Therapy: A Personal Review of CBT
As I start my series about my personal experiences with different therapies, I wanted to reiterate that they are entirely based on my opinions of these interventions. All of them are able to adapt to people with autism, but everyone will have different experiences with everything. The success of any type of talk therapy depends entirely on the relationship between the client and the therapist. If you are looking into any of these therapies for yourself or a loved one, the therapist you choose will be critical to your experience.
CBT stands for cognitive behavioral therapy and it is the most widely used type of talk therapy in the United States. It follows a fairly rigid formula that is easy to teach to therapists, so the overwhelming majority of therapists have at least some experience in it. This formula considers behavior, thoughts, and feelings to be interconnected so that changing any of the three will impact the others. CBT therapists primarily focus on changing behavior because it is easiest to monitor behavior changes externally. This can be beneficial or harmful depending on the client’s relationship with their own behaviors.
Personally, I was in a CBT program at a university’s assault program. This therapy was specifically designed to treat PTSD by changing thought patterns about the traumatic incident and the person’s sense of self. I completed six weeks of the program before being discharged for having PTSD scores below diagnosis level. I would consider this program to be a success for me because my symptoms were significantly reduced in a short period of time, but there are some areas where CBT may not be as effective for others.
CBT is meant to be a short term solution focused intervention, so you usually only meet with the therapist for a few months. Some people prefer this while others prefer to have someone they meet with regularly for several months or years. CBT also requires a large amount of homework that is assigned by the therapist each week. This homework involves tracking and challenging distorted thinking patterns and behaviors. Some people say this feels invalidating of their emotions and blames the individual too much for their situation, but my specific therapist took great care to ensure this didn’t happen for me. This is definitely something to watch for as changing behaviors is often much more difficult for people with autism due to routine and thought rigidity.
Symptoms or disorders related to anxiety like PTSD can be helped with CBT because it addresses the cyclical thought patterns that can get people caught in a harmful cycle. If uncontrollable thoughts are the root of the issue for the person seeking therapy, then CBT might be a good option because of its availability and research proven effectiveness for anxiety.
