Cognitive Behavioral Psychotherapy

Today, cognitive-behavioral therapy is widely used for the treatment of various mental disorders such as depression, phobias, increased anxiety and dependence.

Cognitive Behavioral Psychotherapy

How to learn to realize that it is not always behave correctly

This type of psychotherapy focuses on changing negative behavior by modifying thoughts and feelings have a major impact on human rights. Practicing this therapy, experts are convinced that thoughts and feelings affect human behavior and reinforce it.

For example, if a person constantly thinks about the accident, then his mental attitude will certainly affect his actions, to the extent that he refuses to drive or even ride in the passenger seat.

If someone negatively evaluates your image and ability, his self-esteem steadily declines. As a result, he begins to avoid social interactions and miss many opportunities.

Changing patterns of human thinking, you can change its behavior. Cognitive behavioral therapy aims to help the patient to solve a specific problem that he faced in life at the moment; so often this requires quite a bit of time.

Sessions of cognitive-behavioral therapy, the patient begins to realize that even though he can't control everything that happens in his life, and all that he does, he is quite able to control their interpretation and thoughts about different events.

Stages of the therapeutic process

The therapeutic process itself can be divided into two stages. The first is the functional analysis. The therapist helps the patient to determine which of his beliefs are irrational and represent the problem. At this stage, it turns out, what situations, feelings and thoughts lead to maladaptive behavior. The patient is usually have a hard time, but in the end, he receives knowledge about the world and about himself that are extremely important to the success of the psychotherapeutic process.

The second stage examines specific forms of behavior. The patient learns and rehearses a new skill to apply them later to real-life situations. Typically, this occurs gradually, the patient is consistently moving towards your goal. And with every new step it seems to be less daunting and more achievable.

Multimodal therapy

Most often (with the exception of the above mentioned rational-emotive behavioral therapy albert Ellis) modern psychologists take the opposite approach of cognitive behavioral therapy - multimodal therapy of Arnold Lazarus. This method, instead of focusing on one or two items include in the procedure all the qualities of a person.

Multimodal therapy Lazarus is based on the premise that all people are biological creatures with certain biological modalities, that is, the ability to think, to imagine, to feel, to experience emotions, to feel smells, to act independently and to interact with other people.

Lazarus listed the modality using the acronym BASIC I. D. (in English — basic authentication).

— Behavior (behavior).

— Affects and emotional reactions (affect).

Sensations, and sensory response (sensation), such as the ability to hear, see, feel, touch, smell and taste.

Representation and the imagination (imagery), including the representation of man about himself and about others, as well as the ability to think figuratively.

— Cognitions, thoughts (cognition) - ideas, opinions, attitudes towards themselves and other people.

— Interpersonal modality (interpersonal) attitude toward other people and interpersonal connection with them.

— Physiological variables (drug and biology) - a person's physical status, including medication that he takes, health, exercise, sleep, diet.

A multimodal approach to psychotherapy treatment unique

in each specific case. Before you start treatment, of consultation, during which the therapist identifies which modality the patient ignores, and what is his main priority. Further, the therapeutic process focuses on the most useful modality for him; but then comes the turn of other modalities.

Scientific definition

Bridging (building bridges) — a preliminary communication with the modality in which patient preference for now, before identifying the most productive for him modalities.

Tracking (charting the course) — identification and assessment of priority ranking for the work on modalities of the patient. Identifying a behavioral pattern of patient response, especially in similar situations, is of great importance for the success of the psychotherapeutic process.

It is worth to mention such distinctive features of multimodal therapy as methodological eclecticism. In other words, during the therapeutic process are applied various methodologies and approaches; the therapist is not restricted to a specific theoretical framework.

Cognitive psychotherapy

The method of cognitive psychotherapy was proposed by the American psychologist Aaron Beck in the 1960's; this is another common trend in cognitive-behavioral therapy.

Cognitive therapy is based on the idea that all problems are created by negative thinking. New information is constantly interpreted by man, in the end it leads to errors, false beliefs and negative emotions. Psychologists distinguish between ten different patterns of false thinking. Such unconstructive thoughts Beck called cognitive errors. To change behavior we must first change the course of his thoughts, and this can be done by identifying and fixing cognitive errors. We list ten of the most common ones:

1. Over-generalization - elimination of the General principle on the basis of a single case; the assumption that all other incidents will lead to the same result.

2. Depreciation positive - selection course of action based on the idea that a positive experience for some reason does not matter and it should not be taken into account.

3. Dichotomous thinking or perfectionism - the tendency to see everything in black and white, attributing events to one of the two poles.

4. Emotional reasoning - assessment of the situation under the influence of emotions.

5. Arbitrary inferences - biased assessment of a situation without regard for facts and even in spite of them.

6. Exaggeration or understatement - a distorted assessment of the events, undue emphasis on the negative or an understatement of the importance of the positive.

7. Mental filter - focusing exclusively on negative details and a complete disregard for the positive.

8. Failure to reality - focus on how it should be, not trying to cope with the real situation.

9. Personalization is a vision all his own involvement, a tendency to correlate with a what to man is irrelevant.

10. Labeling and incorrect labels is the attribution of some real and unreal qualities when evaluating themselves and others.

Cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy and all its directions (rational-emotive, behavioral, cognitive and multimodal) are aiming to change negative thinking and behavior. In the process of therapy, the patient should be aware of, what are his patterns of negative thinking and change them and then learn new skills to avoid negative behavior.