CBT for Adolescents

Our Cognitive Behavioral Treatment for Adolescents at Artemis

Using CBT for adolescents is an excellent way to confront some of the mental health challenges often seen in young people. Anxiety disorders are more common than ever and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is one of the best tools that can be used to address it successfully.

This page will help you better understand what CBT is and how it can be used to deal with child anxiety and other issues. Just as with adults, adolescent mental health should never be ignored or minimized.

To learn more about how Artemis Adolescent Healing Center can help your child, give us a call now and talk to an admissions coordinator. We’ll explain everything to you clearly and answer any questions you may have. We’d love to help your family get through this difficult time.

What is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy?

An evidence based form of psychotherapy, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is an effective treatment that has delivered results for countless individuals. The primary focus of CBT is improving the connection between a person’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.

Many people dealing with mental health challenges like obsessive compulsive disorder have developed distorted thinking patterns. These patterns would be obviously distorted to someone on the outside, but to the individual, they feel perfectly reasonable – and even obvious.

CBT aims to help people identify or recognize these cognitive distortions. It challenges unhelpful beliefs and offers healthier ways to shift negative thought patterns and respond to the inevitable difficulties that will arise from day to day.

Cognitive Behavior Therapy can be tremendously effective for teens when administered by a trained, experienced clinician. Anxiety disorders and other mental health issues are often improved through the consistent, appropriate application of CBT.

Why CBT Works Well for Adolescents

The practical, focused nature of CBT techniques tends to be effective when treating youth. They like the structure of this treatment and how it is easy to see the connection between therapy sessions and the real world.

While talk therapy is tremendously helpful in all forms, it can sometimes be hard for young people to see how a general therapy session will apply to their real lives. That’s not the case when CBT is used to teach teens. They will be building skills that can be applied to life immediately – as soon as they walk out of the office, the work they have done can start to pay off.

Many different benefits of CBT exist for teens. Improved emotional regulation is a big one. There is also typically a reduction in symptoms of anxiety disorders and depressive disorders. Overall mental health will improve and self-esteem can receive an important boost.

Childhood anxiety disorders can feel overwhelming and impossible to defeat. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy doesn’t just help a teen feel better about life for a while – it arms them with tools that can push back on their anxiety symptoms. Whatever mental health symptoms have been experienced recently, there is a good chance that CBT will be able to make progress on them right away.

Common Issues CBT Can Treat in Teens

It will be helpful as a parent to understand what types of issues can be addressed by Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. If you feel like your teen may benefit from this treatment – or you simply think they need help but aren’t sure what that help should look like – call Artemis right away and we’ll be happy to chat.

Anxiety Disorders

Living with anxiety disorders can be extremely challenging. Whether it’s social anxiety disorder, ongoing panic attacks, or any other type of experience, your teen may be exhausted from day to day just trying to manage their thoughts.

And, of course, thoughts affect emotions in a powerful way, so the teen’s behavior may not be what you have come to expect. Negative thought patterns are difficult to break out of when ongoing anxiety has your child looking for the worst in each situation.

It’s also possible that your child could be experiencing anxiety in just one specific area of life. For example, test anxiety can be a problem for young people who are driven to achieve highly in school. Anxious children in the classroom have trouble relaxing and performing their best. CBT may be able to help here, as well.

Anxiety provoking situations will always be a part of life so having the coping skills needed to deal with them and stay on track is a powerful step in anxiety management.

Depressive Disorders

Along with helping anxiety, CBT can also be used to help with depression. Major depressive disorder is often treated in children and adolescents with CBT along with other types of therapies. Negative thinking is common with depression and those negative thought patterns can be rewired through consistent effort.

Clinical psychology has made great strides in recent years on how depressive symptoms are treated. You don’t have to resign to your child experiencing a lifetime of depression just because it is a problem at the moment. By working on negative thought patterns with CBT techniques and other tools as soon as possible, a brighter future can start to come into focus.

Trauma and PTSD

Traumatic experiences can have a powerful impact on life for people of all ages. Child psychology often works on healing young people who have been through difficult experiences early in life.

