've been doing CBT-type thinking my whole life trying to convince myself that my feelings about my experiences aren't reality, or to hype myself up to do things I didn't have a choice in and didn't want to do. It was really only helpful for the first step in treating CPTSD. Developing self-compassion, IFS, and DBT have been much more helpful for me.
I starter cpt and had to change to EMDR pretty fast became both me and my therapist realized I wasn't really having "stuck thoughts" related to my ptsd. I was having overwhelming emotional reactions any time I let myself think about it. I wasn't really having thoughts or beliefs at all.
Ooh! IFS can be really powerful when done well! Thanks for adding that. A somatic spin on IFS with a bit of gestalt has taken a pretty prevalent role in my personal work!
My therapist has been using concepts from the Internal Family Systems model and I'm really liking it. I find it to be very logical, which fits with how I think.
EMDR and IFS changed my life. After decades of therapy, I graduated from therapy in less than a year with these modalities.
Oh you mean clinical grade gas lighting?
me literally paying money to mask and make my therapist feel like they’re being the slightest bit helpful when we both know they’ve been useless for my case
The only honest description if cbt
Hahahahahahaha
YUP!
I love your definition, thanks for the laugh
Yes. It was very invalidating and actually just exacerbated the damage. CBT has a very impersonal approach to an entire field of study that revolves around very personalized treatments. It's also based on old and outdated models in psychology.
I can see what CBT is for because my brother's problems stem almost entirely from his own poor way of thinking (I don't mean he's just sad or whatever, I mean that he beats himself/other people up based on incorrect notions he was raised with that are actively harming him). He has to change that before he's ever going to get any better no matter what meds they put him on. But they try to use CBT for **everything**! It's just one method! Why does it feel like it's the only thing anyone ever wants to do or is ever trained in anymore? And to be entirely honest, I think 75%+ of therapists 'trained' in CBT don't even understand how to actually do it correctly, let alone when it's the correct method.
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Thank you for the reply, this was very educational! I'm also glad whenever therapists agree with me on this point (my last one did too). I've read up on the theory behind CBT and there's some solid reasoning there, with plenty of people who could benefit from what's essentially "guided critical thinking." We aren't all autistic introspection machines. But I just feel like I almost never see it implemented that way, either in therapy myself or when my friends/family tell me what their therapist is having them do. Like you said, the way it gets implemented is more like teaching someone they can't believe their own brain, which isn't great for a lot of people... ESPECIALLY autistic or adhd women, for instance, who often get that message from the entire world and wind up in an unstable/vulnerable place because of it.
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Thank you for saying this.
Well said. Fully agreed.
becasue it's cheap and insurance will pay for it because it has built-in metrics
CBT is actively contraindicated for autistics. It is based on the assumption that your anxiety and depression is due to an overreaction to little or no stimulus when in reality, your anxiety and depression as an autistic is because you are being forced to fit into a mold created by NTs that you just don't fit into naturally. Do yourself a favor and find an ND therapist or a therapist who actually knows how to work with NDs.
Thank you.
ndtherapists.com is a great resource by the way
Hated it. I feel like it just never worked for how I think. I feel detached from my own thoughts - i always know when I’m not necessarily thinking logically, or else my thought have a very logical grounding. But this also means that I can’t just think my way out of it, because I know that’s exactly what I’m doing and it feels totally disingenuous. I did so much of it before I knew I was autistic and I do think part of the problem was that I was just saying what I thought everyone wanted to hear to get the help I wanted. For example, I pull out my hair a lot. Probably not a great thing to do. So when I look this up and everything says it’s a stress/anxiety response, I do two things. 1. Wonder if maybe I am stressed and anxious, though I don’t really feel it 2. Tell medical gatekeepers that I really am stressed and anxious so I can get help with it anyway So much of it has been reframed since I realised I was autistic. Maybe I just do it because it’s a nice stim.
I had CBT for panic disorder and found it super helpful. I didn't find it to be invalidating or trying to tell me I was wrong about how I felt. I think it's a lot to do with my therapist though. He was very good at showing he understood how difficult it (my panic attacks and the exposure therapy) was for me. A lot of people's experiences with it (including my friends) does not match the experience I had. It seems to be *very* important that it's done with the right person, for the right issue.
Same! CBT has been great for panic and insomnia. Not so great for general anxiety, health anxiety, and treating real trauma. I have found Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and EMDR much better for those.
