Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Addiction in Orange County, CA

Mental health professionals often prefer CBT because it’s a quick and effective way to help clients identify and cope with challenging thoughts.

CBT can help clients:

• Manage symptoms of a mental health disorder
• Manage substance use disorders, including alcohol addiction
• Identify healthy ways to manage emotions
• Cope with grief, loss, or trauma
• Resolve relationship conflicts and improve communication
• Cope with stressful situations

Cognitive behavioral therapy is used to treat a wide range of issues, including substance use disorder, anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, and PTSD/trauma. Yet even those who don’t have a co-occurring mental health disorder—referred to as dual diagnosis—can benefit from cognitive behavioral therapy.

CBT is structured, and it typically includes these steps:

• Identifying problem situations or conditions in your life, such as substance abuse and unhealthy relationships
• Becoming aware of your thoughts and emotions about these problems
• Identifying and addressing negative or inaccurate thinking or thought patterns

Through CBT, clients develop an awareness of automatic thoughts and learn to distinguish between facts and irrational thoughts. Cognitive behavioral therapy helps people see things from other perspectives and better understand the actions and motivations of other people.

Clients learn how to stop fearing the worst, how to avoid all-or-nothing thinking, and how to stop fixating on how they think things should be rather than how they are.

CBT is often most effective when used in combination with other therapies, such as family counseling, 12-step programs, and medications.

CBT includes a range of techniques and approaches to address negative or unhelpful thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. Techniques that involve CBT include:

Dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), a type of cognitive therapy that teaches people how to live in the moment, interact with others more effectively, and focus on changing thoughts, beliefs, behaviors, and actions that are not effective or helpful.

Rational emotive behavior therapy (REBT), which involves identifying irrational beliefs and actively challenging them with the goal of changing unhelpful thought patterns.

Multimodal therapy, which utilizes different types of therapy together, such as pharmacotherapy (medications), devices, and behavioral therapies, such as CBT.