Cognitive/Behavioral Therapies
Here is a little more detail on some of the most common kinds of cognitive and behavioral therapies used to treat ADHD, ASD, anxiety disorders, and depression.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT): CBT teaches you to be more mindful of your feelings, change your thoughts, and better handle stressful situations. CBT is a very structured, skills-based therapy with specific versions that meet the unique needs of children, teens, and adults with ASD, ADHD, anxiety disorders, and depression.
Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) and DBT Skills-Based Groups: Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) is a type of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy that incorporates mindfulness and concrete skills to help you regulate difficult emotions and have difficult conversations so are less likely to react to a situation in a way that you’ll later regret. DBT is used to treat children, teens, and adults with a variety of mental health conditions. There is evidence that DBT and DBT-based skills training groups are effective for adolescents with ADHD.
Mindfulness Skills Training: Mindfulness skills training is part of DBT but is also often incorporated into other kinds of individual and group therapy for many mental health conditions. It increases attention and the ability to regulate emotions. With all those benefits, there’s no reason not to start regular mindfulness practice at home.
Exposure Response Prevention (ERP): A type of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy specifically developed for Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Similar exercises with exposures help treat social anxiety and phobias. Here’s how it works:
You and your therapist will make a list of things that make you very anxious and feel like you need to complete a compulsion.
Your therapist will either watch you or tell you to do or look at that, called exposure.
But instead of giving in to the compulsion, you learn strategies to sit with the anxiety.
Eventually, you break that bad habit because your brain realizes that the compulsion won’t stop whatever you’re worried about from happening.
References
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