[adamweld]

FWIW the data agrees with you, for milder cases of anxiety and depression, which often correlate with interpersonal issues, talk therapy (e.g. dissecting childhood trauma) is much less effective than cognitive behavioral therapy (analyzing behavioral and emotional patterns, trying to catch and redirect cycles of thought and action that lead to negative outcomes).

[taurath]

CBT is designed around outcomes that can be easily measured. It can also be actually harmful in cases where there’s actual trauma or neglect underlying the behavior or thought patterns. It has a tendency to paper over them.

It helps a lot of people, but it’t also a trap for those who have more deep things to work through, having spend 6 years stalled out in CBT before coming to grips with the deep trauma and neglect, and the dissociation that was so prevalent in my life that CBT therapists never even bothered screening for. Ask anyone with an emotionally neglectful or abusive upbringing what CBT did for them and you’ll get quite a few nasty answers.

[kayodelycaon]

> It has a tendency to paper over them.

Yeah. That's one of the dangers the book I had talked about. CBT is a tool for rewiring the brain. If you have deep things to work out and don't recognize it, CBT will do exactly what it says on the tin and rewire around things that need to be explored.

That's very not good.

I'm bipolar and use CBT a lot. Identifying if the problem is logic-based is key to its application. Logic cannot override depression or mania, which means CBT doesn't work and alternative strategies are needed. Usually I switch to some variant of DBT techniques. (It's so automatic at this point it's hard to identify all of what I'm doing.)

In my experience, learning when to apply CBT is much harder than learning CBT.