Our brain is like a zoo, filled with lots of different animals where each animal has a different role: The owl sits calmly at the front, ready to solve problems and help calm the monkey down. The monkey examines things with curiosity and decides whether a certain change of situation is good or bad for you. When he spots danger, he runs wild, scaring and agitating all the other animals, except for the owl which he simply throws out, so he can keep making a mess with no one to stop him. The […]

What is empathy? Empathy is the capacity to understand and acknowledge other people’s feelings, thoughts and behavior. It is usually characterized as an emotional reaction to other people’s emotions, usually when they are in a state of distress. Empathy means the ability to feel and understand another person’s inner world as if it were our own world, but without losing track of our own selves. It is the ability to experience the mental, emotional and behavioral state of another person, while completely separating ourselves from that person. In other words, […]

Anxious or frightened children have difficulties understanding their experience and often react automatically and unconsciously. This article presents means to explain the cycle of anxiety to children, using the game Playing CBT. It also presents the elements of anxiety and provides a psycho-educational explanation for both children and parents about the three elements of anxiety and fear, and about behavior that intensifies fear.           What is the difference between anxiety and fear? In my work with Playing CBT I spread the emotions cards on the table […]

Playing CBT was first developed in 2015. The goal was to help children to understand their emotional experience through play, and to help therapists use Cognitive Behavioral Therapy with children in a creative and enjoyable manner. The Playing CBT game board seems like a regular game board at first glance. However, through its carefully chosen questions, it becomes much more than just a game. It is a means and a tool to facilitate meaningful discussions with patients about characters in their lives, about their thoughts, about their emotions, internalized voices […]

in a world in which success is everything. We all want to be as beautiful, as successful and as smart as we can. And even more so – we want our children to be successful. From an early age, we invest and nurture them – we send them to private tutors and after-school courses, enroll them in private schools – anything that may help them succeed and realize their potential. But doesn’t this kind of success, or realization of cognitive potential, make us miss something important?! Studies have shown that […]

Cognitive behavioral therapy is a method that combines behavioral therapy with cognitive therapy. The uniqueness of this method, developed by Aaron Beck and based, among others, on the latent conditioning model, is the understanding that cognitive processes – that is, automatic thoughts and basic beliefs – are acquired through learning processes just like behavior. According to Beck, conditioning is mostly influenced by our immediate surroundings, through people who constitute a model for us or through a significant event that took place in our lives.   CBT was developed following therapy […]

Playing CBT helps children with difficulty in emotional regulation, identify and better understand their emotions Difficulty in emotional regulation has been identified as a major cause of many emotional disorders, some of which are expressed by non-adaptive behaviors. In many cases, the inability to cope with an “unpleasant” emotion that is experienced as emotional overwhelm generates a behavioral difficulty that is reflected in the interactions with others. Despite an awareness of the difficulty and the great motivation to change their behavior, people tend to have little ability to understand its […]