Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in Denver

Your thoughts create your reality—but not all thoughts are true, helpful, or worth believing. Paul Wozniak, LPC, uses CBT because it's one of the most researched and effective approaches for anxiety, depression, and a range of other struggles.Plus, it gives people concrete tools they can use immediately.

Insight alone isn't enough. You need practical strategies to interrupt unhelpful patterns and build new ones. CBT doesn’t include forced positive thinking or pretending everything is fine. CBT teaches you to recognize when your brain is lying to you, understand the connection between thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, and making deliberate choices about how you respond to life's challenges.

What is CBT?

Cognitive behavioral therapy is a structured, present-focused approach that examines the relationship between your thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. The core principle is that our thoughts about situations—not the situations themselves—largely determine how we feel and what we do.

When you're anxious, your brain might catastrophize and predict the worst possible outcome. When you're depressed, your thoughts might be globally negative, telling you that nothing will ever get better or that you're fundamentally flawed. CBT helps you identify these automatic thought patterns, examine the evidence for and against them, and develop more balanced, realistic ways of thinking.

But CBT focuses equally on changing behaviors. Depression tells you to isolate and withdraw; anxiety tells you to avoid what scares you. These behavioral responses make sense in the moment but ultimately maintain the problem. Through behavioral experiments, activity scheduling, exposure exercises, and skills practice, CBT helps you gradually change the behaviors that keep you stuck.

Paul teaches specific techniques like thought records, behavioral activation, relaxation strategies, and problem-solving skills that you can use outside of sessions. The goal is to internalize the skills so you can manage symptoms, challenge unhelpful thinking, and navigate future challenges with confidence and clarity.