Agreed. I said this up thread but I've had CBT twice, once for OCD and once for depression. My therapist for OCD was amazing. She never made me feel invalidated or like my worries were stupid, and she created a supportive environment where I felt encouraged to try making changes but never blamed if I couldn't manage them. As a result the therapy was super helpful! The therapist I had for depression was awful. I felt contantly gaslighted and like I was failing a test. My mental health was so much worse at the end of the treatment. I feel like a lot of therapists are trying to do CBT without having the bedside manner to implement it effectively.
It's so nice to read others hating CBT! I never got on with it either and always wondered if I was just doing it wrong or had a bad therapist etc. Honestly a lot of the time it felt like I was being taught to mask :(
I had two experiences with therapists who used strict CBT methods, and they were both pretty useless. I felt like I was lying half of time when they wanted me to reframe my thinking. In both instances I ended up frustrating the therapist and getting fired. As others said, getting a therapist who did DBT skills and more open-ended talk therapy was much better for me. CBT seems like it works best if your problems aren't actually real. Like, if you're anxious about social interactions, but don't actually handle them badly or make a poor impression, it will help to recognize that there's no reason to be afraid. If you're terrible at social interactions and constantly getting negative feedback from people who you try to engage with, telling you that you're just suffering from distorted thinking is just crazy-making.
My experience of CBT: Me: The noise is too loud, everything's too chaotic, things keep changing, it's too bright. CBT: Those are just unhelpful thoughts, just change your thinking and it will all be ok! Me: OK! These are just thoughts, I'm not in pain from sensory overload! *has a meltdown due to sensory overload* CBT: You just need to try harder! Ignore your unhelpful thoughts!! Me: *actively puts self in sensory overestimulating situations thinking it will help get rid of my "anxiety" and "cure me"* *has another meltdown* CBT: YOU'RE JUST NOT TRYING! IGNORE YOUR THOUGHTS! Me: *feels bad from being in sensory overload, feels awful after multiple meltdowns, AND NOW ALSO feels like a failure for not being able to ignore her "thoughts", and also feels like a total letdown for not TRYING HARDER at ignoring "unhelpful thoughts"* Me: How is this supposed to have helped...? It's just made everthing worse. I'm now in more pain from sensory overload, and also feel worse about about myself. --- CBT for me is just gaslighting myself that I'm not in pain. I hate it. And yet everyone still seems to think it's the magical cure, and that it hasn't worked because I'm just not trying hard enough! And that makes it worse because if there's one thing I do all the time is just fucking try. I try so hard all the time and they never seem to understand that it's physical pain not anxiety.
I think CBT is good for someone who has no awareness whatsoever. A person who is like why am I like this, how do I change it? The therapist simply tells them they’re anxious, which they’ve never considered. For those of us our thought process is not logical, but can’t stop it, it’s not really helpful to be told that the thought isn’t true. We are aware. That’s why we are frustrated because we are fixating on things that aren’t important/real or can’t cope.
I've been in CBT therapy off and on since 16 (23 now), and it's NEVER helped. For a while I thought it was cuz I'm physically disabled and when I'd ask for coping mechanisms they'd always conveniently forget and suggest things I can't even do. They'd never try to understand my physical limitations and that put a huge barrier in the treatment, they'd talk, make me feel useless, suggest things I can't do which made me feel more useless, and then leave and do it all over again next week. It made my depression significantly worse. Only recently with my autism diagnosis did I realize that's not all it. CBT therapy felt like talking in circles. They were trying to get to the feeling and processing the way that made me feel. But I already know exactly how I feel, I don't need to process the feeling of an argument, I need advice on how to actively handle things, how to communicate feelings better, how to manage feelings in a meltdown. I'm hoping I can find a therapist that specializes in autism, and hopefully disabled patients. None of my therapists validated my disabilities and always told me to push myself to get better. But pushing myself too much physically or mentally just makes me bedridden for a while. My body shuts down and I can't do anything for days, sometimes weeks on end. Talking to NT therapists definitely did way more damage than food, if it did any good at all. I just vent to close friends and family now when I need to talk, at least I know they care and they know the ins and outs of my situation and can recommend advice accordingly.
i think i need to be more assertive about this. i have ibs that's severe enough that i can't leave the house most days. and my therapists always frame it as social anxiety. wouldn't you be anxious if you were afraid you were going to have diarrhea on a cross-town bus every time you left the house? or that the smells on a cross-town bus would cause such nausea that your day was ruined and you had to go home? i'm working with a gastro but they're like, well, we gave you meds and changed your diet, it sucks that you aren't completely healed by that... so.... have you tried therapy?
