By Albert Wong, Psychology Today, May 7, 2020
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) has been a de facto standard of care within psychotherapy for the last 30 years. Certainly, CBT has shifted and changed over the years—particularly with the mindfulness revolution of the past decade—but the underlying ethos of CBT which places cognition and behavior in positions of elevated primacy in the psychotherapeutic healing process has remained relatively intact—at least within the halls of academe.
There have, however, been recent advances in neuroscience that challenge the completeness of a purely cognitive behavioral model—particularly when dealing with the impact of trauma. What we are learning now is that trauma is not just something that impacts our cognition and behaviors alone.
Trauma impacts much more than just our thoughts and actions. Trauma is far-reaching and systemic—it cuts us to our bones. It can dissolve our sense of identity, diminish our capacity to locate ourselves accurately in time and space, inhibit our tolerance for interpersonal relatedness, disrupt the coherence of our experience, impair our capacity for emotional regulation, and so much more.
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