Category: Therapy

Dallas CBT’s unique exercise program combines cognitive behavioral therapy and exercise to help you improve stress, anxiety, and mood, as well as meet your fitness goals. Undoubtedly, most of us know that exercise is good for us and that we should, ideally, make exercise a part of our daily routine for the physical and mental health benefits. Every New Year, countless people join gyms, start new exercise routines, or make the resolution to exercise more. However, turning that initial resolve into consistent and repeated action with a workout routine can be hard, especially when the physical results we want aren’t going to happen quickly.

This program will help you identify, plan, and effectively implement exercise goals while working with your therapist to maintain the motivation necessary to follow through with these behaviors and trouble-shoot the obstacles that might get in the way. At the top of this list of obstacles are our patterns of thinking about ourselves and exercise; your therapist will utilize tools derived from CBT to help you approach exercise in a different way.

This program is especially effective for people struggling with stress, anxiety, and/or mood symptoms, especially if these seem to get in the way of regular exercise. We will help you focus on and take advantage of the substantial benefits (comparable to antidepressant and anti-anxiety medications!) regular exercise can have on improving these symptoms. Our exercise program is also ideal for those already undergoing treatment for mood or anxiety who are interested in incorporating exercise to enhance your treatment progress.

Ours is intended to be a short-term and flexible program tailored to your needs. This program helps you build towards and maintain the recommended “dose” of exercise by shifting your focus to the cognitive and emotional benefits of exercise. The positive effect that regular exercise has on stress, mood, and anxiety symptoms is reliable, happens more quickly than the more long-term health benefits, and can be harnessed to make an exercise routine more sustainable.

Consider this program if you:

• Want to exercise regularly but have been unsuccessful in the past
• Want to improve your mood, anxiety, or stress level though exercise
• Feel that stress, anxiety, or mood symptoms get in the way of exercise for you
• Have spent hundreds of dollars (if not more!) on gym memberships but rarely go
• Fall victim to some of the common obstacles to exercise:
  • Focusing solely on how unpleasant exercise might feel
  • Get discouraged by the amount of time it takes to achieve physical results
  • Want to get active, but get very anxious about the physical sensations that come with exercise

High quality CBT treatment is now available online. Dallas CBT is happy to offer online therapy services, also known as tele-psychology, to Texas residents. Depending on where you live, it might be hard to find a therapist specializing in cognitive behavioral and exposure therapy for anxiety or obsessive compulsive disorders. Online therapy is an innovative way to increase access to high-quality treatment regardless of geographic location, offer more choices in treatment providers, and decrease burdensome travel requirements. Research in this area indicates that online therapy can be as effective as in-person therapy across children, adolescents, and adults. Dallas CBT is proud to provide these new and innovative options to give more people access to effective treatment.

It should be noted, however, that online therapy is not appropriate for all clients. When a client’s symptoms require a more intensive level of care, online therapy may not be the most appropriate avenue for treatment. Please contact Dallas CBT to determine whether our online therapy services may be right for you.

How does online therapy work?

If you have ever used Skype or FaceTime, or participated in video or teleconferencing, you will find online therapy quickly familiar. Online therapy sessions are conducted through video-conferencing services, such as Skype and FaceTime, and require that you have access to the internet and preferably a comfortable, private location with limited distraction. Aside from this, the content of therapy sessions is virtually the same as face-to-face sessions with Dallas CBT psychologists.

Exposure therapy is a type of CBT that is the most effective for anxiety and obsessive-compulsive related disorders. In fact, it is often referred to as the “gold-standard” of psychological treatments for these issues. Exposure involves gradually and systematically confronting fears and anxiety-provoking situations that you have been avoiding, with the aid and support of your therapist. It provides the opportunity to learn that feared consequences are unlikely to come true and that your anxiety will go down naturally over time– and after repeated exposure, it will stay down. Exposures can be conducted as imaginal, where you are asked to imagine a feared situation, in vivo, or real life exposure, and interoceptive, which involves confronting feared bodily sensations. The overarching goal of exposure therapy is to reduce or eliminate avoidance of objectively safe situations, which leads to reduction in anxiety about these situations. Although this treatment causes short-term anxiety, as it involves facing the fears that you have been avoiding, it is the most effective way to gain long-term freedom from anxiety.

Exposure therapy is known to be especially effective for anxiety disorders, including social anxiety, panic disorder, health anxiety, and phobias. Common phobias treated with exposure therapy include fear of flying, animal phobias, and blood or needle phobias.

Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) is an empirically supported treatment for obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). ERP involves gradual and systematic exposure to anxiety-provoking situations while, at the same time, reducing and eliminating typical fear responses, such as escape, avoidance, or compulsive behaviors in OCD (e.g., checking, washing, ordering).

Prolonged Exposure (PE) is an empirically supported treatment for adults struggling with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). It involves education about common reactions to trauma, relaxation skill-building, and exposure to both real-world situations causing anxiety (i.e., in vivo exposure) and processing the trauma experience in a systematic and repeated manner (i.e., imaginal exposure).

Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (TF-CBT) is an empirically supported treatment for children and adolescents (ages 3 to 18) struggling with difficulties related to traumatic experiences (i.e., PTSD). This treatment involves both the child and parent in a structured, skill-building program and incorporates exposure-based techniques. The goal is to help the child process and resolve distressing feelings related to the trauma and better manage problematic thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.

In exposure therapy, you can expect to: learn about causes of anxiety and factors maintaining it, understand how your thoughts contribute to the anxiety process while learning to respond to thoughts in a more adaptive manner, and most importantly, engage in gradual and systematic exposure to situations which provoke anxiety.  Treatment is tailored to each client, with their specific type of anxiety and their own experiences influencing the content of each component of treatment. With young children, exposure-based CBT requires significant involvement from the parent(s).

Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) examines how our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are connected. CBT changes patterns of distorted thinking and unhelpful behaviors to improve mood, anxiety, and other psychological issues. Unlike many other types of therapy, CBT is more active and problem-solving oriented, collaborative, and shorter-term. CBT has consistently shown to be effective across hundreds of clinical research trials, and is considered the gold-standard treatment for many different disorders, such as depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and anxiety disorders. We believe that therapy shouldn’t be a mystery– a key part of our work is teaching you how to use CBT strategies and skills so that you can effectively manage your emotions for the rest of your life.

Several different types of therapies fall under the umbrella of CBT. These therapies target specific problems and include the following:

Exposure Therapy is an effective and evidence-based practice for anxiety and obsessive compulsive disorders. This therapy involves systematically increasing tolerance to feared situations or things while changing unhelpful behavior patterns. This category of therapies includes Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) for obsessive compulsive disorder, Prolonged Exposure (PE) for adults with PTSD, and Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (TF-CBT) for children and adolescents struggling with coping around traumatic experiences.

CBT for depression, anxiety, eating concerns, and stress management. CBT is an evidence-based and effective treatment for each of these conditions, focused on making long-term improvements in mood, feelings, and day-to-day functioning. This therapy teaches individuals to examine how their patterns of thinking, behaviors, and emotions interact and influence their experiences and symptoms.

Comprehensive Behavioral Treatment (ComB model) is a recently developed treatment for hair-pulling (trichotillomania), skin-picking (excoriation), and other body-focused repetitive behaviors. ComB involves modifying thoughts and feelings contributing to the problem and replacing deeply entrenched behaviors, such as pulling or picking, with helpful alternatives, including habit reversal training techniques.