CBT is a psycho-social intervention that focuses on alleviating mental health and changing cognitive distortions, which is an irrational thought pattern that causes individuals to perceive reality inaccurately. Being a highly time-sensitive and strict form of psychotherapy, CBT helps individuals overcome obstacles, such as addiction treatment, and helps people identify their goals. Here at New Roads Behavioral Health in Salt Lake City Utah, we understand how frustrating this can be troublesome.
Based on a cognitive model, CBT uses a variety of cognitive and behavioural therapy. While in treatment at New Roads, individuals learn skills that enable them to change their thinking and achieve a sense of well-being that lasts long. According to various experts in the field of psychology, CBT is a gold standard of psychotherapy or talk therapy and helps in rewiring the thought pattern efficiently.
Thoughts and emotions can influence behaviour and allow individuals to view typical life situations differently. The treatment was used to treat depression earlier, but considering the benefits, CBT expanded to include a multitude of mental health conditions such as eating disorders and substance abuse. There are several approaches to CBT that comprise of:
- Cognitive therapy
- Dialectical behavior therapy
- Rational behavior therapy
- Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT)
- Rational living therapy
One of the significant benefits of CBT is that past experiences are not entirely involved. It is a problem-oriented approach that helps individuals manage triggers by recognizing the circumstances that lead to behavior, then envisioning strategies to avoid the trigger situations, and then using CBT coping techniques to uplift emotions.
CBT has been shown to heal trauma, reduce stress impact, cope with situations, handle emotions healthily, and prevent relapse of the symptoms. It is said that the person should not leave the treatment in between because it may cause discomfort and can also be a reason to depend on the toxic substance that triggered the problem earlier.
As per NAMI (National Association for Mental Illness, CBT is different from traditional psychodynamic psychotherapy because it includes active interventions outside of sessions.
How Do People Get Addicted?
The Excessive Appetites model of addiction was introduced in 1985 by Professor Jim Orford. This model focuses more on the psychological aspect than the physiological side of how people get addicted and states that addiction is a process that starts from the teenage years when a person starts gaining autonomy on certain things.
There are several reasons why a person is indulged in a substance causing addiction. It can be due to a personal basis, difficult childhood, series of addictions within the family, learned associations including many other unidentified or undefined factors. The theory of addiction treatment is simple. People engage in an activity that induces a feeling of pleasure in them. Whenever people start facing a problematic situation, they perform such activities to calm themselves down. This process soon becomes a habit that is hard to stop and goes on to become a detriment of everyday living.
Dopamine, also known as the feel-good hormone, is released naturally when an individual is doing a healthy activity, including eating a favourite food. But if a person starts using drugs, the brain is forced to produce dopamine, making the pleasurable experience unnaturally longer. This soon becomes a problem as it alters the brain chemistry enabling it to create the required amount of dopamine that is usually secreted.
Because of addiction behaviours, people tend to lose out on a lot of things, including their friends, family members, and livelihood. If we try to understand the profoundly entrenched issue of aggravated addiction, we will find that the behaviour is caused due to some emotional stress.
How CBT Treats Addiction
Being a widely used therapeutic intervention, CBT interrupts negative thought patterns and paves new ways of learning things to live a fulfilling and addiction-free life. CBT possesses two main components, including functional analysis and skills training, where the consequences of behavior are assessed. Our therapists here at New Roads Behavioral Health in Salt Lake City Utah ask a series of questions to the patients to gather insight about emotions. This also helps our therapists here at New Roads in understanding the root cause of the elicited behaviors. Within the skill training session, the therapist tries to help the patient unlearn maladaptive behaviors and introduce coping skills.
Skill training allows the individual to understand the harm that a particular substance is causing or the future impact of the same, basically educating patients. Skill training is integral as the patient who has learned the coping skills will be able to implement them whenever they are facing the need to use the substance.
The sole purpose of CBT techniques is to gather insight into the patient psyche and understand their own thought processes. Below mentioned is a few functions that our psychologist in Northern Utah can perform on our patients:
- Imagery Exposure: this form of treatment is introduced to help patients overcome their fears and talk about the negative episodes of their life openly without any thought. There are several variations in the exposure therapy and is determined by the psychologists.
- Planning Pleasant Activity
A highly organized form of activity that took researchers by surprise with the results. Pleasant activity planning is one of the cognitive behavioural therapy that includes 2 versions. The first version asks the patient to have an activity that is not a regular part of their life for 7 consecutive days. The nature of the activities can be as simple as drinking eight glasses of water a day.
