I credit CBT with a whole lot - I did it in various formats for a number of years, and at first glance? It made me incredibly well-practiced at noticing my thoughts occurring, as a thing in and of themselves.
CBT gets you to practice noticing your thoughts, feelings and behaviours, as a potential way to prevent unhelpful thought patterns becoming unnecessarily destructive. Like has been explained above.
For example: Just because I'm having the thought "Nobody likes me", doesn't make it true. So, I don't need to run away from a situation just because I think nobody there likes me. Wow!
In fact, that's a thought that I have partly out of habit, partly out of cognitive distortions (like taking things personally when when they have nothing to do with me), and partly because it was conditioned into me by my trauma.
Practicing noticing our thoughts, feelings and behaviours throughout the day, and learning a skill that helps us understand how they might be inter-related, is the foundation to a lot of therapeutic approaches for PTSD, as well as a range of other mental health issues.
So in that respect, CBT can be taught in its basic general sense (so that you can apply it to your ptsd, but also to depressive or anxiety-based symptoms you might have). Alternatively, it can be taught specifically to apply to PTSD, so the general principles get fine tuned to the typical ptsd internal experience.
Having done both (and being a person who experiences a lot of depressive episodes), both were incredibly helpful. The process of learning CBT was, at the time, frustratingly slow and often I found myself thinking "but isn't that obvious?".
That's intentional! The learning process is typically very slow, partly so that it's easy for anyone to learn. But mostly, it's slow because the daily practicing is the most important part. For cbt to be helpful? It takes practice, and practice takes time.
By that? I mean that the content of a 6 week, or 6 month CBT program? You could probably cover in a few days. But there's no way around practicing, daily, for an extended period of time, for it to be truly helpful.
Like any therapy approach, I found that I got out as much as I put in. And when I started doing the ridiculously simple homework each day, I started to notice big differences in my level of insight, which I've taken and used in a range of therapy approaches.
It has its limits. For people with complex ptsd, for example, a lot of our emotions and behaviours are coming from core beliefs, rather than floating, spontaneous thoughts. But if the person teaching you is competent, they will go on to help you nut those out.
And being able to identify the core belief that is behind a thought, emotion, or behaviour as it is occurring? Is phenomenally helpful.
Behaviours that aren't helpful, in particular, are something we have a lot of control over, and can change in a relatively short period of time, if we've identified the thoughts, emotions or core beliefs that are driving those behaviours. CBT gives you the skills to do that, and being able to change our behaviours gives us a tonne of control over the direction our life is taking.
I also credit CBT with now being able to challenge the thoughts that I have, rather than just accepting them, and letting them dictate both my inner experience, and the way I react in situations.
Time I spent practicing CBT, for me, was definitely time well spent. A solution to ptsd all on its own? Not for me. But absolutely I'm grateful for how much time I spent on it.
