[This post is part of a series on The Model — my model for the human emotional system designed for use in leadership, self-awareness, and general purpose professional and personal development — which I find the most effective and valuable foundation for understanding yourself and others and improving your life. If you don’t see a Table of Contents to the left, click here to view the series, where you’ll get more value than reading just this post.]

If you want to improve your life, you should know about cognitive behavioral therapy. CBT has a lot going for it, but if, like me, you don’t have mental problems and diseases you should know its shortcomings too. I’ll describe them after describing it.

What is it? The web site of one of its core practitioners describes it as follows

Q: What is cognitive behavior therapy?

Cognitive behavior therapy is one of the few forms of psychotherapy that has been scientifically tested and found to be effective in hundreds of clinical trials for many different disorders….

and

Q: What is the theory behind cognitive behavior therapy?

Cognitive behavior therapy is based on the cognitive model: the way we perceive situations influences how we feel emotionally…

I’m no psychotherapist, but I know cbt has been shown in tests to improve the lives of people with some mental problems. Even if you don’t have mental problems, knowing about cbt can help you improve your life.

For now, let’s look at “the cognitive model” mentioned above, comparing it to our Model:

I looked up the cognitive behavioral therapy model online and found a few representations. Here’s one:
Look familiar? Just slight differences in the words and no reward. Here’s another:

Look familiar? It will even more in a few days when I post about the connection between environment and body. I think I mentioned before how I simplified the arrows to ease communicating the Model. This person increased the connectivity between elements — not a big difference.

You get the idea. I’m not sure how cbt’s originators developed their model. I developed mine before hearing about cbt, so I was pleasantly surprised to find people had reached so much success with such similar models.

Tomorrow I’ll write about shortcomings of cognitive behavioral therapy.

By the way, to learn more about cbt and its practice, I’ve found the Wikipedia page and Beck Institute’s page helpful. Aaron Beck played a major role founding cbt and his daughter Judith Beck worked closely with him.

• ← The Model: our emotional system is outdated
• Shortcomings of cognitive behavioral therapy and remedies to them →