Sarah Edelman Relaxation Audio CD

Sarah Edelman, PhD. is an author, lecturer and a psychologist in private practice. She worked for many years as a research psychologist at the University of Technology Sydney, and has published several articles on the use of CBT with cancer patients. She also conducts workshops for mental health practitioners and employees in industry, and provides training for psychologists at the Black Dog Institute, Sydney. In 2002, Sarah published a book, now in its second edition, titled ‘Change your Thinking – positive and practical ways to overcome stress, negative emotions and self defeating behaviour using CBT, it was reprinted in 2006 ’

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Sarh Edelman says CBT is not so much about changing personality, but adjusting cognition and belief with evidence. Many of our thinking patterns are established in childhood and can remain stubborn to change, but Sarah Edelman points out that our thoughts and beliefs are influenced for better or worse throughout our adult lives: influences include the social environment, culture, friends and partners. CBT's mantra is that dysfunctional beliefs can cause unnecessary emotional pain, but we can change those beliefs. In the case of anger, CBT entails the person writing down the advantages and disadvantages of staying angry. With panic attacks, Sarah Edelman encourages people to feel the physical sensations, and help them realise the sensations usually quickly pass. For the shy, Sarah Edelman gets people to rate social events from least feared to most, then go about attending such events, all the while challenging their fear that a social gathering will end in catastrophe.

CBT can alleviate every-day problems stemming from irrational beliefs, says Dr Melissa Green, a clinical research fellow with the Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science. These problems include frustration, anxiety, even road rage.

Dr Sarah Edelman's book Change Your Thinking (ABC Books, 2006) is a practical and reassuring guide to help overcome stress, negative emotions and self-defeating behaviour using CBT (Cognitive Behaviour Therapy). It demonstrates how to dispute that nagging voice in your head and deal more rationally with feelings of anger, depression, frustration and anxiety.

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More on CBT

Cognitive behavioral therapy (or cognitive behavior therapy, CBT) is a psychotherapeutic approach that aims to influence dysfunctional emotions, behaviors and cognitions through a goal-oriented, systematic procedure. CBT can be seen as an umbrella term for therapies that share a theoretical basis in behavioristic learning theory and cognitive psychology, and that use methods of change derived from these theories..

CBT treatments have received empirical support for efficient treatment of a variety of clinical and non-clinical problems, including mood disorders, anxiety disorders, personality disorders, eating disorders, substance abuse disorders, and psychotic disorders. It is often brief and time-limited. It is used in individual therapy as well as group settings, and the techniques are also commonly adapted for self-help applications. Some CBT therapies are more oriented towards predominately cognitive interventions while some are more behaviorally oriented. In recent years cognitive behavioral approaches have become prevalent in correctional settings. These programs are designed to teach criminal offenders cognitive skills that will reduce criminal behaviors. It has become commonplace, if not pervasive, to find cognitive behavioral program strategies in use in prisons and jails in many countries. In cognitive oriented therapies, the objective is typically to identify and monitor thoughts, assumptions, beliefs and behaviors that are related and accompanied to debilitating negative emotions and to identify those which are dysfunctional, inaccurate, or simply unhelpful. This is done in an effort to replace or transcend them with more realistic and useful ones.

CBT was primarily developed through a merging of behavior therapy with cognitive therapy. While rooted in rather different theories, these two traditions found common ground in focusing on the "here and now" and symptom removal. Many CBT treatment programs for specific disorders have been developed and evaluated for efficacy and effectiveness; the health-care trend of evidence-based treatment, where specific treatments for specific symptom-based diagnoses are recommended, has favored CBT over other approaches such as psychodynamic treatments. In the United Kingdom, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence recommends CBT as the treatment of choice for a number of mental health difficulties, including post-traumatic stress disorder, OCD, bulimia nervosa and clinical depression.

