Principles of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
Cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT, is a psychotherapy technique that attempts to teach patients to correct emotional and behavioral responses to troubling situations. The treatment focuses on identifying the situations that lead to negative emotions and behaviors and then examining the thought process and beliefs of the patient that leads them to make the wrong behavioral choices. Once patients are aware that they are making the wrong choice and understand why, they can be retrained to make the right choices with the result being the elimination of the negative behavior. This is always the goal of CBT: to eliminate the negative behavior.
The treatment is effective when it is done as a systematic process and it takes time. Patients need to encounter problem situations numerous times in order to have the opportunity to retrain their thinking and thereby change their behaviors. Cognitive behavioral therapy has been successful in the treatment of eating disorders, anxiety, insomnia, obsessive compulsive disorder, and post traumatic stress disorder.
Cognitive behavioral therapy had its beginnings in the 1960’s when advances in behavioral therapy, which had been around since the 1920’s, was combined with the new field of cognitive therapy. Both techniques had their strengths and weaknesses but combining the two seemed to be the best of both worlds. As long as the patient had significant cognitive functions to understand the underlying assumptions that were responsible for their negative behaviors, then they could be retrained to assess the situation more correctly and generate a different emotion or behavior as a response in place of the negative one.
Each individual creates their own unique view of any given situation. This view is based in part on our past experiences as other environmental factors. For some people, this view is distorted and that leads them to an irrational response to the situation. Given their distorted view, this response may seem to be perfectly acceptable. Therefore the first step in cognitive behavioral therapy is to teach people to view the trouble situations clearly so that they can then learn the correct appropriate reaction.
This approach which directly engages the patient’s behaviors is in stark contrast to the psychoanalysts approach like that pioneered by Freud. Freud’s techniques look backwards, searching out the root of the problem, while cognitive behavioral therapy looks forward to the end result and starts there. The theory being that if you eliminate the symptoms, then you have effectively cured the disorder. CBT requires repetition to teach patients the appropriate responses to stimuli and to help them understand how to make that right choice so they are able to apply those new decision making skills to real life situations.
In this way, cognitive behavioral therapy owes a debt to early behavioral researchers like Ivan Pavlov who among his many experiments showed that dogs could be trained to salivate at the sound of a bell if the sound was repeatedly associated with their mealtime. In the same way, positive behaviors are trained into patients until that hopefully becomes their natural response instead of the negative behavior that brought them to therapy in the first place.
For the therapist, the key to solving a patient’s behavioral problems lies in uncovering the underlying assumptions that the patient holds that act as a trigger for the behavior. Once the therapist has identified these flawed assumptions, they can help the patient change them. Once the patient understands that the assumptions they held were wrong, they can be replaced with ones that are correct. Once this transformation occurs, the patients reactions to situations will also change and the negative, inappropriate behavior will be eliminated.
Given the types of assumptions or even core beliefs that the therapist is asking the patient to question and ultimately change, the situation can naturally be quite volatile. For this reason the these techniques take time. A therapist does not want to shake a patient’s belief to the core without giving them something else to build upon so the therapist must move slowly in steps. Validity testing is a common first step, where the patient is asked to explain or defend his or her beliefs or assumptions. If they are faulty, then eventually the patient will see the flaws in the logic. The therapist cannot simply tell the patient this however, the patient has to learn it on their own so they understand it as well as accept it.
The results of cognitive behavioral therapy show that the lengthy process is worth the effort because in the end it is effective. That is why cognitive behavioral therapy is the number one treatment for a wide variety of disorders from bulimia to panic disorder.
Bethany Jordan is an Information Technology professional and aspiring writer who was clinically diagnosed with SAD (Social Anxiety Disorder) in 2007.
She maintains a website dedicated to sharing information on natural antidepressants, herbal remedies for anxiety and depression, and anxiety disorders in general. Everyone is welcome and invited to visit http://www.naturalantidepressants.info …
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