The dishes were still in the sink an hour after the last guest left. The argument — a small one, over whether the restaurant from a few years back had closed before or after the pandemic — had already been settled twice: once by a phone search under the table, and once by the conversation simply moving on to dessert. The point had landed. Everyone had agreed on it. And at midnight, over a wine glass being scrubbed clean, a follow-up case was still quietly being assembled, in case the subject ever came up again.
It never would. That didn't stop the case from getting built.
Albert Ellis, who founded rational emotive behavior therapy and became one of the major influences on the cognitive behavioral tradition that grew up around it, spent a career cataloguing a particular category of belief he called "musts" — not preferences but demands, rigid and absolute, placed on the self, on other people, and on the world generally. I must be seen as competent. Others must agree with me, or something has gone wrong. The demand rarely announces itself as a demand. It shows up disguised as a fact about the restaurant, or the route, or the year something happened — small, checkable, low-stakes on its face. What is actually at stake almost never has anything to do with the restaurant.
Being right, in this frame, isn't the goal. It's the evidence. The correction settles something larger and less visible: a felt account of competence, or reliability, or standing, that being wrong would call into question. The fact gets checked and confirmed. The demand underneath it doesn't get examined at all, because it was never presented as something open to examination — only as something that had to be met.
What keeps the case-building going after the argument has technically ended is that the thinking is doing something, even with no audience left in the room. Rehearsing the rebuttal, refining the timeline, building the version of the exchange where the point lands more cleanly — none of this is idle. It's the mind continuing to secure something that already felt insecure the moment it was challenged, regardless of how the actual conversation resolved. The dishes get washed. The case keeps being built for a hearing that already happened and isn't going to happen again.
Cognitive behavioral therapy is less interested in whether the restaurant closed in 2019 or 2021 than in what a person notices themselves doing at midnight, alone, over a point nobody is contesting anymore. That's usually where the belief actually lives — not in the fact, but in what not having the fact would apparently mean.
The people I work with in New York — many in law, finance, and medicine, in Fort Greene, Harlem, Long Island City, and around Astoria — often bring a version of this that has served them well professionally. Certainty is frequently the job: the correct read, the correct call, the confidently defended position that turns out later to have been the right one. What doesn't come bundled with that skill is an off switch for the situations where being right was never actually the point — the dinner table, the group text, the small disagreement everyone else has already forgotten by the time the guest coats are on.
CBT doesn't ask a person to start being wrong more, or to stop noticing when something is genuinely inaccurate. It asks what the "must" underneath the correction is protecting, and whether the argument — once the fact has been checked — is actually finished. Sometimes it is. The case keeps being built anyway.
I work with adults throughout New York — in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and across the city — via telehealth. Prospective clients are welcome to reach out at jonathanwalsh@hushmail.com or to request a complimentary 15-minute consultation through this site.
Frequently Asked Questions about Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
What is cognitive behavioral therapy?
Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is an evidence-based approach that examines the relationship between thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. It works from the observation that how we interpret situations — not the situations themselves — largely determines how we feel about them.
What does CBT help with?
It is well-suited for anxiety, depression, anticipatory worry, and the persistent sense that emotional reactions are out of proportion to what's actually happening. It tends to produce measurable results within a defined time frame.
How is CBT different from other therapy approaches?
Most other approaches work at the level of relationships, history, or meaning. CBT works more directly on the thinking patterns that generate distress in the present — identifying them, examining them, and testing whether they hold up.
Who is a good fit for CBT?
It works well for people who are curious about their own patterns and willing to notice their thoughts rather than simply accept them as accurate accounts of reality. Some people use it alongside other approaches for different layers of the work.
Jonathan Walsh, LMHC, LCMHC, LPC is a licensed therapist offering cognitive behavioral therapy via telehealth in New York and several other states. He is a member of the New England Center for Existential Therapy and has completed core training at the Institute for Existential-Psychoanalytic Therapy. Learn more about Jonathan.