The roots of CBT can be traced to the development of behavior therapy in the early 20th century, the development of cognitive therapy in the 1960s, and the subsequent merging of the two. Behavior therapeutical approaches appeared as early as 1924, with Mary Cover Jones' work on the unlearning of fears in children. However, it was during the period 1950 to 1970 that the field really emerged, with researchers in the United States, the United Kingdom and South Africa who were inspired by the behaviorist learning theory of Ivan Pavlov, John B. Watson and Clark L. Hull. In Britain, this work was mostly focused on the neurotic disorders through the work of Joseph Wolpe, who applied the findings of animal experiments to his method of systematic desensitization[6], the precursor to today's fear reduction techniques.. British psychologist Hans Eysenck, inspired by the writings of Karl Popper, criticized psychoanalysis in arguing that "if you get rid of the symptoms, you get rid of the neurosis" , and presented behavior therapy as a constructive alternative.. In the United States, psychologists were applying the radical behaviorism of B. F. Skinner to clinical use. Much of this work was concentrated towards severe, chronic psychiatric disorders, such as psychotic behavior and autism.
Albert Ellis (1913 – 2007) was a pioneer in the development of CBT.

Although the early behavioral approaches were successful in many of the neurotic disorders, it had little success in treating depression. Behaviorism was also losing in popularity due to the so-called "cognitive revolution". The therapeutic approaches of Aaron T. Beck and Albert Ellis gained popularity among behavior therapists, despite the earlier behaviorist rejection of "mentalistic" concepts like thoughts and cognitions. Both these systems included behavioral elements and interventions and primarily concentrated on problems in the present. Ellis' system, originated in the early and mid 1950s, was first called rational therapy, and can arguably be called one of the first forms of cognitive behavioral therapy. It was partly founded as a reaction against popular psychotherapeutic theories at the time, mainly psychoanalysis.Aaron T. Beck, inspired by Ellis, developed cognitive therapy, in the 1960s. Cognitive therapy rapidly became a favorite intervention to study in psychotherapy research in academic settings. In initial studies, it was often contrasted with behavioral treatments to see which was most effective. During the 1980s and 1990s, cognitive and behavioral techniques was merged into cognitive behavioral therapy. Pivotal in this merging was the successful developments of treatments of panic disorder by David M. Clark in the UK and David H. Barlow in the US.[3]

Concurrently with the contributions of Ellis and Beck, starting in the late 1950s and continuing through the 1970s, Arnold A. Lazarus developed what was arguably the first form of broad-spectrum cognitive behavioral therapy. . He later broadened the focus of behavioral treatment to incorporate cognitive aspects. When it became clear that optimizing therapy's effectiveness and effecting durable treatment outcomes often required transcending more narrowly focused cognitive and behavioral methods, Arnold Lazarus expanded the scope of CBT to include physical sensations (as distinct from emotional states), visual images (as distinct from language-based thinking), interpersonal relationships, and biological factors.

Samuel Yochelson and Stanton Samenow pioneered the idea that cognitive behavioral approaches can be used successfully with a criminal population. They are the authors of, Criminal Personality Vol.I. This book has an extensive amount of information regarding the dynamics of criminal thinking and application of cognitive behavioral approaches.

CBT includes a variety of approaches and therapeutic systems; some of the most well known include cognitive therapy, rational emotive behavior therapy and multimodal therapy. Defining the scope of what constitutes a cognitive–behavioral therapy is a difficulty that has persisted throughout its development.

The particular therapeutic techniques vary within the different approaches of CBT according to the particular kind of problem issues, but commonly may include keeping a diary of significant events and associated feelings, thoughts and behaviors; questioning and testing cognitions, assumptions, evaluations and beliefs that might be unhelpful and unrealistic; gradually facing activities which may have been avoided; and trying out new ways of behaving and reacting. Relaxation, mindfulness and distraction techniques are also commonly included. Cognitive behavioral therapy is often also used in conjunction with mood stabilizing medications to treat conditions like bipolar disorder. Its application in treating schizophrenia along with medication and family therapy is recognized by the NICE guidelines (see below) within the British NHS.

Going through cognitive behavioral therapy generally is not an overnight process for clients. Even after clients have learned to recognize when and where their mental processes go awry, it can in some case take considerable time of effort to replace a dysfunctional cognitive-affective-behavioral process or habit with a more reasonable and adaptive one.

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