The second version involves the patient schedule for additional activities in their day to day lifestyle.
- Distress Exposure
Patients tend to avoid situations that can trigger them. Hence this form of therapy is involved where the patient is asked to write events that have caused him/her distress in the past. This exposure includes a scale ranging from 0-10, with 0 showing the least stress moment and 10 depicting the worst memories.
This treatment allows our therapists to understand the intensity of each event in the individual’s life and experiment with each event several times a day, starting from the lowest levels. There are instances where the therapist had to work on each list item again to reduce the level of stress in patients.
Overcoming addiction is not as brisk as it sounds, and people who are walking on the path of sobriety will face new challenges in their lives. Here at New Roads in Northern Utah we understand the addiction treatment. Proper guidance of our therapists will help patients to move to a new phase of their life in a hassle freeway.
What Should Be The Expectations From CBT Therapy and Addiction Treatment?
The first session in the Addiction Treatment usually involves our therapists explaining to patients about the entire treatment process, resolving any problem that clients might face, or answering any questions related to the treatment. The treatment is confined to a room and includes homework where the individual has to practice coping strategies on their own and track patterns of behavior.
The patient in the therapy is required to be as open to the therapist as possible to make way for treatment success. The whole idea of performing CBT on patients with addiction is to understand the pattern and what provokes the need to use the substance. Our psychologists and therapists here in Salt Lake City Utah use strategies and a treatment plan that helps the patient eradicate the problem from its roots.
During therapy, individuals will get a chance to use the treatments taught in the sessions in real-life so that they can deal with the urge smartly and upkeep their sobriety. It is to learn a variety of life skills that helps individuals at managing stress, building resilience and forging assertiveness.
How Long Does Addiction Treatment Take?
Usually, treatments can feel that they last for a long time, but with CBT, an individual may have weekly sessions anytime between five to twenty weeks. Which is normally around ten to twenty sessions total. However, the length of the treatments we offer here at New Roads Behavioral Health in Salt Lake City, Utah entirely depends on the individual’s level of addiction and many other factors influencing the treatment plan. This includes existing disorders, duration since the person is suffering, level of support from friends or family and the amount of stress the individual is facing.
When it comes to thinking about how CBT is different from other forms of treatment, it’s important to remember that CBT is a very engaging therapy method that allows our therapists here in Salt Lake City Utah to do more than passively listening to the patient’s problems. The collaboration between our patients and therapists throughout is what makes the treatment remarkable from others. CBT is flexible, making it effective in inpatient and outpatient settings, as well as individual and group counseling environments.
Over half of those with substance abuse disorders have also been diagnosed with a mental health or personality disorder, we take this into account during all levels of care.
- Cognitive and Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (CBT/DBT)
- Motivational Interviewing
- Regular Drug Testing
- Regular Therapy Sessions (individual and/or group)
It is unique that CBT guides our patients to overcome negative thoughts successfully. Still, one of the major essences of the treatment is CBT is also used as a part of a treatment plan that is tailored according to the needs of the patients exclusively. A combined approach helps a person remove harmful influences and develop coping or relapse prevention skills to the life circumstances they will face after treatment.
If you or a loved one is in need of cbt treatment New Roads Behavioral Health in Salt Lake City can help.
Give us a call today at 888-358-8998.
Dual Diagnosis in Salt Lake City
We believe that the best treatment option for cognitive behavior therapy and other dual diagnosis is an integrated option, where a person receives care for both of their diagnosed disorders.
An individual should spend time understanding their disorders and so should the professionals that are working with them.
Having a full understanding of the disorders and knowing the ways they affect each other will allow treatment to be the most effective that it can possibly be.
Due to the wide range of co-occurring disorders, treatment will not be the same for each individual. Even those that may present with the same two disorders will still need a specialized plan for their recovery.
We know each person is unique and the root cause of their health is unique as well.
Each doctor or therapist should be aware of the dual diagnosis and addiction treatment. They should be aware of how the other professionals are treating the individual.
For instance, an individual may be prescribed for addiction treatment, or anti-anxiety medication while they gain control over their mental health. The professional that is treating the addiction side of things must be aware of any medication that the individual is on.
Complete transparency and a joint effort in all the areas of the individual’s treatment is necessary for a full recovery.
Here at New Roads, we specialize in cognitive therapy behavior in the Salt Lake City area. If you or a loved one is in need of dual diagnosis treatment, please call us today to learn more about how we can help you gain control of your life. 888-358-8998.