The most exciting thing about CBT is that it is not only used by clinicians or professional therapists to help their customers but also by people who want to self heal. But to do it successfully, you need to educate yourself about CBT.
No matter if you know everything, very little or absolutely nothing about CBT. You can always seek help from the best CBT books available in the market. Why not save your time and effort? Just check out the list of books written by experts in the field of CBT.
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- List of CBT Books We Recommend
- Retrain Your Brain: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in 7 Weeks: A Workbook for Managing Depression and Anxiety
- CBT Toolbox for Children and Adolescents: Over 200 Worksheets & Exercises for Trauma, ADHD, Autism, Anxiety, Depression & Conduct Disorders
- The Comprehensive Clinician’s Guide to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
- Cognitive Behavior Therapy: Basics and Beyond
- CBT Workbook for Kids: 40+ Fun Exercises and Activities to Help Children Overcome Anxiety & Face Their Fears at Home, at School, and Out in the World (Health and Wellness Workbooks for Kids)
- The CBT Deck: 101 Practices to Improve Thoughts, Be in the Moment & Take Action in Your Life
- On Becoming A Person: A Therapist’s View of Psychotherapy
- To Sum Up
Here we’ve compiled a list of the best cognitive behavioral therapy books for psychotherapists and clients.
7 Best CBT Books For Therapists and General Readers
1. Retrain Your Brain: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in 7 Weeks: A Workbook for Managing Depression and Anxiety
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| Author | Seth J. and Gillihan, Ph.D |
| Rating | 4.6/5 |
| eBook | Available |
| Ideal for professionals or general reader | General reader |
About the book:
This is the ideal book when we talk about the best CBT books. Not just this, it gives real-life examples that can be relatable to the experiences of general readers. So, it allows readers to quickly relate to and understand how to use CBT for treating problems like anxiety or depression in only 7 weeks.
Being a seasoned psychologist, the author has shared his real-life experiences in this 7-week course. It gives readers a feeling of hope and that they can quickly control their thoughts. It’s a perfect book for anyone who is looking for self-help and does not feel comfortable seeking help from a therapist.
Need more options before buying the best CBT therapy books, keep reading.
2. CBT Toolbox for Children and Adolescents: Over 200 Worksheets & Exercises for Trauma, ADHD, Autism, Anxiety, Depression & Conduct Disorders
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| Author | Lisa Phifer, Amanda Crowder, Tracy Elsenraat, Robert Hull |
| Rating | 4.7/5 |
| eBook | Available |
| Ideal for professionals or general reader | Professional |
About the Book:
Written by experienced teachers and clinicians, this book is among the best-selling CBT books. It serves as a useful tool for therapists who help children in coping with the serious struggles of their lives.
Within this book, you can find several exercises, activities and worksheets. Children can do these activities either as homework or during their sessions. This help treats serious problems like depression, ADHD, trauma, autism, conduct disorders and anxiety.
Furthermore, the book has step-by-step strategies and tools adapted from various CBT therapies for children. This makes it one of the best books about cognitive behavioral therapy. The book is overall well-written, except for some typos.
This is a good book for dealing with children and adolescents having complex problems in their daily life. It helps them to effectively deal with such obstacles in a smooth way.
3. The Comprehensive Clinician’s Guide to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
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| Author | Leslie Sokol, Marci Fox |
| Rating | 4.7/5 |
| eBook | Available |
| Ideal for professionals or general reader | Both |
About the Book:
This book contains updated and comprehensive content explaining everything about CBT. It is dedicated to helping students, supervisors, teachers, clinicians, trainers, and health experts.
That said, it is the best cognitive behavioral therapy book with simple and practical strategies. You can easily understand its theory and implement it. This can help clients in dealing with personality disorders, bipolar disorder, self-harm and suicidal tendencies, depression, substance abuse, PSTD, Psychosis, Anxiety and more.
To help professionals treat their clients effectively, this is a book containing step-wise activities and plans, coping cards and worksheets. You can find it as an easily accessible guide that will help you become more confident and eliminate thoughts that encourage self-doubt.
Talking about the best CBT books for self help, this book is certainly a resourceful tool.
4. Cognitive Behavior Therapy: Basics and Beyond
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| Author | Judith S. Beck |
| Rating | 4.8/5 |
| eBook | Available |
| Ideal for professionals or general reader | Professionals |
About the Book:
This book is written by the leading professionals in CBT, Judith S. Beck. It shows how to sustain patients’ attention during sessions, plan sessions, and conduct personalized treatments.
It also helps carry out behavioral, experiential and cognitive techniques on patients. Being one of the best-selling CBT books it discusses the basics of learning Cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) with revised material such as case studies of patients with anxiety, depression and other personality issues.
