Cognitive-Behavioral Therapies: Achievements and Challenges PMC

These detailed, science-based exercises will equip you or your clients with tools to find new pathways to reduce suffering and more effectively cope with life stressors. In the long run, constructivism indulged in highly speculative thinking which risked not addressing empirical challenges. For example, cognitive behavioral therapy people who have developed depressive thoughts often tend to become withdrawn and give up their hobbies. Behavioral therapy helps to identify this pattern and find ways to become more active again. Beck (1967) identifies several illogical thinking processes (i.e., distortions of thought processes).

Stress inoculation training

For cognitive behavioral therapy to be effective, you must be ready and willing to spend time and effort analyzing your thoughts and feelings. This self-analysis can be difficult, but it is a great way to learn more about how our internal states impact our outward behavior. CBT emerged during the 1960s and originated in the work of psychiatrist Aaron Beck, who noted that certain types of thinking contributed to emotional problems. Beck labeled these “automatic negative thoughts” and developed the process of cognitive therapy.

The Role of Self-Knowledge in the Clinical Theory of Cognitive Therapies

The second group, on the other hand, presents itself as a non-schedulable corrective emotional experience in the here and now of the therapeutic relationship and seems not directly compatible with a significant top down action, at least at the beginning of its implementation. This is perhaps the case of the model of Safran and Muran (2000) focused on detecting alliance ruptures and rupture repairs in session, in which the only top down moment is locked up in the retrospective reconstruction of these critical events. In short, it would seem that the development of cognitive behavioral therapies goes more towards the aware (and therefore top down) clinical management of the processes in therapy and this top down management can include in its rationale bottom up experiential and imaginative processes. In Germany, statutory health insurers pay for cognitive behavioral therapy to treat mental illnesses such as depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder and addictions.

Self-Knowledge in Beck’s CT as a Core Belief

There is hardly any scientific research on the possible side effects of psychotherapy. This suggests that knowledge of the cognitive explanation can improve the quality of people’s lives. People with negative self-schemas become prone to making logical errors in their thinking, and they tend to focus selectively on certain aspects of a situation while ignoring equally relevant information.

• CBT-exposure therapy refers to the direct confrontation of feared objects, activities, or situations by a patient.
• CBT also has roots in Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy (REBT), the brainchild of psychologist Albert Ellis.
• When he helped them evaluate and change their underlying beliefs, their improvement was long-lasting.
• Beck was trained at the Philadelphia Institute of the American Psychoanalitic Association.

While Meichenbaum applied his model mainly to social and community psychology, Lazarus and Mahoney were the scholars who devoted their major theoretical efforts to the development of a clinical model comparable to Ellis’ and Beck’s (Dobson and Dozois 2010). Unlike Beck and Ellis, however, Lazarus and Mahoney https://ecosoberhouse.com/ were not trained psychodynamically. From a certain viewpoint, they were the authentic clinical counterparts of the non-clinical theorists of the cognitive revolution; those who, coming from a behaviorist background, applied the cognitive revolution in the clinical field and promoted CBT approaches.

• The self provides consistency, continuity, and identity in the individual development; it is not the result of memory and information but is the guarantee of good psychological functioning.
• The behavior part of the therapy involves setting homework for the client to do (e.g., keeping a diary of thoughts).
• Beck initially focused on depression and developed a list of “errors” (cognitive distortion) in thinking that he proposed could maintain depression, including arbitrary inference, selective abstraction, overgeneralization, and magnification (of negatives) and minimization (of positives).
• For anxiety disorders alone, more than 200 empirically supported scales were in use in the early 21st century.

However, it risks being excluded from broader and less immediately fruitful reflections. In conclusion, although the new wave of process oriented and experiential therapies is promising, scientific literature confirms that, at the present time, CT is still the most effective psychotherapy for most emotional disorders (Nathan and Gorman 2015). However, it is possible to imagine possible future directions of development and their empirical and theoretical strengths and weaknesses using the top down/bottom up classification. In turn, it should be stressed that the parallel movement went on even after the discovery of the self in these theories. In fact, the prevalence of the self ended up generating an increasing attention towards the therapeutic relationship in many therapeutic approaches.

• The therapy aims to reframe people’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors around sleep.
• In fact, the metacognitive model selects a bottleneck on which to surgically act to obtain the maximum therapeutic effect.
• Among prevalently bottom–up models we can list two therapeutic protocols which integrate experiential interventions and process oriented, developmental and interpersonal components and preserve a clinical and theoretical interest in self-knowledge structures.
• Behavioral therapy has its origins in “behaviorism.” This theory assumes that human behavior is learned and can therefore be changed or learned differently.
• Initially, some patients suggest that while they recognize that certain thoughts are not rational or healthy, simply becoming aware of these thoughts does not make it easy to alter them.
• His findings suggested that these types of thoughts dominated the thinking of people with depression.

Philosophical concerns with CBT methods

A Brief History of Aaron T. Beck, MD, and Cognitive Behavior Therapy

Strengths of CBT

• The conceptualization based on the CBT model is built from session to session and is shared with the patient at an appropriate time later in therapy.
• In addition, process oriented models also would allow to conceive in a new and different way the relationship between cognitive therapies and behaviorism, forcing all of us to rethink both behaviorism and cognitivism in less simplistic terms.
• Positive self-judgments about being able to manage and control events and their own emotional reactions are seen as largely responsible for their emotional well-being and daily life efficacy.
• Techniques designed to directly modify cognitions may be neither necessary nor sufficient for improvement, and in some cases can produce paradoxical effects.