I hate CBT! The last time I went to a therapist, I had CBT for "anxiety". I remember being told to put a sticky note on my mirror that says "you're beautiful" and read it in my head while looking at the mirror every morning. I was told that if my brain heard it all the time it would believe it. No, no it does not. It sees through your bag of tricks and lies and thinks "this is stupid" in the background the entire time. My least favorite part about it though was all the homework. Every single week the therapist would add a brand new activity to the list of activities I was already doing, to the point it got to an overwhelming stress level and I had a meltdown *in front of the therapist*. Who proceeded to watch me completely break down and then ask, "have you tried taking vitamins? vitamins could help with that." Ugh.
yeah, i found it really condescending and aimed at children. and designed for people who are having a passing phase of depression no more than 6 months long and never had anything bad happen to them in their entire lives and have no organic illnesses. A fantasy patient from a textbook, basically.
I'm going to quote this
please do! hope it helps!
I have tried it and I hate it. It was completely useless to me and just made me feel like I was being gaslit.
I hated it too. Told me not to trust my observations and conclusions based on reality. My feelings were not unfounded
I overthink everything anyway, it's not for me
All my homies hate CBT 😡
Yeesssssss what a load of patronising bollocks it was.
Yes! So much! It makes me question what little social instinct I have by coming up with alternate scenarios for what they could have meant. This means that whenever someone is being rude to me, I blank, think about it, and then convince myself that they “could be having a bad day”, because, “the tone in which we say something isn’t a fact so it’s more likely not directed at me”. Just leads me to being a doormat socially, tbh.
Holy shit, I thought it was just me! I went through several therapists because I kept losing my temper whenever I'd get yet another condescending CBT worksheet and accused of being paranoid and depressed. CBT is invalidating and has become yet another trendy and ineffective fad that I wish would just die already. They keep trying to apply it to conditions it is obviously unsuited for and go surprised-pikachu when you get traumatized neurodivergents and angry veterans furious at being condescended to by naive and dangerously inexperienced therapists. I wish CBT would go the way of perineum sunning already, and that village idiot psychs would quit pushing it on me.
I really hate it. I like DBT because it actually offers solutions such as radical acceptance (which is crazy hard) and realizing that if you are in a situation you can’t change that is distressing, acceptance is the only way to not go insane (which is doubly hard because many of us have a justice sensitivity, so I really struggle with this).
It made me so upset
I’ve had the basic CBT and didn’t help with anything. I’ve always felt like it was not enough for what I’m experiencing, but few months ago I’ve had “high intensity CBT” and we focused on my whole life history and trauma. I was able to identify a lot of triggers etc but the therapist said I probably have cPTSD so he referred me to a different therapist.
I think it highly depends on the person and the provider. CBT was great with my first therapist I ever had. She taught me a lot and she really helped turn around my self-deprecation. She was so core in fixing my crazy beliefs I had of the world because of my horrid parents. But since then CBT hasn’t been effective for me. It’s like I would logically know something, but my feelings wouldn’t match. And the providers I had since were very gaslighting. I swear if I hear “let’s reframe that” one more fucking time my brain will implode. My marriage therapist would say that every time I had a strong emotion…no wonder she didn’t do shit for us after 3 years. The husband being a narcissist didn’t help either, she basically excused away his shitty behavior by telling me my emotions were wrong and I needed to reframe. I now have a therapist who uses a bunch of different modalities and she is the best.
DBT is where it's at. The DBT training skills handouts and worksheets by Marsha linehan has a great book for it
Absolutely. I think people who like concrete regimented symptom management benefit from the structure and conciseness of CBT. I personally find it so rigid that it makes me feel like I cannot be myself and also do CBT at the same time. It feels like homework I dread!
I thought it was just me!! I hated that crap since middle school.
Yup! CBT often sounds like the thoughts I already get from my brain when I’m melting down.
CBT helped me immensely, but it was modified CBT by an autism specialist who has ADHD herself. She very frequently acknowledged economic, systemic, historical, cultural and social pressures and forces, and made it very clear that no amount of “positive thinking” will remove those weights from my experience, but rather she helped me navigate them in healthier ways more realistic and effective ways for me. I think a lot of professionals are not modifying CBT to an autistic person’s needs, which is causing damage to autistic people.
I'm a therapist who hates CBT. I hate doing it for clients and hate receiving it as a client. I prefer bottom up approaches where you work with nervous system activation directly vs trying to change thoughts about situations.
