Origin
Cognitive therapy (CT) is a type of psychotherapy that was
developed by American psychiatrist Aaron T. Beck in the 1960’s. Cognitive
therapy seeks to help the patient overcome emotional difficulties by
identifying and changing dysfunctional thinking, negative emotional responses
and the subsequent unfavorable behavior stemming from them. This process
involves helping patients develop skills for modifying their beliefs,
identifying distorted thinking and relating to people in newer and different
ways, owing to the change in behavior patterns.
Cognitive counselors regard faulty thinking to be the
source of emotional dismay and unproductive behavior Different events occur
in each person’s life; some are positive and accomplishing while many may be negative
and traumatizing too. The positive ones do not damage long term thinking in any
way however negative ones like loss, disappointment and failure to accomplish
valued goals can have lasting impressions on the human mind. Cognitive
therapists believe that people who are able to think effectively about their
experiences are able to put negative events in perspective and get on with
life, and those who do not think appropriately about them tend to perseverate
on negative happenings and allow them to disrupt their happiness and effectiveness
for the future.
Cognitive therapy constructs
Cognitive therapy is highly structured and demands a certain
level of intelligence in the client to accept, introspect and mitigate personal
change. Therapy consists of testing the assumptions which an individual
typically makes; and identifying how one's usually unquestioned thoughts may be
distorted, unrealistic and unhelpful. These need to be challenged and opposed. Once
those thoughts have been confronted, one's feelings about the subject matter of
those thoughts are more easily subject to change. Beck identified several
patterns of erroneous thinking some of which can be described below:
- Selective Abstraction: focusing on certain details while ignoring the others
- Dichotomous thinking: believing that everything is either black or white
- Overgeneralization: Arriving at far reaching conclusions based on no data
- Magnification: Overestimating the importance of an event wihout reason
- Arbitrary inference: Drawing bad conclusions on things with no evidence
- Personalization: Viewing events as related to oneself when they are not
Cognitive restructuring is the principal mechanism of facilitating
change. The first step is to have the individual describe the stressful
situation in his or her life and to identify the faulty thinking that underlies
the undesirable feelings. The counselor identifies the automatic negative
thoughts and silent assumptions that the client uses to interpret his or her
experience. These cognitive errors and distortions may be explained to the
client to that he or she can identify fallacies in perception, inaccuracies in
information and redundancy of the self-defeating behavior
Net goals
The individual’s
goal of becoming more effective in managing troublesome aspects of his or her
life becomes clearer once the thought have been sorted. Thereafter, the last stage and he most important of all involves the clients going
back into their world and behaving differently, either by implementing newly
discovered thinking or by experimenting with finding new information about their
beliefs relating to themselves or others. Scientific problem solving, led by
the counselor but with the client as an active participant, leads to changes
in a relatively short time and assure long term wellness.
No comments:
Post a Comment