About Cognitive Therapy

What is different about Cognitive Therapy?

The other major models of emotional disturbances include the psychoanalysis, behavioral, and neuropsychiatric schools. These have important differences with each other, but they also have an important similarity: They all assume that forces that the patient can’t see or influence cause the patient’s emotional disturbances. These mysterious forces may be repressed unconscious factors, hidden conditioned reflexes, or biological imbalances. These models all depend on the therapist to discover and resolve them.

Cognitive Therapy, on the other hand, is based on the assumption that emotional disturbances arise from thoughts that are created to interpret and react to specific events. These thoughts are accessible by the patient. In Cognitive Therapy, the therapist doesn’t identify and treat these. Instead, the therapist guides the patient to discover, examine, and change them in a manner that the patient determines to be appropriate and functional.

The Cognitive Therapy Model

According to the Cognitive Therapy Model, our emotions and behaviors are formed by the way we interpret events. In other words, it is not the events that affect us, but the way we perceive them. From early childhood, we develop basic beliefs about the nature of ourselves, other people, and the external world. Based on these core beliefs, we develop general assumptions and attitudes. We then use these as a general philosophy for viewing and interacting with the external world. These are intermediate beliefs. As particular events occur, our basic philosophy of life steps in to supply us with thoughts about those events that we use to interpret and react to them. These are automatic thoughts.

The Cognitive Therapy Model says that all of these, from core beliefs to automatic thoughts, can be discovered and examined by the patient. The patient finds them to be irrational or dysfunctional, the patient can change them. The therapist’s role is to instruct and guide the patient through the process.

The Cognitive Therapy model describes how our thoughts influence our behavior, and help us understand how we can modify our reactions to events of all kinds to improve our lives.

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