Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Solution Term Paper

It also relaxes them and helps build rapport, and it can give you ideas to use for treatment...Everybody has natural resources that can be utilised. These might be events...or talk about friends or family...The idea behind accessing resources is that it gives you something to work with that you can use to help the client to achieve their goal...Even negative beliefs and opinions can be utilised as resources. (p. 451)

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy also works with negative aspects of the client's life as a way to increase the positive aspects of his or her life. Cognitive behavioral therapy is a more established therapy than in solution-based therapy, although the two are conceptually twinned. The major goal of cognitive behavioral therapy is to solve difficulties that arise in the client's life as the result of the presence of behaviors and cognitions (that is, thoughts) along with emotions that are dysfunctional (Albano & Kearney, 2000, p. 81). Unlike solution-focused therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy can be practiced without a therapist and so is often used in self-help programs (Tanner & Ball, 2001).

Cognitive behavioral therapy is based on the premise that often a person's behavior is not in alignment with his or her goals. For example, a person may want to have a job as a partner in a law firm while drinking to excess on a daily basis. The individual may see this level of drinking as necessary to deal with the stress in his or her life while failing to recognize -- or acknowledge -- that the drinking is in fact causing additional stress.The goal of a cognitive behavioral working with such a client would therefore be to help the client understand the mismatch between the client's behavior and goals and, in turn, to help the client shift his or her behavior so that it is in line with both short-term and long-term goals.

Cognitive behavioral therapy is used to treat a very wide range of conditions, including anxiety disorders like obsessive-compulsive disorder; mood disorders such as depression; disorders such as insomnia that have a very significant physiological element; and long-term disorders such as complex post-traumatic stress disorder (McCullough, 2003, p. 36).

Both of these forms of treatment are widely used and preferred by many therapists and clients. However, there are also many critics of both forms of therapies. These critics argue that by focusing on short-term behavioral changes, therapists are short-changing clients who will continue to have to address fundamental underlying problems without being able to acknowledge the power of these more profound issues.

References

Jones, D. (2008). Becoming a brief therapist: Special edition. London: Lulu Enterprises.

McCullough, J.P. (2003). Treatment for chronic depression: Cognitive behavioral analysis system of psychotherapy. London: Guilford Press.

Miller, S.D., Hubble, M.A., Duncan, B.L. (1996). Handbook of solution-focused brief therapy. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers.

O'Connell, B. (1998). Solution focused therapy. Los Angeles: Sage.

Tanner, S. & Ball, J. (2001). Beating the blues: A self-help approach to overcoming depression. New York: Susan Tanner and Jillian Ball Publishing.

Albano, M., & Kearney C. (2000). When children refuse school: a cognitive behavioral therapy approach: Therapist guide. New York:….....