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Essay on Cognitive behavioral therapy
The almost universal appeal and acceptance of cognitive-behavioral therapy appears to stem from the very "straightforward and practical approach; bad thinking and interpreting lead to psychological difficulties". The application of this therapy extends to the idea that when it is taught to patients better thinking habits they experience relief from their symptoms. Similar to the approach taken by researchers and others in the Rationalemotive School, the cognitive-behavioral therapist seeks to discover and then confront the error-filled or negatively biased patterns of thought held by the patient. One of such researcher used the term "schemas" to describe cognitive patterns with stable characteristics through which the patient interprets experience. He reported depressive schemas as rigid or occurring in the extreme, without shades of gray. Cognitive-behavioral therapists actively seek to confront evidence for faulty thinking and generalization while Rational Emotive Therapy practitioners focus more on patients' emotional overreaction to evidence.
Consider as an example the depressive parent of a child who gets caught with drugs at school and berates himself for being a bad parent. Therapists might attempt to get the patient to accept that he couldn't be a perfect parent at all times. In other words, he attacks the impact of the conclusion. Researchers would take the more empirical approach and search out and confront evidence regarding the idea that this father was (or was not) an inadequate parent. Researcher's process would eventually move to the point of working with the father on the idea of being perfect in every facet of parenting as a means of feeling well adjusted. The cognitive-behavioral model helps provide the patient with a new or asocial experience in that the therapist and the patient work together to interrupt the fixed action pattern of the patient interpreting his behavior within the context of a fixed, possibly negative schema.....................
