Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy CBT, or Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, is a group of therapies. CBT is a problem-focused, active collection of therapies that focus on producing real changes in mood and behaviors and can provide some relief from symptoms within a reasonable period of time. This is not to say that you should expect to be in and out of therapy in a matter of weeks or even months — however, your therapist will likely help you to create specific, measurable, achievable goals so you can move forward both in therapy and in your day-to-day life.
The “Cognitive” part of Cognitive Behavior Therapies, focuses on working with thoughts. CBT therapists can assist you in restructuring or changing unhelpful thoughts, can help you challenge or fight your irrational thoughts, or even help you work toward accepting disturbing thoughts as non-harmful stimuli in your mind. These are among the many tools that a CBT therapist may use when working with your thoughts.
The “Behavioral” part of CBT focuses on helping you change your behaviors as an avenue of achieving psychological wellbeing, emphasizing the connection between our actions and our feelings. For example, a behavioral technique for depression may include helping a client set specific, achievable and measurable goals to become more physically active, which could in turn help produce improved mood. Behavioral techniques are especially popular in the treatment of anxiety disorders, and could include helping the client overcome avoidance of feared stimuli in the environment (from crowded places to spiders, and everything in between!) through imagery or in-person exposures.

CBT therapists generally apply techniques that have been extensively researched, and continue to be researched to help improve clinical practice. We call these “evidence based techniques”, as research tends to support the use of various CBT techniques in therapy across a wide range of disorders.