Ch. 10 Cognitive Behavior Therapy – Flashcards

-collaborative relationship between client and therapist -psychological distress is the result of distorted thoughts and beliefs - changed thoughts can lead to changed feelings and behavior -time-limited -goal oriented

-created by Albert Ellis - first of the cognitive behavior therapies -emphasizes thinking, assessing, deciding, analyzing, and doing -we learn irrational beliefs from significant others during childhood and then re-create these irrational beliefs throughout out lifetime -basic assumption is that people contribute to their own psychological problems, as well as to specific symptoms, by the rigid and extreme beliefs they hold about events and situations -based on the assumption that cognitions, emotions, and behaviors interact significantly and have a reciprocal cause-and-effect relationship -basic hypothesis is that are emotions are mainly created from our beliefs, which influence the evaluations and interpretations we make and fuel the reactions we have to life situations

replacing faulty cognitions with constructive beliefs/ thoughts

-demonstrates to clients what it is that they are continuing to tell themselves. Then they teach clients how to challenge these self-statements so that they no longer believe them, encouraging them to acquire a philosophy based on facts. 1) disputing irrational beliefs: clients dispute a particular "musts", absolute "should", or "ought" until they no longer hold that irrational belief, or until it diminishes into a strength -ex: "why must people treat me fairly?" "If I don't get the job I want, it may be disappointing, but I can surely stand it." 2) doing cognitive homework: make lists of their problems, look for their absolutist beliefs, and dispute these beliefs -homework assignments are a way of tracking down and attending to the "should" and "musts" that are part of their internalized self-messages. 3) Bibliotherapy: therapy is seen as an educational process, clients are encouraged to read REBT self-help books 4) Changing one's language: clients learn that "musts" "oughts" and "shoulds" can be replaced by preferences -ex: instead of saying "it would be absolutely aweful if..." they learn to say "it would be inconvenient if..." 5) Psychoeducational methods: more likely to cooperate with the treatment program if they understand how the therapy process works and if they understand why particular techniques are being used.

-REBT use a variety of procedures: unconditional acceptance, rational emotive role playing, modeling, rational emotive imagery, and shame-attacking exercises -purpose is to dispute client's irrational beliefs and to help them change some of their thoughts, emotions, and behaviors 1) Rational emotive imagery: form of intense mental practice designed to establish new emotional patterns in place of disruptive ones by thinking in healthy ways 2) Humor: to put life into a healthy perspective 3) Role playing 4) Shame-attacking exercises

-use most of the standard behavior therapy procedures like operant conditioning, self-management principles, systematic desensitization, relaxation techniques, and modeling

-Aaron Beck - based on empirical research - the way people feel and behave is influenced by how they perceive and place meaning on their experience

see things in black and while categories. if your performance fall short of perfect, you see yourself as a failure

you see a single negative event as a never-ending pattern of defeat

you pick out a single negative detail and dwell on it exclusively so that your vision of all reality becomes darkened, like the drop of ink that discolors the entire beaker of water

you reject positive experienced by insisting they 'don't count' for some reason or other. In this way you can maintain a negative belief that is contradicted by your everyday experiences

you make a negative interpretation though there are not definite facts that convincingly support conclusion, there are two different ways

- jumping to conclusion - you arbitrarily conclude that someone is reacting negatively to you and you don't bother to check this out

- jumping to conclusion - you anticipate that things will turn out badly, and you feel convinced that your prediction is an already- established fact

you exaggerate the importance of things (such as your goof-up or someone else's achievement) or you inappropriately shrink things until they appear tiny (your own desirable qualities or the other fellow's imperfections)

you assume that your negative emotions necessarily reflect the way things really are: 'I feel it, therefore it must be true.'

you try to motivate yourself with 'shoulds' and 'shouldn'ts' , as if you had to be whipped and punished before you could be expected to do anything. "musts" and "oughts" are also offenders. The emotional consequence is guilt. When you direct should statements towards others , you feel anger, frustrations, and resentment