How Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and the Law of Attraction Can Work Together
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What is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)?
Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is a form of psychotherapy that can help you become aware of negative thought patterns which allows you to change how you respond to undesirable thoughts. By increasing the awareness of when negative thoughts arise, you’re able to handle stressors more objectively and respond more effectively.
CBT is helpful for anyone wanting to manage stress, anxiety, intrusive negative thoughts, worst-case scenario thinking, as well as address emotional challenges while improving symptoms of mental illness. CBT can help you break free from negative thinking patterns and get out of the victim mindset.
This form of therapy can help you identify faulty thinking patterns and help change the way you analyze and identify with thoughts and experiences. You become the observer of your thoughts from a non-judgemental perspective while gaining clarity about how the world actually affects you instead of faulty perceptions of how you think the world affects you. CBT helps you change your inaccurate perceptions.
Initially, CBT can be an uncomfortable and emotionally draining process as you uncover buried emotions and experiences that you’ve actively tried to avoid. Facing fears and negative emotions or thought patterns can temporarily increase feelings of discomfort, but this allows you to release what is no longer serving you. CBT is best completed with a licensed professional who can help you cope during the initial discomfort of CBT.
Although CBT mostly focuses on what bothers you in the present, it doesn’t mean past stressors and trauma won’t emerge since the past and present tend to tango during negative thought patterns. Your ways of thinking have developed over many years, so the past is likely to come up.
What is the Law of Attraction?
The law of attraction is a pseudoscience principle that arises from the New Thought movement which states thoughts are energy and that like attracts like, so positive thoughts attract circumstances and people to match the positivity. A positive mental attitude is the foundation for making the law of attraction benefit your life. However, this also means that persistent negative thoughts will attract negative circumstances and people into your life.
According to the law of attraction, you are constantly creating your life with your thoughts. By becoming conscious of your thoughts and shifting your focus to a positive mindset where you expect good things to happen to you, you can live the life you’ve always wanted.
To learn more about the law of attraction, check out my post: What is The Law of Attraction.
How is CBT Beneficial with LOA
CBT does bring negative thoughts to the surface, but with the intention of addressing problematic thought patterns and changing the perception of your thoughts to serve a greater benefit in your life. WIth CBT you can learn how to effectively change negative thought patterns so these thoughts don’t keep resurfacing and shifting your mind into a negative state.
Ignoring thoughts or even replacing the negative thoughts with a positive statement still just suppresses the unhealthy thinking pattern without addressing the real issue.
Suppressing and trying to ignore intrusive negative thoughts is a guaranteed way to keep having these thoughts pop into your mind.
Let’s try something.
First, don’t focus on a pink teddy bear. No matter what, don’t think about a pink teddy bear. Anything, but a pink teddy bear. No pink teddy bears.
What just happened? I’m going to guess that every time you were told not to think about the pink teddy bear, you saw the pink teddy bear. The same is true for negative thoughts. If a negative thought pops into your mind, trying to bury the negative thought and ignore it is just going to make the negative thought keep returning and likely return more than if you had addressed the thought effectively.
Thought suppression is not an effective way to deal with your problems. Although this may provide temporary short term relief, the thoughts are going to return and in some cases, they’re going to return with a vengence.
You can’t run from your problems, but you can learn to manage your emotions and feelings surrounding stressors effectively. This is what makes CBT so important when working with the law of attraction.
Once you’ve effectively dealt with unhealthy thinking habits, then you can have a negative thought without tumbling down the rabbit hole and destroying your day, and in some cases your spouse’s day, your kid’s day, your week, your month, or your year. If you can allow a negative thought to pop into your mind without having a shift in your vibrational energy, then you can start improving your manifesting abilities with the law of attraction.
You can’t stop thoughts, but you can prevent them from causing major distress in your life.
WIth the law of attraction, strong emotions associated with thoughts increases the likelihood of attracting more circumstances to match the emotion and thought. This is why you want a positive mental attitude instead of negative thought patterns.
The negative voice in your head likes to say things are hard and impossible, but once you overcome this, you’re able to take more chances in life because your inner critic is less noisy.
Once you’ve effectively addressed negative thought patterns, you can effectively change your focus to what you want in life while feeling emotion of joy and gratitude. When a negative thought surfaces, you have the tools with CBT to effectively address the thought without shifting away from positive thoughts, affirmation, and gratitude.
Online Cognitive Behavioral Therapy or Face-to-face Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
Face-to-Face CBT and Online CBT are both evidence based and beneficial for your overall mental health. If you have health insurance with excellent coverage for face-to-face therapy, there may be a financial benefit to seeing a licensed therapist in person. However, if you don’t have coverage with your health insurance to see a licensed therapist, the cost is usually less online.
Some people prefer online since you don’t run the risk of running into your therapist in public or at work if you’re in healthcare.
When you see a therapist locally, there’s typically less therapist available than if you’re working with an online therapy company. Online options increase availability of a therapist that you feel matches your needs and personality type. You are telling this person your personal emotions and thoughts, so it’s important to find someone you feel comfortable with.
Some people feel more comfortable texting/typing their feelings as opposed to feeling vulnerable with someone in the same room while they analyze destructive thought patterns.This feature alone opens up CBT to people who typically wouldn’t seek out face-to-face help. Again, comfort is a huge reason I support online therapy.
For CBT to be effective though, please remember that you must be willing to share thoughts, life circumstances, and emotions. If you hold back, therapy can only help so much.
Isn’t the Law of Attraction Clear that You Shouldn’t Focus on the Past?
Yes. Living in the past does not benefit your present or your future and it surely does not change the past. Even knowing this, sometimes we get stuck replaying our past in our mind as if we’re continuously rewinding an old tape. As previously stated, our past thoughts and how we’ve reacted or catastrophized a situation play a role in how you’ll respond to the present and future.
CBT gives you tools to stop replaying the same negative frequency over and over again. The more emotion we have associated with an event, the more it is going to resurface and affect our response to trigger situations.
Cognitive behavioral therapy is evidence-based therapy that can help you break free from distorted thought patterns. This allows you to focus on what you want instead of what you don’t want which improves your ability to see the law of attraction work in your life.
You can always bury the past and keep saying affirmations and writing things that make you feel grateful, but until you address distorted thoughts, they will keep coming back.
Before giving the thousands of dollars to a so-called Law of Attraction Master, you can start the process for evidence-based cognitive behavioral therapy today at Online-Therapy (for 20% off by clicking the banner below).
It’s time to take care of your thoughts so you can boost your confidence and start living the life you love.