Link :Amazon, Goodreads. Price:£9.89
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy is a psychological treatment to help people make sense of and manage their emotions. Published by two expert practitioners in the field, and endorsed by comprehensive list of psychologists and psychiatrists, this book aims to put some of the tools of CBT into your own hands.
I am a disabled veteran with significant physical disability, post-traumatic stress disorder, and a variety of emotional problems stemming from a catalogue of sins (for example, I spent a couple of years gigging as a singer-songwriter. I imagine my audiences are still in therapy.)
CBT helps people deal with issues like anxiety, depression, trauma, psychosomatic issues – where you become physically ill because of your emotional difficulties – and even relationship problems. It helps you identify and correct the unhealthy beliefs behind your emotional pain.
This book does this through illustrations. Divided into sections on anxiety, depression, anger, guilt, hurt, jealousy, shame, and envy, it shows you pictures accompanied by a sentence associated with the feeling. It then proposes an alternative way of expressing that feeling, along with discussion about how and why we feel this way. (By the by, the pictures could have been drawn by my 5-year-old and don’t work well on Kindle, but that isn’t a big problem.)
It works like a supermarket. You stroll through the pages, pick out things you recognise, then you start trying to reformulate your thoughts. It helps just seeing something you are feeling expressed in words, knowing you’re not alone and knowing there’s an alternative. After that, the book is very clear that there is a lot of work – changing a habitual line of thought for something new is difficult and takes time.
But it has helped me already. And if you’re hurting, and looking for a path out, I can’t recommend this highly enough. It won’t fix everything but it may give you some ideas for how to start.
