Cognitive Behavioural Therapy For Dummies Paperback – October 15, 2010

I recently consulted a psychotherapist who was moderately helpful, but this book was of enormously more help than the in-the-flesh professional. My emotional problems, though not extreme, were eased to a considerably degree by chapter 2 (Spotting Errors in Your Thinking) and Chapter 3 (Tackling Toxic Thoughts) and many, many others. The authors, Rhena Branch and Rob Wilson, bring a llight touch, when appropriate, and I found myself laughing with them and at myself. I just wish that I had found this book earlier in my life - it would have saved me a lot of grief and made my life more enjoyable. So buy this valuable book...it will repay you greatly.

Bought this for my husband whose life is consumed with anxiety. We have tried numerous therapists in the past 5 years and all have focused on his past instead of working on the "present". He reads it everyday and sees himself on almost every page, which has helped him realize that this is a treatable issue. He now sees a therapist who is working on the CBT with him and he has found ways to retrain his mind away from the negative thoughts. Work in progress, but this book is easy to understand and every page has a suggestion on how to help your mind from controlling your life.

Personally, I couldn't connect to this book and didn't finish it. However, 'For Dummies' books are popular, which makes it worth a try.

If I could give this book 10 stars, I would. It is very readable and makes so much sense to me. I hope I don't sound dramatic, but this book changed my life. The authors are well versed on the subject and are able to explain CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) to us "dummies". I'm actually studying Clinical Psychology and I feel that this book has not only helped me, but it will help me to help my clients when I get to work in a few years. I'm very grateful that the authors shared their insight and experience with the world - what a gift. :)

This book has literally changed my life. I used it in conjunction with the Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for Dummies Workbook. This book explains things in layman's terms so you don't have to have a Psychology degree to understand what to do and why you are doing it. I have been able to get rid of a problem I've had for more than 15 years by using the principles in this book. It teaches you why you do what you do so you can get control of the behaviour. Awesome!