It can be really helpful for any knowledgeable therapist who wants to resolve common problems related to CBT. The new edition has various attractive features including therapy sessions in video format and downloadable worksheets.
Some of the key updates highlighted in this best CBT books include:
- Recent case studies on clients with highly difficult problems.
- Pedagogical characteristics like practice exercises, reflection questions and clinical methods.
- Using mindfulness to treat clients.
- How to establish and understand the therapeutic relationship.
- It shows how to combine and implement tips from other modalities kike cognitive therapy based on mindfulness, commitment and acceptance therapy and dialectical behavior therapy.
- Shows cognitive therapy that leads to quickly recover, such as CT-R therapy influences customers’ values, and aspirations and easy adaptation to conventional CBT.
The benefits of this book make it one of the best CBT books for therapists.
5. CBT Workbook for Kids: 40+ Fun Exercises and Activities to Help Children Overcome Anxiety & Face Their Fears at Home, at School, and Out in the World (Health and Wellness Workbooks for Kids)
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| Author | Heather Davidson Psy. D BCN |
| Rating | 4.7/5 |
| eBook | Available |
| Ideal for professionals or general reader | Professionals and general readers |
About the Book:
Most often we come across children who spend most of their time worrying. It creates complicated difficulties in their lives and stops them from enjoying sports, school, hobbies or company of their friends.
To help them out, expert author Heather Davidson has written the best CBT books known as “CBT Workbook for kids”. It helps them in living a fun life by doing the things that they enjoy most.
This book gives numerous strategies that can reduce anxiety and induce peace in kids within the age group 6–10 years. The book discusses several strategies and ways to help customers in changing their distressing feelings and thoughts. It begins by helping children in understanding what makes them anxious and how to cope with it.
The kids can enjoy using many fun tools like drawing challenges, fill-in-the-blank exercises and interesting quizzes. If you have a kid of age 6 to 10, then these could be the best CBT books for self-help.
The book has many other benefits for kids like:
- Helps children with learning tips and strategies to express their feelings, cope with anger, remain focused and make smart choices.
- Help kids with effective strategies to relax like following a morning routine, finding out helpful methods to keep calm, how to face your fears.
- Learning from other kids, as the book covers stories telling how other children experience anxiety in their daily life.
6. The CBT Deck: 101 Practices to Improve Thoughts, Be in the Moment & Take Action in Your Life
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| Author | Seth J. and Gillihan, Ph.D. |
| Rating | 4.6/5 |
| eBook | Available |
| Ideal for professionals or general reader | General readers |
About the Book:
If you are dealing with extreme stress in your life, then this is your go-to book. This is certainly also the best CBT books for therapists who want to help people in creating positive emotions in their life.
To help clients, the book gives action-oriented and practical tools that can influence your life with positive thoughts. It contains 101 strategies and exercises that make it the best book about CBT.
You can make optimum use of this book to deal with the following issues:
- Feel connected and live in the present moment.
- Deal with self-doubting beliefs by overcoming them.
- Calm yourself and redirect your thoughts.
- Select and implement actions that will help you create the life you want.
Read on to check out the last book in our compiled list of best cognitive behavioral therapy books.
7. On Becoming A Person: A Therapist’s View of Psychotherapy
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| Author | Carl R. Rogers, Peter D. Kramer M.D. |
| Rating | 4.7/5 |
| eBook | Available |
| Ideal for professionals or general reader | Professionals |
About the Book:
This book is highly rated as the best cognitive behavioral therapy book. It highlights the teachings of CBT experts and Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT) professionals.
With that said, the book helps people who often experience feelings of panic and anxiety. People suffering from emotional problems can either use this book on their own or consult with a therapist for help.
That’s the most common reason it is considered one of the best CBT books by most people suffering from various difficult disorders.
The book discusses the entire program step-by-step so the readers can easily improve their lives and remove anxiety.
So, it is the book for people who are working towards improving their lives. It will provide you with an easy, actionable way to deal with emotional difficulties.
Related: Best CBT Courses Online
To Sum Up..
The cognitive-behavioral therapy is a really helpful technique not only for expert professionals but also for general readers. There are many good books about cognitive behavioral therapy mentioned in this article. Whether you are a therapist or anyone looking to treat emotional disorders, based on your requirements, you can seek help from any of the books mentioned above.
Please note that these books are written by experienced authors. Some of them are expert psychologists while others are just people who have implemented CBT to enhance their life.
For example, you can go for the best book about CBT – “Cognitive Behavior Therapy: Basics and Beyond”. As its title says, the book will benefit you in a deep understanding of the fundamentals and updated information about CBT.