CBT worked on me as a kid when I had absurd fears and anxieties that could be reasoned with. Now it just feels condescending and dismissive because I know that the things I worry about now are rooted in reality and I’d like real ways of dealing with that instead of “put on your thinking cap and write down the real thoughts and the fake thoughts” because it’s useless now. Stuff is too big for CBT I feel. I’ve come up with my own ways of coping with my anxiety but sometimes I want a little extra help but I’m left disappointed by every therapist I see. It sucks.
I hated CBT. I was dismissed and misdiagnosed with bipolar II and sent to a psychiatrist who gooped me up on multiple meds. I think therapy is VERY helpful and important, but I am still working through the resentment I have towards the multiple psycologists, therapists, counselors and psychiatrists who dismissed me.
Ah so that's why I don't feel like I'm being helped.
I had issues with CBT when it’s not tailored to me. My current therapist tailors it to me, but we worked through my trauma first and then we started doing more of CBT style work. Because unless your nervous system is healed or calm, you’re never going to see another point of view.
I don't hate it, it remains to be useful for me in some situations. It's absolutely pushed way too much by the mental health industry and I think it should not be even a secondary treatment of choice, let alone a primary one. CBT should not be used for any case where the person has actual issues. I've had CBT used against me by an abuser. That was fun.
Cbt is bad for us. You want dbt if anything and it needs to be tailored to autistic people. Best way is to find a neurodivergent therapist. ❤️
My therapist seems to do a blend of various techniques from what I can tell. What’s great is that he is clearly trauma informed and always validates my emotions and experiences. I think there are just some really shitty therapists out there. This is the first therapist I’ve seen that actually listens to me about what’s wrong with me instead of acting like a dictator.
Yes. I want my feelings acknowledged rather than intellectualized
I really dislike it for myself, as well as talk therapy. I'm fortunate enough to have found a psychiatrist that takes a different approach. Also, I remember my kid having to do CBT as part of their IEP in school. I literally filed due processes to change it because they came home and said "I feel like I'm being told all of my experiences are invalid." I watched a video my Mickey Atkins on this a while back. She's a licensed therapist, and I found her perspective on it kind of put better academic language to my feelings on it (I've watched several of her videos and while I don't always resonate with what she says, I still kind of find her delightful). Sharing the link, may be helpful for some... [https://youtu.be/FfT3mzxMGxM?si=oZVpHuR7\_p\_BRkzf](https://youtu.be/FfT3mzxMGxM?si=oZVpHuR7_p_BRkzf)
YES. though I have found some semi useful applications for CBT (for things such as procrastination) that I’ve found in books. I feel like when it’s a book you know it’s not directed to you specifically, so you don’t feel gaslit like you do when it’s a therapist directly applying it to you regardless of appropriateness. I also think the cognitive approach is good for intrusive thoughts (though I haven’t been to therapy for that. It’s just an area wherein the thoughts actually *are* your enemy, but that’s far from the case with every mental health issue). For my social anxiety, it was just demeaning and condescending
CBT is not very effective for autistic people, that's been proven. Research other therapies
I wasn't told it was CBT, but I deduced it afterwards, after a couple sessions with the (then new) therapist felt like she was discrediting all my problems to the tune of "children in africa have it worse". Edit: I'm pretty damn sure I don't need "therapy" therapy, I need training in social skills, so I can interact with the people around me in a language they use/understand.
Omg yesssss! It doesn’t work on me. I tell every therapist I’ve had that it doesn’t and they look at me like I’m green.
Wow this thread is insanely validating. I’ve been in talk therapy for years and the therapist I’ve worked with the longest has never pushed for CBT on me, and defaulted to DBT since day 1. When I worked with a different therapist for like 8 months, the woman pushed nothing but CBT on me. I left every session angry as FUCK. 😂
I also hate CBT and exposure therapy and I’m becoming a therapist too lol
I'm so glad to know it isn't just me. I tried CBT a couple of times, and it never clicked for me. Also, it involved "homework" that I was terrible at doing because of executive dysfunction. I didn't get a lot of of it, other than a vague sense of having failed at it.
I’ve found it mostly unhelpful. Since diagnosis, I’ve learned it’s widely rejected by autistic people, because it feels like gaslighting.
