Transcripts, Notes & Reflections from The CBT Dive Video Podcast

This book is designed to be nonlinear: you can read straight through, or open to the theme that feels most relevant to your life, practice, or learning. The structure is intentionally reflective—more like a spiral than a syllabus.

Themes explored across the book

The sessions are grouped into six thematic parts, including:

• Living with the Inner Critic

  • Self-criticism, perfectionism, imposter syndrome, conditional self-worth, and the internalized voices that shape identity.

• Regulating Emotions

  Frazzled nervous systems, emotional overwhelm, grief, insomnia, control, and compassion-based shifts.

• Queer Identity and Belonging

  The ongoing psychological labor of being queer, navigating belonging, and holding identity in environments that challenge it.

• Love, Sex, and Relational Traps

  Attachment fear, jealousy, rejection sensitivity, poly dynamics, ghosting, intimacy, and shame in sexual culture.

• Caretaking, Identity, and Generational Ties
  Family roles, boundaries, disappointment, the hero role, grief over time, and the emotional weight of caretaking.

• Culture, Power, and Resistance
  Capitalism, poverty, activism fatigue, cultural contradiction, moral injury, and the psychological toll of survival under systemic strain.

This book is for anyone who has ever felt like the tools they were given in therapy didn’t fully hold their complexity.

It is for the overthinkers, the perfectionists, the identity-questioners, the people who’ve been told they’re “too sensitive” or “too much.” It is also for clinicians, students, peer supporters, and educators who want to see CBT practiced in a way that is emotionally attuned, culturally literate, and grounded in real human struggle.

CBT as a tool—not a weapon.