Supercharge Your Therapy Sessions: 35 Essential CBT Tools for Trauma
Doc Snipes・75 minutes read
Dr. Donnelly Snipes discusses 35 trauma-informed cognitive behavioral therapy techniques focused on creating safety and empowerment, utilizing tools like sensory activities, symptom logs, and cognitive restructuring to manage stress, develop coping skills, and improve overall well-being. The strategies aim to help individuals feel grounded, reduce anxiety, manage triggers, enhance self-awareness, and foster personal growth through techniques like mindfulness, radical authenticity, thought stopping, cognitive distortions, and successive approximations to achieve gradual improvements towards personal goals and better emotional regulation.
Insights
- Trauma-informed cognitive behavioral therapy focuses on creating safety through various means like physical, cognitive, and environmental safety, alongside distress-tolerant mantras and tools.
- Utilizing sensory tools and breathing techniques can trigger relaxation responses, grounding individuals and helping them manage stress effectively.
- Symptom logs, stress reduction through anxiety tracking, and systematic desensitization techniques are crucial elements in managing mental health symptoms and promoting gradual progress and well-being.
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Recent questions
What is trauma-informed cognitive behavioral therapy?
Trauma-informed cognitive behavioral therapy focuses on utilizing strengths, recognizing expertise, and developing coping tools to help individuals feel safer and empowered.
How can individuals create safety in trauma therapy?
Individuals can create safety in trauma therapy by focusing on physical safety from self and others, cognitive safety, and environmental safety to reduce stress response activation and promote feelings of security.
What are some distress-tolerant mantras and tools?
Distress-tolerant mantras and tools include diaphragmatic breathing, blowing bubbles, keeping a phone for support, essential oils, anchoring objects, and jolting techniques to trigger relaxation response and promote feelings of safety.
How can individuals manage mental health symptoms effectively?
Individuals can manage mental health symptoms effectively by tracking symptoms in logs, identifying triggers, vulnerabilities, coping strategies, and reviewing logs for insights into managing symptoms and understanding patterns.
What techniques can be used to slow breathing and trigger relaxation?
Techniques like yawning, massaging the vagus nerve, laughter, blowing bubbles, and using balloons or party noise makers can help individuals slow breathing, override stress response systems, and trigger relaxation responses for stress management.
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Summary
00:00
"Trauma-Informed CBT Techniques for Safety & Empowerment"
- CEUs available at AllCEUs.com/CBT-CEU for 35 trauma-informed cognitive behavioral therapy techniques
- Hosted by Dr. Donnelly Snipes, focusing on tools to help people feel safer and empowered
- Trauma-informed cognitive behavioral therapy aims to utilize strengths, recognize personal expertise, and develop coping tools
- First tool is creating safety to help individuals feel secure and reduce stress response activation
- Different types of safety include physical safety from self and others, cognitive safety, and environmental safety
- Encouragement to create a rescue pack with distress-tolerant mantras, activities, and tools for various situations
- Activities like diaphragmatic breathing, blowing bubbles, and keeping a phone for support can trigger relaxation response
- Sensory tools like essential oils, anchoring objects, and jolting techniques can help individuals feel grounded and safe
- Distress tolerance techniques include activities to reset the HPA axis, improve vagal tone, and guided imagery
- Sensory tools like smells, sights, and sounds can trigger relaxation response and promote calmness, aiding in distress tolerance.
17:52
"Breathing techniques and symptom tracking for stress"
- Slowing your breathing manually overrides the stress response system, helping mitigate stress and maintain composure.
- Square breathing is a foundational technique to slow breathing, but various methods like yawning, laughter, and blowing bubbles can also be effective.
- Yawning, massaging the vagus nerve, laughter, blowing bubbles, and using balloons or party noise makers are practical ways to slow breathing and trigger relaxation.
- Fitness trackers can help monitor heart rate and guide intentional breathing to reduce heart rate, signaling the activation of the relaxation response.
- Creating a vision board to define a rich and meaningful life can help individuals allocate energy effectively towards important aspects like relationships, health, and career.
- Purposeful action involves mindfully acknowledging the present situation and deciding how to use energy effectively to move towards important life goals.
- Symptom logs are crucial for tracking mental health symptoms, identifying triggers, vulnerabilities, and coping strategies, helping individuals recognize progress and trends.
- Symptom logs should include details like date, time, triggers, intensity, duration, impact on energy and relationships, coping mechanisms, and future strategies.
- Regularly reviewing symptom logs for themes, triggers, and vulnerabilities can provide insights into managing symptoms effectively.
- Creating a pictograph of symptom frequency, intensity, and duration can visually represent patterns and aid in understanding triggers and responses.
34:26
Anxiety Reduction Through Mindful Stress Management
- Stress reduction involves tracking and analyzing anxiety levels through charts.
- Difficulty in perceiving progress when viewing multiple episodes of high anxiety daily.
- Mathematical formula used to calculate overall anxiety based on duration and intensity.