Children and adolescents who have experienced any type of trauma should be provided access to professional treatment in order to build a foundation for recovery over the years to come. Patterns like negative self talk and predicting outcomes can stem from trauma that hasn’t been properly treated.

Behavioral Issues

It’s quite challenging to deal with ongoing behavioral issues with a teenager. These issues can lead to problems at school and at home, and it can make it hard to keep relationships together. Using CBT skills can make meaningful progress on these behavioral matters in teens and even younger children.

Adolescent psychology is complicated as there is a lot going on in the mind of a young person. Even if teens recognize that their behavior isn’t appropriate in a given situation, they might not be able to control their emotions well enough to make changes. CBT can help by building the skills and thought patterns necessary to act in a different way when certain circumstances arise.

What to Expect in Our CBT Program

You surely want to know what to expect when your child is put into a CBT program, and that’s what we’ll cover in this section. While all treatment plans are customized to the needs of the individual, the following will surely be included in the process.

Psychoeducation

This is where teens learn how their thoughts, emotions, and behaviors are connected. Negative thoughts are powerful things and they can impact the rest of life in a notable way. Helping teens understand the complexities of how their brains work will start to give them a sense of control and self-awareness.

Cognitive Restructuring

You’ll really start to see changes when the cognitive restructuring work begins. This is where teens are taught to identify the thoughts they are having that are unhelpful or distorted.

For example, a damaging thought could be something like “I’m never going to pass this class.” Through CBT, the teen could learn to reframe that thought along the lines of “This is a hard class, but I can ask for help and study to make sure I pass.”

That’s a small difference in thinking that can lead to totally different outcomes. This type of perspective can be applied in almost every area of life.

Behavioral Activation

Adolescent psychology, as with general psychology, sees great power in activating behaviors that can break negative cycles. These are activities that help a person “snap out” of the mood or line of thinking they are in currently.

CBT encourages taking meaningful action even when the individual doesn’t feel like it at the moment. To continue the school example from above, this could mean jumping right into studying – even if for just five minutes – to break the cycle of dread and procrastination around the action. Once it is started, the individual often realizes it isn’t as bad as they expected, and they are able to continue without any problem.

Emotion Regulation

The big emotions that teens experience can be better handled through CBT. We will work on emotion regulation to keep things under control in terms of anger, frustration, and sadness. As the CBT skills are developed effectively, your teen should be better able to get through emotional moments without acting out in a harmful way or shutting down completely.

Problem Solving and Decision Making

No one lives a life free from problems. It’s how those problems are handled that really matters in the long run. CBT will help teens properly assess the problems they are facing so they can produce a number of options and then pick the best path forward. This kind of functional, practical learning will help just as much years from now in adult life as it helps during their teenage years.

A Custom Approach to Cognitive Behavioral Treatment

Using evidence based psychosocial treatments is a great way to make progress for a teenager struggling with a variety of issues. But these mental health services can’t just be applied with a broad brush. They should be customized to the needs of the individual, which is exactly what we do here at Artemis.

It would be easy enough to lump all anxious youth into the same category. And, sure, they do share some characteristics and symptoms – but they are all individuals. Children and adolescents, like adults, need to be given individualized care if the best possible results are going to be achieved.

We take adolescent anxiety seriously and our entire team gives every young person their full attention. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is one of the many tools that we have available to use to make progress in the battle against depressive thoughts, negative thinking, and many other types of challenges.

When you trust the Artemis team with such an important job, you can be sure that our use of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy will be intentional and designed with your child’s needs in mind.

Call Us Today for Effective Teen Therapy Options

Treating anxiety disorders is something that should be done with as much care and professionalism as dealing with any type of physical or mental health condition. If your teen has childhood anxiety and needs help to find a positive, healthy way forward, Artemis would be the ideal partner.

Don’t wait any longer to make the call. These aren’t the types of problems that tend to get better on their own. Reach out now to get started and you will be one big step closer to positioning your child for the bright, exciting future that they deserve.