Cognitive Behavioural Therapy

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) is a process of psychotherapeutic treatment that helps to solve problems like anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), drug misuse etc.

CBT, initially named Rational Emotive Behavioural Therapy (REBT) was first introduced by Albert Ellis an American psychologist way back in 1955, based on Alfred Korzybski’s “Theory of general Semantics”. Aaron T. Beck proposed another approach named ‘cognitive therapy’ which originally was for the treatment of mental depression. This therapy became so much successful that it became a model to study. Cognitive Therapy along with Rational Emotive Behavioural Therapy together came to be known as Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT). Initially used to cure mental depression, CBT along with medication is now applied to treat almost all psychiatric disorders.

Though CBT accepts that your past have shaped your cognitive and behavioural responses to a certain situation, it asserts that your problems are often created by you. Unlike some other type of psychotherapies which looks into your past for the causes and symptoms of your distress, CBT focuses on finding out how to change your current thoughts and demeanor to rectify your distortive social behaviour and attitude.

According to CBT therapists clinical depression is generally due to negatively biased thinking and inconsistent thought process. So to cure a person of these irrational thoughts a three step procedure is obtained – known as ABC technique of irrational beliefs.

• A is Activating event – event that contributes to negative thought.
• B is Beliefs – the patient’s beliefs related to the event.
• C is Consequence – the dysfunctional behaviour resulting from the thoughts and feelings related to that incident.

There is another method which helps the patient identify with one or some of the distortive thinking patterns that he/she experiences.

1. All or Nothing: Being too much pessimistic and carrying a negative feeling abut life.
2. Overgeneralization: seeing a single negative event as a never ending pattern of defeat.
3. Mental Filter: by conceding a single defeat one dwells in it losing any vigor to act as the vision of reality become’s blurred.
4. Disqualifying the positive: Insistently maintaining negative belief and negating any positive belief by asserting it to be “they don’t count”.
5. Jumping to conclusions: making negative interpretation of any event without considering any definite facts to support the conclusion.
6. Magnification and minimization: Exaggerating or minimizing things – also known as binocular trick.
7. Emotional reasoning: Negative emotion coming into the way of logical reasoning and thus disrupting it.
8. Should statements: Not being definite about any thing.
9. Labeling and mislabeling: Instead of accessing and analyzing any error you attach a negative feeling to it.
10. Personalization: You hold yourself responsible for some negative events even if you are not responsible for it.

By using the above procedures the therapist deduces the reason behind the improper behaviour of the patient and then reinterprets the incident in a much more realistic light so as to get rid of the distressed or phobic situation.

There are various other procedures by which the Cognitive Behavioural Therapists access to their patient’s problems and cure them. In short it can be said that CBT assists a patient become aware of his or her own thought distortion that results in distortive behavioural patterns, and then rectify them.