- Formula: Multiply hours by intensity and sum up, then divide by total intensity for average anxiety.
- Aim for average anxiety to decrease gradually over time.
- Systematic desensitization and ownership help alter reactions to triggers or stimuli.
- Desensitization involves gradually exposing oneself to triggers and managing stress responses.
- Ownership involves taking control of triggers by associating them with positive experiences.
- Mindfulness techniques like personal mindfulness and grounding aid in managing stress and staying present.
- Mindful reflection at the end of the day involves evaluating activities based on moving towards meaningful goals.
52:13
"Mindfulness and Authenticity: Keys to Well-being"
- Bonding time can be valuable if it aligns with personal interests and promotes relaxation.
- Mindfulness is crucial for health and well-being, aiding in self-awareness and energy management.
- Authenticity involves being true to oneself, avoiding inauthentic behavior driven by external approval or fear.
- Authentic relationships are like chocolate chip cookies, where two authentic individuals enhance each other.
- Mindfulness is a precursor to authenticity, helping individuals act in accordance with their thoughts and needs.
- Radical authenticity should be approached with caution, gradually building up to being fully authentic.
- Thought stopping involves redirecting negative thoughts through mantras, prayers, or grounding activities.
- Perspective taking involves understanding others' reactions by considering predisposing, precipitating, provoking, and planning factors.
- Self-forgiveness entails taking responsibility, feeling remorse, making amends, and releasing past hurt to move forward.
- Living in the "and" allows for forgiveness while maintaining personal boundaries and learning from past experiences.
01:09:58
Managing Thoughts and Beliefs for Growth
- Practice thought stopping to manage recurring thoughts effectively.
- Utilize the ABCDEs of CBT: Activating event, Consequences, Beliefs, Dispute, and Evaluate.
- Identify automatic beliefs triggered by past experiences before disputing them.
- Challenge cognitive distortions like all-or-none thinking, personalization, magnification, minimization, and assuming.
- Use a cognitive distortions worksheet to analyze beliefs during stressful times.
- Apply alternate problem formulation using the mnemonic PEACE CORPS: Problem, Early experiences, Assumptions, Core beliefs, Effectiveness, Context, Options, Resources, Probability, Support.
- Embrace tragic optimism by acknowledging the good and bad, creating a vision, and accepting reality.
- Anticipate the positive, be present, focus on growth and learning, set realistic goals, affirm yourself, find solutions, and accept what cannot be changed.
- Face challenging questions by evaluating beliefs, considering all factors, assessing probability, exploring alternate explanations, and focusing on moving forward.
- Practice radical acceptance by acknowledging facts, accepting the present, identifying control, and evaluating choices effectively.
01:28:28
Enhancing Growth Through Various Self-Reflection Techniques
- Successive approximations involve making incremental improvements towards a goal, such as learning to shoot free throws by gradually getting closer to the basket with each attempt.
- Scaffolding, linked to successive approximations, entails allowing individuals to perform tasks independently until assistance is required, aiming to prompt gradual improvement and reduced need for help.
- Heartiness, comprising commitment, control, and challenge, encourages focusing on all aspects of life that are going well to counterbalance those that are not, aiding in avoiding feelings of hopelessness or overwhelm.
- Playing the tape through involves considering short and long-term consequences before making decisions, akin to playing a game of chess in life to foresee potential outcomes.
- Decisional balance activities involve assessing the benefits and drawbacks of both changing and staying the same, aiding individuals in identifying motivations for change and potential obstacles.
- Dialectics, radical acceptance, and cognitive restructuring advocate embracing both positive and negative aspects of situations, recognizing that certain challenges or discomforts are necessary for growth and progress.
- Autobiographies can be beneficial for self-reflection and healing, with various approaches like writing from different perspectives such as the adult self, child self, or even letters to different versions of oneself.
- Journaling can be a powerful tool for self-expression and introspection, with options like daily reflections, symptom logs, mindful journaling, gratitude journals, or writing from the perspectives of inner archetypes like the inner child, manager, or firefighter.
- Journaling can be done in various formats such as text, video, or audio, and can involve changing writing utensils, using graphic elements, or altering the style of writing to suit individual preferences and needs.
01:45:32
Managing Pain and Healing Through Imagery
- Guided imagery can be utilized for managing emotional or physical pain by envisioning a dial or knob to adjust the intensity of the pain, visualizing it as a color that changes from opaque and red to transparent and blue as the pain diminishes.
- It can also be employed for various purposes such as envisioning the body healing itself, overcoming anxiety, preparing for stressful situations like public speaking or loss, fostering personal growth by visualizing desired outcomes before sleep, and aiding in relaxation for better sleep through techniques like counting sheep.
- Cognitive behavioral therapy emphasizes educating individuals on the connection between thoughts, feelings, and symptoms, especially crucial for trauma survivors to comprehend how past experiences influence present perceptions, helping them reframe extreme or egocentric childhood schemas to empower them in addressing and responding to their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.
