What’s Actually Going On When CBT Feels "Gaslighty"?

There’s a phrase that has recently been appearing more and more in online conversations about therapy: “CBT feels gaslighty.”

Gaslighting is a strong word, and when people use it, they’re usually trying to describe a very real experience. It’s the feeling that their thoughts or emotions have been dismissed, minimised, or reframed too quickly into something more positive, and that is absolutely worth taking that seriously.

When CBT is experienced in that way, something has often gone very wrong, not necessarily with the model itself, but with how it has been explained or applied.

At its core, cognitive behavioural therapy is not about telling someone that their thoughts are wrong, irrational, or inappropriate, and it’s certainly not about simply replacing negative thinking with forced positivity or about persuading someone to believe something that doesn’t feel true.

When it’s done well, CBT is much more grounded and much more practical than that.

One of the most important things to understand about CBT is that it’s not really about “positive thinking” at all, but about learning how your brain forms patterns, and how those patterns can actively be changed over time.

This is where concepts like neuroplasticity become relevant. Your brain is constantly adapting, based on what you repeatedly think, feel, and do. In simple terms, it gets better at whatever it practises. i.e. whatever you focus on.But here's the problem: your brain doesn’t judge whether a certain pattern (or skill) is helpful or unhelpful. It simply strengthens whatever is used most often.

From that perspective, habits like catastrophising, overthinking, or being constantly on edge are not failures, but learned skills, and your brain loves learning things and automating the process by making it easier and quicker for you to follow the same pathways over and over again. Until your brain has practised them so frequently that they have become automatic and feel “right”.

In many cases, those patterns have developed for very good reasons. At some point, being hypervigilant or anticipating problems may have helped you feel safer or more prepared. But what was once protective can become exhausting when it runs constantly in the background, this is where CBT begins to make more sense.

What won’t help is arguing with every thought to see if it’s true or trying to replace it with something more positive. What does help is retraining your mind to strengthen constructive patterns and loosen the ones that aren’t.

A useful way of understanding this comes from a principle referred to as Hebb's Law and often summarised as “neurons that fire together, wire together” (and its counterpart “neurons that no longer fire together, no longer wire together”.) The more a particular pathway is used, the stronger it becomes (and the less it is used, the sooner it falls by the wayside).

So, if someone spends large parts of their day repeatedly running through worst case scenarios, then that pathway becomes increasingly dominant, not necessarily because it depicts reality, but simply because it is well practised.

When people hear that they should “interrupt” these thoughts, it can easily be misunderstood, and a common response is: “But I can’t just ignore my problems.” Of course that’s absolutely right, ignoring genuine problems is not helpful, and that’s not what your CBT therapist is asking you to do either.

The distinction here is between constructive problem-solving and that unproductive mental noise that simply zaps your energy.

If there is something that genuinely needs your attention, such as a difficult conversation, an upcoming meeting, or a decision that needs to be made, then it makes sense to engage with that in a focused, deliberate way. Setting aside time to think it through, prepare, or take action is useful. It moves things forward, and it is something that can be done within a structured framework. But what tends to happen instead is that the mind keeps returning to the same issue repeatedly, without resolution. The same thoughts loop in the background, often becoming more catastrophic over time, without leading to any clear outcome. And that is the part that CBT is targeting, not the actual problem itself, but the way that your mind is interacting with it. In practice, this means creating a clear boundary and interrupting that loop.

There is a time to engage with a problem constructively, and outside of that time, when your mind starts replaying the same scenarios, the task is to gently but firmly interrupt that process. This is where your CBT therapist’s advice of not arguing with every thought, but by recognising that “this isn’t helping right now” comes in.

By reducing the amount of repetition given to those unhelpful pathways and increasing engagement with more constructive ones things begin to shift, and, over time, what has been a strongly ingrained behavioural pattern, changes.

Instead of suppressing thoughts or pretending that everything is fine we’re working on becoming more selective about when and how attention is given to them. If someone is told to “just stop worrying” or to limit their thoughts without understanding the rationale, it can feel invalidating, and it completely misses the point, and that’s why some of the commonly suggested CBT techniques don’t always land well.

For therapists, this is often where the real difference lies. When CBT is presented as a set of techniques to apply, it can feel mechanical. When it is explained as a process of learning and of reshaping patterns in the brain, it tends to feel much more collaborative and meaningful, for both client and therapist.

Especially for clients who have previously found CBT frustrating, this can be an important reframe. I have so often found that the issue wasn’t really the approach itself, but the way it had previously been introduced.

Remember that CBT isn’t about dismissing thoughts, but about deciding which ones are worth practising, which is a very different process from being told what to think.

Understanding the reasoning behind these techniques and their practical application is often what makes the difference between CBT feeling frustrating or genuinely helpful. When the why is clear, and the how has been adapted to facilitate growth, the work becomes a lot less about forced change and much more about building a new skill, step by step and over time.