Cognitive Therapy Provides a Structured Framework for Essay

Cognitive therapy provides a structured framework for change. Describe your understanding of how this form of therapy works.

According to Cherry (2012), cognitive behavior therapy, also known as CBT focuses on helping clients to understand the thoughts and feelings that create their behaviors. If such behaviors are problematic, the client is encouraged to work on the way they think and feel about certain situations, which, it is assumed, would then also create change in the behavior. Commonly, phobias, addiction, depression, and anxiety are treated by means of CBT. This type of therapy is generally used to create short-term solutions to very specific problems, which focus on helping people to change by focusing on destructive or disturbing thought patterns that influence their behavior negatively.

The underlying cause for disturbed behaviors is then regarded as thoughts and feelings, more than repressed subconscious disturbances created by the individual's past. As such, these are much easier to access than the deeper subconscious. Cherry (2012) provides the example of excessive thinking about air disasters which might cause a person to avoid air travel. Cognitive behavior would then focus on helping a person to control such thinking, which would lead to a healthier travel experience.

According to Cherry (2012), the recent popularity of cognitive behavior therapy has increased among both clients and professionals, generally as a result of the generally short-term solutions it offers and its greater affordability than other options. Over the years of its existence, this type of therapy has also been empirically proved as effective, helping clients to overcome a wide variety of behaviors that make their function in society difficult.

There are several types of cognitive behavior therapy, which include rational emotive therapy, cognitive therapy, and multimodal therapy.

The main component that functions as the underlying assumption of cognitive behavior theory is the fact that people tend to experience thoughts and/or feelings that reinforce faulty beliefs, which can, in turn, cause problematic behaviors.This can affect areas such as family, romantic relationships, work, and academic study. Low self-esteem, for example, is a range of ungrounded negative beliefs about the self that influence many areas of life. This could result in a lack of opportunity to connect effectively with professional or academic associates.

A cognitive behavior therapist would then begin by helping the client to arrive at an awareness of the problematic nature of the thoughts and beliefs underlying the results experienced in his or her life. The ultimate goal is self-discovery and insight, which are to play a pivotal role in the therapeutic process. Once insight is achieved, a new set of skills can be learned and practiced to first overcome the negative thought process, which will then lead to change in behavior. The important component here is the fact that the healing process can be consciously achieved. This is also what creates the major difference between CBT and other forms of therapy such as psychodynamic therapy.

Psychodynamic therapy focuses on accessing subconscious disturbances that affect current behavior. To achieve this, the therapeutic process includes a reference to the client's personal history, especially in terms of the family and parental history. Other processes such as free association and Rorschach patterns are also used in an attempt to access potential subconscious causes for current psychological disturbances. This often takes a long time, although some psychodynamic therapy processes will also work in the short-term. More often than not, however, this is an intensive process that takes six months or longer. In contrast, cognitive behavior therapy is a relatively short-lived process, which is focused on specific thought processes that can be changed consciously.

2) Outline the main distinctive features to the psychodynamic approach to psychotherapy.

According to Haggerty (2006), psychodynamic therapy is also known….....