Hi Fighter,
Welcome to the site. Thanks for sharing your introduction here with us. You have found a great place to share your feelings and experiences of depression with members who truly understand what it is like to have these feelings.
The core of The Depression Center is our Depression Program which is an interactive, 16-session cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT)course. Many here have had great success with it.
When using cognitive behavioral therapy, each person has unique goals in their treatment.
Whatever your motivation, cognitive behavioral therapy is a very effective treatment for depression.
In this program we’ll teach you techniques to help you cope with stress, solve problems and manage relationships. However, our main goal for the next 16 sessions is to help you to learn how to understand and challenge your negative downward spirals.
Most people who are depressed want to change how they feel. They want to feel better. It makes sense that people usually want to jump right in and start trying to change how they feel.
In this program we’ll spend a lot of time asking you to think about and explore your feelings. However, in CBT we don’t spend a lot of time trying to convince you to change how you feel. That is because feelings just “are” and they’re difficult to change directly.
For example, if you’re feeling sad, angry or frightened those feelings are true for you, and are difficult to challenge. When you say “I’m sad” it doesn’t make a lot of sense for someone else to say “no you aren’t” or “you just shouldn’t feel that way.” Challenging feelings usually doesn’t work very well.
But the good news is that thoughts and behaviors can be tested and challenged. More importantly for depressed people, testing and challenging how you think and behave can change how you feel!
In the “cognitive” part of this program you’ll learn how to identify, understand, and challenge your negative thoughts. By examining your negative thoughts, you’ll learn to stop your negative downward spirals.
In the behavior part of this program you’ll learn how to identify and challenge the behaviors that contribute to your negative downward spirals.
You’ll learn to reduce problem behavior such as social withdrawal and increase positi