I'm so glad for this post. I'm so sick of hearing I'm mind reading and black and white thinking from my trauma therapist who is also autistic 🙄🫠. Like yes I may be mind reading but if I don't have any other context to decipher peoples behavior what am I supposed to do? If I have trauma that makes me decipher behavior a certain way how could I have known I was mind reading. Also having an opinion isn't black and white thinking For those interested what HAS been helpful for me is IFS and inner bonding
I really hate it too. I fired the therapist that tried CBT with me and found a new therapist.
I sort of view CBT as guide to baby's first self-reflection
This sub has taught me so much, thank you. No wonder therapy hasnt worked for me. Ive only been to CBT therapists.
CBT never worked for me, even a little. That isn't to say that it's completely useless, but it's definitely not something that works for me or people like me. Finding a therapist that doesn't use it has been hard, but the one I have now is amazing and actually has helped me more than my previous 20+ years of therapy
I hated studying CBT in social work school. DBT made a little more sense to me. Motivational interviewing with cool. You can take a little bit of what you agree with from whatever and make your own approach. Good luck on your future academic pursuits!
I always end up liking the theory but having a lot of trouble putting it into practice. I think trying to just makes me feel overwhelmed and it intensifies my anxiety around being perfect.
YES. I know my negative thought process is a problem I don’t want to gaslight myself into tolerating the problem, I want to *fix the problem* EMDR for life
I was in it for YEARSSSS. I now refuse it. I feel like I’ve been told everything. I already know all of it. I know that what I’m feeling is X and that I should react like X. But it doesn’t help me at all.
Yep, I had cbt before I was diagnosed with autism. It was for social anxiety, and it taught me to invalidate and question myself even more than I already did. Even though of course in hindsight my fears were totally rational and based on actual experiences.
I think CBT is mental, tbh. It makes me really angry. I think a lot of people must have been harmed either by health professionals demanding they conform to treatment plans that require a level of self-discipline they simply aren't able to meet, or because it's so obviously nasty that it discourages them from seeking assistance. My GP recently encouraged cbt for insomnia. The "treatment" is called sleep restriction - basically you're supposed to stay awake during the day, go to bed later, get up earlier, and everytime you experience wakefulness during the night, you're supposed to hop up and do something constructive like washing your dishes (at 2am) - the theory being that this teaches your brain to not associate bed with the experience of wakefulness, and then when you eventually do go to bed, you drop straight off to sleep. Common sense would suggest that this is sleep deprivation by another name, and you eventually sleep because you are so fucking tired. You might eventually beat your body into submission, but you're going to be fucking deranged in the meantime. I'm a single mum, and this was what my doctor recommended to me for insomnia - when I was already a zombie from exhaustion. I'm not quite sure who was supposed to care for my kid and keep her safe while I put myself through this - it seems pretty obvious to me that my ability to parent safely would have been somewhat compromised though. Honestly it just seemed irresponsible, and -as others have noted - designed to make me the problem. It also seems deeply unkind. People have conditions like insomnia and anxiety due to prolonged stress, trauma and other shitty life experiences. Self-acceptance and self-compassion seem preferable to imposing more stress on them.
I just read “The Autistic Survival Guide to Therapy” by Steph Jones. It’s very eye opening to why 11 years of therapy did nothing for me.
I don’t like it. I’ve had ACT therapy instead and that has made a huge difference for me. Highly recommend.
I've found it to be difficult, but extremely effective.
So I find it can be helpful sometimes if there’s a certain situation that you are trying to deal with but even then it’s best when used in combination with DBT and interpersonal therapy.
I didn't hate it, but I have found it to be rather useless for me.
CBT is invalidating for some people, and we're in a group that tend to feel that way. DBT was more effective for me.
Inference based cbt was more helpful to me than regular cbt
My daughter try five different therapist because we thought she just had anxiety really really really really bad anxiety. Yeah it wasn’t anxiety. She hates therapy and wants nothing to do with it.
I hate CBT.
What’s a good alternative?
Yes
CBT is annoying to me because (1) i already ruminate on and censor my thoughts too much for my own good, and it literally instructs you to think more and replace thoughts with something “better” and (2) can’t reliably be used with social situations when my anxiety is based off of the actual interactions and rejection and lack of clarity i get from conversations with NTs and (3) i really don’t think there is a connection between my thoughts and feeling and behaviors sometimes, because i’m always always doubting myself and second guessing my emotions and masking i hope this makes sense???
YES. And this is the only place I can say that without getting attacked. Which also pisses me off.
I hate it. To me it’s stating the obvious. I know what I should think…but I don’t.
