Cognitive Behavioral Therapy: Techniques for retraining your brain—Jason Satterfield—Lukewarm

 

This is another Great Courses lecture series (GCLS). Here's my review on Great Courses vs. books.

The overall concept is pretty good. Satterfield, besides having a cool name, seems to know his stuff.

I'd say this course serves as a round introduction to cognitive behavioral therapy, though it seems to be intended as something of a self-help foundation. Given the bifurcated focus of the book, it comes as no surprise that a lot of the information isn't really all that interesting or necessary. Unlike the last GCLS, CBT suffers from a lack of stories, dropping it way out of the inspirational half of our quadrant. 

The information is pretty good, but nothing earth-shattering. CBT, in a nutshell, is "thoughts, actions, feelings, they go round and round, one leads to another, this is what I've found"(source unknown). Satterfield describes the mechanisms connecting each point of the triangle and provides specific examples and illustrations of interventions that can be taken at each point in the cycle. He also makes an effort to include the physical health impacts of the cognitive cycle. 

The most eye-opening aspect of this book to me was the broad range of applications. I, like many people, have been using the basic principles of controlling thoughts, actions, and emotions to yield a specific outcome for most of my life, I was generally unaware that it's the same set of principles that therapists use to help patients overcome mental disorders. This serves to reinforce my theory (ok, so it's actually an existentialist theory) that we're all broken. The difference is one of degree, not of kind.