Dr. David Burns’ feeling good team Cognitive Therapy

Dr. David Burns is one of the pioneers of Cognitive Therapy. His book Feeling Good defined for millions of people a path to feeling better using Cognitive Therapy. Since those early days, Dr. Burns has continued to refine and define his approach which has resulted in a much more intensive form of Cognitive Therapy. I have had the honor and pleasure of working personally with Dr. Burns and his colleagues to learn this powerful approach.

The original concept of Cognitive Therapy was to teach a set of skills to identify thoughts and evaluate whether or not they are realistic. When they were not, you would learn to replace them with ones that were. With Dr. Burns’s new approach, the first step is measure the way you are feeling at the beginning and end of the session. The next step is for me to follow a procedure to fully understand what you are going through. Next, I work with and melt any resistance to giving up the symptoms that may exist. Finally, I use 50 different methods to defeat the thoughts that are causing you to be anxious or depressed. Because we are each so unique, only a few techniques will emerge to reliably destroy the troubling thought every time. Once you use those techniques, a remarkable fundamental change in how you view yourself occurs. It is very powerful.