|
Articles CBT - Cognitive Behavioural Therapy continued Jasmine: Then cognitive therapy also approaches the way that thinking can keep on triggering the fight and flight response, so that fear continually keeps the symptoms going and therefore justifying their own belief system on that? Chris: Oh yes. You really have to look at where the thoughts are. Sometimes a persons fear is triggered by a physical sensation. Another time it might be triggered by a thought about the possibility of having physical sensations and on other occasions it is triggered by images. So I guess one of the difficulties is that if you are being chased by a sabor-tooth tiger then your response would be quite normal. However, once a person's anxiety response has been triggered by any of those above three means, the person really needs to interpret how is it that they are having these extra physical sensations, or is it (they are being chased by) a sabor-tooth tiger. So in order to try and explain it to themselves they come up with 'this must mean that I am about to have a heart attack, go crazy ..' or something like that. Jasmine: Which ultimately is a logical conclusion, considering what is happening. Chris: Absolutely. It's extremely logical. There is a proportion of people who have the same strong physical feelings at different times. We know that some people develop panic disorder and other people have panic attacks and don't go on to develop panic disorder. And some people can even have those very strong, scary sensations and five minutes later not be terribly scared about them at all. Jasmine: Have they looked into that Chris ? What is the difference between the two types of people ? Chris: I think this is where personality comes into it. Not only personality but life circumstances. A person who might have had very adverse early life circumstances and has a general feeling of insecurity, they're more likely to worry about very strong physical sensations because it is just one more thing in their life that is going wrong. However, there is a psychologist in the USA called George Clum. George was writing a book on panic disorder and he was burning the midnight oil, so he had been under stress for a number of months writing this book, and all of a sudden he had a panic attack himself. Fortunately for George, he understood what was going on, so the anxiety dissipated fairly quickly. But it prompted him to go around and talk to his colleagues on a university campus about how many of them had experienced these attacks and how many of them had went on to develop panic disorder. He was surprised to find that many people had experienced the attacks and some of them almost without fear. In other words, they reported that rush of physical sensations but didn't become fearful of them. That is really telling us something else about the importance of thinking and cognitive therapy as well, because really if people can have the same physical sensations and not develop the disorder, then a person is really saying that it is what they think about the sensations, rather than the sensations themselves which cause the disorder. Jasmine: How successful is CBT really? Chris: Well, I think as of this present time CBT is very successful compared to most other treatments. Now it is not to say that new treatments won't come up in the future, or it's not to say we won't find our theories wrong in the future and that they'll be replaced by something that's even a better treatment. But right now, most people would agree that Cognitive Behaviour Therapy is the most effective treatment for panic disorder and for that matter, all anxiety disorders.  |
Home
|
|
|
|
|
| Home Page |Contact | Bookstore | Anxiety Disorders | Symptoms |
| Derealisation | Depersonalisation| Panic Attacks | Panic Disorder | Social Anxiety |
| Post Traumatic Stress Disorder | Agoraphobia | Depression | Meditation | | Mindfulness |
| Counselling | Articles | Question & Answers |
| Self Help |Research | Links |
Copyright © 2005 APH
Last modified: June 12, 2007