My psychologist adapted other therapies that were more suitable - as did my therapist before her.
You can find overlaps with CBT in what both of them did in their approach with me -- but both of them departed drastically from the CBT paradigm in multiple ways.
Among them that neither ever attempted, directly or indirectly, to tell me my thoughts were the cause of my painful feelings or cognitive distortions ....because neither of them actually believed that. Neither of them really bought into that idea as always applying to all suffering. That foundational element of CBT itself can be re-traumatizing, disempoweing and hugely invalidating of real lived experience for certain types of trauma -- where making a person feel crazy for what are actually reasonable feelings is not helpful. Helping them manage those feelings (not with self-talk, not with altering beliefs -- with self-regulating activities, with understanding of self and others) and solve problems that lead to traumatic situations is helpful.
You can find parallels with CBT and any therapy that uses any type of self-questioning or critical/logical thought and do so while actually empowering a client rather than telling them their thoughts and preceptions are wrong...which again, can be horrifically harmful to people whose thoughts and feelings are not actually clearly wrong/illogical at all and in whom you are just attempting to instill a positive/optimistic outlook whether or not that outlook is actually justified -- particularly when such an outlook is completely unrealistic it can do more harm than good. (You may argue there are always positives to find...and maybe that is true but trying to focus on a positive thing is not the same as saying that seeing an actually awful situation for what it is is a cognitive distortion and should be ignored or disbelieved.)
CBT is not suitable for all people in all situations (and for me personally it is never suitable in any situation). That is true of all therapies - not suitable for all people in all situations. Because there are many valid, healthy ways to think and to live and often many different possible solutions to a problem...not all of them "gel" with every person.
