What is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy?
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is a psychotherapeutic approach which basically helps the individual to have more positive thoughts rather than the negatives ones, to reduce in timely manner or completely eliminate emotional distress, and to address a myriad of psycho/social/behavioral issues.
An important advantage of CBT is that it tends to be short, taking three to six months for most emotional problems. Clients attend a session a week, each session lasting either 50 minutes or an hour. During this time, the client and therapist are working together to understand what the problems are and to develop a new strategy for tackling them. In other words CBT teaches the individual some principles which are essentials for the individual to follow in order to live a better and successful life.
Key theorists of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
Cognitive therapy was developed in its present form by Albert Ellis and Aaron T. Beck in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1960s, Aaron T. Beck observed that, during his analytical sessions, his patients had some internal dialogue going on in their mind which made Beck feel as if they are nearly talking to themselves only but as this was something that was going on in the patients mind they would keep this factor of conversation unattended during their sessions. Hence Beck gave it the name “cognitive therapy” because of the importance it places on thinking. According to Ellis “It's now known as CBT because the therapy employs behavioral techniques as well. The balance between the cognitive and the behavioral elements varies among the different therapies of this type, but all come under the umbrella term cognitive behaviour therapy.” (Ellis, 2006)
Another major theorist to bring in further developments in CBT is Raymond Novaco. Raymond Novaco developed a programme for helping adults to deal with anger and this has been modified for use with teenagers and children....................
