What is Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy?

Within the last half-century, one field of psychotherapy has slowly attained a dominant position in the field of therapy. This field encompasses a collection of approaches that can be collectively termed "cognitive-behavioural therapy."

Cognitive-behavioural therapy is derived from the work of B. F. Skinner, the legendary experimental psychologist who did so much to formulate the ideas of "behavioural psychology," combined with the burgeoning movement within theoretical psychology based on the notion of information-processing, "cognitive psychology."

Certain thinkers within the field of psychological intervention took the best ideas deriving from these two paradigms of psychology, to develop a range of therapies aimed at treating anxiety, depression, social phobia, agoraphobia, panic attacks, OCD, and other related disorders.

In the 1950's Freudian analyst Albert Ellis made the decision that the psycho-analytic method he had been trained to use was not working.

As a result, he turned to other thinkers for answers. Sourcing ideas of Buddhism, Stoic philosophy, and the so-called "ego psychologies" of certain "post-Freudians", he developed a new approach Rational Emotive Therapy. This therapy was later renamed Rational Emotive Behavioural Therapy, or REBT, and is generally considered to be the first cognitive behavioural therapy to have been established in the modern age.

Rational Emotive Behavioural Therapy relies heavily on the notion that you can "dispute" beliefs and ideas that you have that are unhelpful. For example, if you have the belief "I am no good", the therapist will teach you to refute this belief logically (for example, how can someone just be plain, overall, no good -- perhaps you have done things that out of sync with common norms of "goodness", but it is certainly a matter of opinion as to whether a person's "overall worth" is a function of their actions: to be sure, at the very least, it cannot be proved that this is so).

This sort of example illustrates well the philosophical outlook that lies behind REBT: in short, you are not your behaviours, and you are not your thoughts, but rather you a person who happens to have certain thoughts, and who happens to act a certain way (sometimes).

In other words, REBT does not seek to dig out your "true nature", but instead looks for "unhelpful" thoughts or beliefs that you have, that can be refuted, or that do not stand up to rational scrutiny.

Ellis claimed to have uncovered a set of around twelve common irrational beliefs that most people have, that do not stand up to logical scrutiny, but that nevertheless cause people undue distress.

These irrational beliefs include the following:

- Certain people must love me all the time

- Certain acts are awful or wicked, and people who commit those acts must be damned

- It is horrible when things are not the way you want them to be

- Human misery is invariably caused by outside events, i.e., we cannot choose to evaluate events in a positive (or neutral) light

- If something may be dangerous we should be upset about it

- It is easier to avoid than to face life's difficulties

- We need something greater than ourselves on which to rely

- We should be thoroughly competent and intelligent

- Because something once affected us, it will now, or it will in the future

- We must have perfect control over things

- Happiness can be achieved without action

- We cannot control our own emotions and feelings

Awareness of the fallacious nature of these beliefs is a useful step in alleviating distress.

Another important figure in the cognitive-behavioural therapy movement was Aaron Beck. Considered the founder of "Cognitive Therapy", like Ellis, Beck recommended a flexible approach, based however on dispelling beliefs that are unhelpful to the client, or causing them distress.

Beck believed that there exist a set of common "cognitive distortions." In other words, once an unhelpful belief has been identified, then it can be useful to understand what "sort" of faulty reasoning is making this belief seem "real."

These cognitive distortion types include:

- All or nothing thinking (also called black-and-white thinking)

- Emotional reasoning (because it feels true therefore it is true)

- Discounting positive elements of the situation

- Mental filter (again, filtering out positive aspects)

- Blaming self or others

- Pejorative labelling (I am a jerk, instead of "I could have acted better in that situation")

Identification of the type of cognitive distortion at play can help in dispelling the belief altogether: again, if it can be shown that your logic is faulty, that the belief is not reasonable, this weakens its power over the person with that thought.

Cognitive behavioural therapy has achieved such widespread recognition, and has been studied to such a degree, that its influence cannot be understated.

For this reason, it is an avenue worth exploring, no matter who you are...