Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Anxiety Oakland CA

One of the more successful treatments for anxiety symptoms and anxiety disorders is a method of therapy called "Cognitive Behavioral Therapy" (CBT) and many anxiety disorder patients have had great success in overcoming and coping with anxiety symptoms through this method. Some aspects of CBT that are important parts of the therapy are:

1. Change the way the patient thinks about anxiety in general and about the symptoms it causes. The patient will learn through this aspect of CBT that anxiety itself is a "natural emotion" and the unpleasantness of the symptoms in people in whom anxiety has become a "disorder" comes from the fact that this normal emotion can occur out of context or at inappropriate times (disordered). When a patient learns that the emotion he is experiencing is not "strange or foreign," this alone can help toward reducing the fear of the symptoms anxiety causes. Once a patient with anxiety accepts the fact that anxiety is natural and is supposed to happen at the appropriate times, he can:
2. Look at those things that have become "triggers" in causing anxiety to occur out of context or in a disordered fashion. One way to express this fact to an anxiety sufferer is to say, "Anxiety is a completely natural and normal emotion and it is only the timing of it that has become out of the order it was intended to happen." Under normal circumstances, the anxiety emotion was created to be triggered in order to allow the one it is occurring in to have the sudden added strength and presence of mind, to flee from danger or to fight an enemy that has attacked him. This is the origin of the term "triggered anxiety" (that is referred to as the "fight or flight" response).
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Author: James Lowrance