Autism: Parents Need Help Managing Emotions, Too

Both studies used a type of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). CBT is a type of therapy focused on how the brain perceives events, creates beliefs, and regulates feelings, and then behaves as a result of those perception. Using CBT, therapists attempt to retrain the brain’s thoughts and thinking patterns to relieve anxiety, stress, and destructive behavior. It is characterized by therapists as a structured and goal-based therapy.

For example, CBT may seek to correct overgeneralizing (“if something is true in one setting, it’s true in every other setting”) or assign yourself excessive responsibility (“it’s always my fault when anything goes wrong”). Other corrections include selective abstraction (“everyone only looks at my failures”) and self-references (“everyone is always focused on me”).