This is a review of the book “Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Dummies, 2nd edition” (kindle) by Rhena Branch and Rob Willson.It is an overall favorable review that expresses strong reservations about the book in question. It contains approximately sixteen-hundred words, and it should require eight minutes and five seconds of your life to read it.I rate the book at three stars. Were it not for the problems with it I discuss below, it would easily be worth five.Overall, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Dummies is an excellent book on a useful topic.At its many high points, its subject matter lets it soar above most of the self-help books you can expect to find out there, at its low points, it falls flat.On one level, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (hereafter, “CBT”) is a wonderful thing, boasting proven clinical effectiveness in treating many of the most common psychological problems including anxiety, depression and phobias. Better still, it is a therapy that requires a relatively small number of sessions to create noticeable improvement. This contrasts strongly with classical Freudian analysis which can go on for a decade and produce a net effect similar to what you would expect to get from a voodoo ritual.CBT for Dummies does a good job of explaining and showing you how to apply CBT’s simple and robust methodology to identify the recurring thoughts that trigger unacceptable feelings and thoughts that create depression, social anxiety, body-image problems, OCD etc., and reduce the distress they cause by challenging the rational validity/applicability of the thoughts that underpin distressing emotions using forms, diagrams and written exercises to gradually reduce their strength in a process that encourages you to ask yourself questions like, “Is the troublesome thought actually, demonstrably true?” or “How would things be if you thought otherwise?”All of this is good and surprisingly effective.I bought the book and used what was in it to reduce a bout of depression cause by a recent personal loss, and I found its methods rapidly and strongly effective. Its methods worked, very quickly.That’s the good part about CBT as you find it in this book. There are several “less good” ones.CBT’s Strengths, Weaknesses and Concerns.CBT’s strength lies in an approach to psychological problems that basically treats your mind the way a car mechanic approaches an engine: there’s a problem (thought-patterns leading to unwanted feelings and behaviors). The therapist helps the client find the relevant broken part (a thought), and helps the client replace the old, worn-out part with one or more shiny new ones (“No. Strangers *do not* automatically dislike me” “No. The world *will not* end if I look people in the eye and speak audibly and clearly”). CBT is very good for that sort of thing.In this respect, CBT’s simplicity is its strength, and its popularity and wide availability are understandable (you can train any fairly bright person to administer it) but it comes at the price of having a therapist who may have only a limited need to understand you as a human being who is unique in a sense that goes beyond the book’s behaviorist approach’s grudging, mechanical acknowledgement, and, depending on how much you need to have a rapport with someone from whom to you are to take deeply important, deeply intimate, advice. This can be a less-than-optimal approach to therapy.In CBT for Dummies, this “impersonal” approach comes to mean that at least one of the authors does not stop with the idea of creating circumstances that allow the client (note that I avoid the term “patient”) to live more comfortably in his or her own head. He or she wanders off into the realm of values and value systems; and it is here that the book nearly fails when you realize that the car engine metaphor becomes too real.It becomes too real when you realize that “modification of the thoughts underpinning beliefs that lead to behaviors” is one definition of brainwashing.This is a question of context that the author’s don’t address. “Thought modification,” is what elite military units do to create high-performance and unit cohesion. It is also what cults do to obtain new members.The only difference in CBT is that the process is voluntary and can be terminated by the subject at any time if he or she feels the strength of conviction needed to put a stop to it, which someone buffeted by psychological distress might not be able to do. Psychotherapy involves relationships involving trust and that trust requires the therapist to have a light hand which the authors sometimes do not display.To be sure, the authors address this concern, both early on, and again later; telling you, the reader, that you needn’t be afraid of CBT because you can always choose to go back to the way you used to think.From section 8237 of the Kindle Edition :"You can always return to your old ways or try a new strategy if you think your therapy isn't working."However, the first part of that sentence is logically meaningless.Starting a therapy that comments on your most intimate thoughts and saying that you can go back to the way you thought before you started it, is like saying you can have a scarring injury and go back to being smooth-skinned at any time you choose.You cannot unbreak an egg, or herd smoke back into a bottle; and you cannot but wonder why it is that the authors think you can ever hear that a thought you think is fundamentally wrong, and then just go back to thinking or doing the things exactly as you had before. That makes no sense whatsoever and there is a surprising amount of that kind of thing in this book.Then there are things like this advice on not seeking to bolster self-esteem on the basis of feeling special or exceptional.From section 8437 of the kindle edition:“Thinking You’re SpecialTrying to replace a sense of worthlessness with a feeling of specialness is a common self-defeating technique you can adopt for beating low self-esteem. Look out for times when you tell yourself, ‘If I’m not different, I’m nothing’ or ‘Being average or normal is like not existing’….…Accept yourself as a normal, ordinary, worthwhile individual just like everyone else.”The author’s advice seems to be, “Don’t let me help you be more of you—to discover *you* no matter where that leads but; “let CBT help you turn yourself inside out until you think like everyone else.”This aspect of CBT, its invalidation of individuality, is why CBT has been found*utterly* ineffective in the treatment of Borderline Personality Disorder, leading to the rise of Dialectic Behavioral Therapy (DBT).Beyond this, there is the love of and consistent insistence by the writers on the use of the words, “healthy,” and “healthier” enhancing this, “one-size-fits-all” picture of mental health that one hopes is not a built-in feature of all CBT and is only a quirk of this writing about it.It is this aspect of the book—the injection into therapy of CBT’s philosophy of living—that makes you imagine a nightmare world of CBT recipients.It would be a world where there were no insult-comics, where there were no alcohol- , drug-, or depression-fueled writers or artists—a world where no one ever sacrificed himself, intentionally or otherwise, on the altar of his or her own burdensome, non-mainstream, individuality.Don Rickles would have become an accountant. David Foster Wallace would be alive and meaningless as an obscure philosophy professor living on a daily fistful of antipsychotics. Amy Winehouse and Janis Joplin would be aging housewives whom no one but grocers had ever heard of.William Burroughs, Hubert Selby Jr. and William Styron would have gotten their acts together leaving all their amazing books unwritten, their works washed away, not on a sea of normality, but on one of therapy-fueled normalization.The book as written forces you to ask yourself how much of yourself are you willing to give up in order to be “healthier” and “happier.” It confronts you with the question: “Can it be possible for the cure to be worse than the disease?”Conclusion.Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Dummies contains the ideas, references and the materials necessary for you to use CBT techniques in a self-help setting to improve your emotional state (note: not your “health” your *state*) by solving your own problems at your own pace without a therapist.It will give you what you need to let you lessen the effects of anger, depression, phobias, various anxiety disorders, and even the subtle mental conditions that affect self- and body image. It is very good for that.Read and applied intelligently, the material in it can certainly work as advertised. However, “Leave it to Beaver,” went off the air a long time ago, and the book’s (or the method’s) subtle insistence on instilling a mainstream life-philosophy into therapy smacks of indoctrination and is galling.Do I recommend this book?Yes, absolutely: I used what is in it to deal with a depression that was harming my ability to function, and I intend to go on using what is in it to make things better for myself.However, I would advise anyone thinking of reading this volume to take any advice from the authors that goes beyond pure and immediate problem-solving; not with a pinch of salt but with a fist-sized rock of it.

I gave my rating because I found only two errors and I understood everything written in one pass down each sentence and I found my weak areas with plenty of resources within its structured pages. Thank you for making it available in Kindle book format so I can gorge on it and not miss my Facebook notifications. 😎

I'm a co-dependent person, and this book, along with CoDA, have gone a long way to helping me with this problem. It's an easy to use, fabulous resource for people out there ready to get tough on their mental hang ups. It's no substitute for a psychologist, but can help you with those unhealthy thoughts you have at 4 in the morning. I recommend that you also get the workbook and scan forms out of it. I use my forms more than once.