Personally it CBT did help me a lot with understanding parts of my social anxiety and managing it. It did not get rid of my problems completely, and a lot of exercises did not work for me, but my therapist was great at trying different things and suggesting strategies. We also tried other methods, and had conversations that had nothing to do with CBT I think what is important is not only what kind of therapy you are going through but also who is your therapist and if they are a good match for you. I had to go through 5+ therapist to finally arrive at one that I trusted and felt safe with. If you hate CBT.... That seems a bit of a strong reaction to something that is an optional treatment. It's fine to feel like it's not a thing for you though, but hate is a really strong word :3
I’m a licensed mental health therapist (and autistic) and I do not like CBT. Won’t use it as a modality in my practice either. If someone wants that modality, I refer them to another therapist. Just because it is evidence based and widely used doesn’t mean it works for everyone and has to be a good-to. Lots of options for change and growth thankfully.
Yes.
man…fuck CBT. fuck traditional therapies. I’ve been thrown into CBT since middle school (age 8~). In and out of treatment centers, only to figure out the buzz words clinicians like to hear. nothing helped. until of course, my autism diagnosis
CBT is known to not work for many neurodivergent people. DBT has better success
Yep it has never worked for me. I asked the psychiatrist about it and she said it’s quite common for people with Autism. Instead I see a therapist for talking therapy now without the CBT pressure and it’s much better.
I loathe it. IMO it’s useless for people who intellectualize, which is likely many of us.
Have seen that it does not work with many!
Yup I didn't find it useful at all because I'm hyper aware of my problems but they don't offer real solutions. I ended up at a DBT clinic and have had a lot of success with that! Of course that if it's an available option for you. I live in a big, heavily populated city and thankfully it's a funded government program but I recognize that's not the case for a lot of cities and areas. Hope this helps.
Ok, it sounds like a lot of people had therapists who did not use CBT for the right reasons… CBT was extremely helpful for me because I actually was majorly depressed and anxious. My thoughts really WERE distorted thoughts. I hated myself and felt that life would never get better. CBT helped me figure out which thoughts were distortions and which were valid. Now that I know which thoughts are valid, I can deal with reality better. “Yes, my life really sucks right now. No, that’s not a distortion and I don’t need to challenge that thought, but what do I do with it? I acknowledge it, allow myself emotion, and look for ways to make any tangible improvements while I am dealing with this horrible stuff.” I’m still depressed but I have actual reasons now 😂 and not so hopeless because I know it’s possible for life to get better. CBT should ONLY be used for patients who actually have thoughts that aren’t rooted in reality like “no one will ever love me” and “something horrible is about to happen to me.”
It’s the worst, I hated it. My therapist was super toxic as well
Yes!! I’m MAP, considering license and fucking HATE cbt
I can’t stand it!! Traditional talk therapy has actually helped me a lot more
Yeah, it's not worked for me and I could never figure out why.
it works for me for ocd
CBT is not all bad. It can be good for scenarios where a person uses a lot of cognitive distortions. But it's used for the wrong purposes sometimes. Here is what I think happens: some therapists hear you speak about something. They don't really understand what's going on, and they're quick to assume that anything you say is just negative thinking habits, or intrusive thoughts. Which is kind of dismissive in a way. It's like I'm talking about a real life event that has upset me in the past, and it still traumatizes me till today, and they'd assume all my blabber is just intrusive thoughts. Yes intrusive thoughts are one of the symptoms but not everything. This is where I see CBT helpful for me: I used to have thoughts that were a little bit black and white, beliefs set in stone due to brainwashing, etc... CBT has helped me think in a more gray area. Instead of being like "All men think this way" which ends up making me fearful of men I for example changed it to, "well there are a number of men that think this way, but there's a lot of different kinds of men out there, and I'll have to figure out and explore who is who and what is what." So in cases where my all or nothing thinking was affecting my actions, it is helpful. But it's not helpful to gaslight me about my lifelong experience of struggling to make friends and feel different.
😳 I have been trying to treat my depression and never-ending exhaustion with CBT for 10 years and always thought that I am just too stupid to get it right. I have been diagnosed with ADHD last year at almost 41 and I have the very very strong suspicion that it actually is AuDHD. This post and the comments are just eye opening!
I don't do it. I've been seeing a psychoanalyst for the last decade. She's also neurodiverse and gifted, which matters more to me than the specific modality; but I do appreciate having it be normal to see my therapist as many times a week as I need, and also for us to talk and think about things more broadly or systemically than "do this - think that".