CBT Process

While theory without practice is pointless, if you have no understanding of why something works then all the practice in the world will not get you to where you want to go.  Cognitive Behavioural Therapy is rooted in the scientific method as follows:

1. Create a question you want the answer to, called a formulation.
2. Come up with an explanation, called a hypothesis.
3. What does your hypothesis predict?
4. Do an experiment to see whether the hypothesis is true, or not?
5. Discuss and analyse the results of the experiment, do they support the hypothesis or not?

Some terms and conditions apply to the above.  The first is that one has to scrupulous in accepting that the  null-hypothesis, or opposite, is actually true, which means you have to be open to being wrong.  You have to also pare down the hypothesis to make it as simple as they need to be as  Occam's Razor applies, and also:

6. You must be able to replicate the experiment, do it more than once.
7. You must be open to criticism of your methods and re-do experiments.
8. You must record and share the results, even if what happens refutes your hypothesis.
9. You must rate the certainty that your results are right.

I would observe that one of the reasons that people find Cognitive Behavioural Therapy difficult to engage with is because it's rooted so deeply in the scientific method, but however imperfect it may be the therapy is based on evidence that can be measured.  Any therapy that isn't conducive to being measured and tested is asking for a person to trust it on faith.