I’m currently trying to “Notice” the spaces between thoughts. Or be just aware of them, without all the negative thoughts. And then carry on with that space and just check it out.

No idea if that answers your question as I’m in the same point maybe, does make me think I’m not the only one who thinks this way. I hope it will work and I can see that it could work.

Long way to go yet. Stick with the cbt and try it.
It might help us yet!
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Firstly, why is it that cbt is (most of the time) not practiced by those who preach it, i.e. the psychotherapists who prescribe it to their clients/patients. For example, even though psychotherapists train their clients in how to dispute negative thoughts and identify faulty thinking patterns (such as distortion, mind reading and black and white thinking), why do these same psychotherapists not use the same techniques in their own personal lives? Surely, patients would benefit most from using the same strategies used by people who are NOT diagnosed with depression or anxiety.

Secondly, CBT involves critical thinking, which is mentally fatiguing for people when practiced in large volumes. CBT virtually relies on a person to use critical thinking in order to replace their negative thoughts. It seems problematic that disputing negative thoughts in order to “replace” them is the only way to use CBT. Critically thinking about negative thoughts is also time consuming and is therefore impractical in the long run.

Thirdly, CBT is only useful for fixing the symptoms, not the problem. This is because CBT involves “replacing” each and every individual negative thought which ever arises. This is also why it only works when the person using it is committed to the process. Yet I am questioning the effectiveness of a form of therapy which continues throughout a person’s life.

I am arguing that a truly effective form of therapy is like an effective teacher: when a teacher performs their job properly, they leave the student better off, even to the extent that the student can now continue learning without the teacher; a student taught successfully becomes an independant learner. Hence, a good teacher is constantly working on making themselves obsolete to the student – when the student no longer requires the teacher’s assistance, this indicates that the teacher has successfully taught the student. Likewise, when the client no longer requires psychotherapy (in this case, CBT) they can consider themselves successfully treated for whatever problem they suffered from.

If we apply this analogy to the psychotherapist training their clients in CBT, then CBT as a system or method of therapy fails the test of being an effective teacher. In other words, it fails to properly teach clients how to NATURALLY think positively about the world around them. If CBT only needed to be practiced for a few months in order to have its positive effects, then I would think differently of CBT. However, the reality is that CBT only works as long as the client actually uses it. This is because the underlying causes of the person’s anxiety are not directly addressed by CBT. In this respect, hypnotherapy might have a more positive and lasting impact on a client – after a client has received hypnotherapy from an expert practitioner, they are not required to constantly engage in “identifying their automatic thoughts” and then finding an alternative explanation for those thoughts.

Nor are the person’s behavioural habits successfully improved (despite the name Cognitive Behavioural Therapy). The name Cognitive Behavioural Therapy was chosen mainly because of an “assumed” link between cognition and behaviour. This link DOES exist, however proponents of CBT seem to have this misconception that training clients to replace negative thoughts automatically equas less negative behaviour.

The reason this does not work consistently is that the only way to form a habit out of a certain behaviour is the repeat that behaviour many times. The only way to become more comfortable and less anxious about public speaking is to actually DO public speaking lots of times; the only way to become more confident and less hesitant about initiating a conversation with a stranger is to DO that lots of times; the only way to become more relaxed when asking someone out on a date or for their phone number is DO it lots of times. And each time a person does that, they are guaranteed to lose some of their fear and anxiety. The only way to achieve real results in the area of social anxiety is through “exposure”.

Why have I now shifted the focus onto improving behaviours? The answer is because behaviours, in the end, are the what really shape our relationships, our careers, our social lives, our diets and every other aspect of our own environment. The ultimate goal of any form of therapy, I think, should be to equip the client with new, more helpful (and healthy) patterns of behaviour.

My personal opinion is that this is a step too far in the other direction. I believe, and have experienced, that it is extremely helpful to replace those negative thoughts, but replace is the word I’d use rather than challenge. As you point out, challenging keeps you engaged in the thoughts.

Just straight switching to unrelated more helpful thoughts can be difficult for people when they fully feel their negative thoughts are the whole truth, but they rarely are. They could be a part truth, though, or very true but an incomplete truth, which makes challenging them confusing for people.

As a first step it can be helpful for people to just make a small dent in their line of thinking and just start to doubt its usefulness a little while still acknowledging any negative circumstances they are faced with. I talk about this in this video, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sGRyZUIVzM. Once doubt is established, then it is easier for someone to ‘replace’ their thoughts with something more positive (but preferably unrelated to the original negative thought in my opinion).

That said, standard CBT can still be very helpful for people if they persist with it, even if it’s not perfect. Standard CBT is a massive improvement on no CBT, or some other therapy options, when it comes to social anxiety. There are improvements to be made though.

My point is that the problem with challenging your negative thoughts is that the only way you can do that is to continue thinking about the same thoughts which were bothering you in the first place: and the longer you do that for, the longer you’re behaviour will be influenced (either subtly or obviously) by your negative thoughts.

The reason this is a problem is that not all negative thoughts ARE entirely unrealistic, or if it is possible to challenge and disprove them, then the person using CBT might run out of plausible or realistic explanations for their negative thoughts. When compared to simply occupying your mind with other thoughts, it seems to me that attemtping to disprove the negative ones is really just a longer route to the same destination: lack of concern/anxiety/insecurity.

How can you confront and then disprove challenging thoughts without thinking about them in the first place? I think that this problem holds the key to the next stage in evolving CBT from from where it is now, to where it could be eventually.