In order to evaluate whether modern behavioural therapies can help a client accept the uncertainty of their future, I am going to look in detail at two Modern Behavioural therapies, REBT – Rational Emotive Behavioural Therapy and CBT – Cognitive Behaviour Therapy to ascertain their use in therapy with a client. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) is a talking therapy it is a way of talking about, how you think about yourself, the world and other people and how what you do affects your thoughts and feelings.
CBT can help you to change how you think ('Cognitive') and what you do ('Behaviour'). These changes can help you to feel better.Unlike some of the other talking treatments, it focuses on the 'here and now' problems and difficulties. Instead of focusing on the causes of your distress or symptoms in the past, it looks for ways to improve your state of mind now.
CBT has been shown to help with many different types of problems. These include: anxiety, depression, panic, phobias (including agoraphobia and social phobia), stress, bulimia, obsessive compulsive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, bipolar disorder and psychosis. CBT may also help if you have difficulties with anger, a low opinion of yourself or physical health problems, like pain or fatigue.CBT can help you to make sense of overwhelming problems by breaking them down into smaller parts. This makes it easier to see how they are connected and how they affect you.
By breaking them down into Thoughts, Emotions, Physical Feelings and Actions can help a person think about a problem and how they feel physically and emotionally as one of these parts can affect the others. There are also helpful and unhelpful ways of reacting to most situations, depending on how you think about it. The way you think can be helpful - or unhelpful. For example, a client has had a bad day, feels fed up, and so goes out shopping.
As they walk down the road, someone they know walks by and, apparently, ignore them. The clients unhelpful thoughts begin to think they have been ignored and the person doesn’t like them, their unhelpful feelings feel low sad and rejected, their unhelpful physical state is feeling sick, stomach cramps, low energy, the clients unhelpful action is to go home and avoid them. However with the help of CBT the client can be assisted to have helpful thoughts for example the person looks a bit wrapped up in themselves, I wonder if there's something wrong? Their helpful emotional state in feelings of concerned for the other person.Their helpful physical state is feeling comfortable, and the client helpful action would be to get in touch to make sure they're OK. So basically how you think about things and how your thought process works has an impact on how you feel and not only at that time but throughout your life.
If you go home feeling depressed, you'll probably brood on what has happened and feel worse. If you get in touch with the other person, there's a good chance you'll feel better about yourself. If you avoid the other person, you won't be able to correct any misunderstandings about what they think of you - and you will probably feel worse.This 'vicious circle' can make you feel worse. It can even create new situations that make you feel worse. You can start to believe quite unrealistic (and unpleasant) things about yourself.
This happens because, when we are distressed, we are more likely to jump to conclusions and to interpret things in extreme and unhelpful ways. CBT can help you to break this vicious circle of altered thinking, feelings and behaviour. When you see the parts of the sequence clearly, you can change them - and so change the way you feel. CBT aims to get you to a point where you can 'do it yourself', and work out your own ways of tackling these problems.
With the therapist, you break each problem down into its separate parts, This will help to identify your individual patterns of thoughts, emotions, bodily feelings and actions. Together you will look at your thoughts, feelings and behaviours to work out, if they are unrealistic or unhelpful and how they affect each other, and you. The therapist will then help you to work out how to change unhelpful thoughts and behaviours. It's easy to talk about doing something, much harder to actually do it. So, after you have identified what you can change, your therapist will recommend 'homework' - you practise these changes in your everyday life.
Depending on the situation, you might start to question a self-critical or upsetting thought and replace it with a more helpful (and more realistic) one that you have developed in CBT. You may also recognise that you are about to do something that will make you feel worse and, instead, do something more helpful. At each meeting you discuss how you've got on since the last session. Your therapist can help with suggestions if any of the tasks seem too hard or don't seem to be helping. They will not ask you to do things you don't want to do - you decide the pace of the treatment and what you will and won't try.The strength of CBT is that you can continue to practise and develop your skills even after the sessions have finished.
This makes it less likely that your symptoms or problems will return. CBT is one of the most effective treatments for conditions where anxiety or depression is the main problem. It is the most effective psychological treatment for moderate and severe depression and it is as effective as antidepressants for many types of depression. Depression and anxiety are unpleasant.
They can seriously affect your ability to work and enjoy life. CBT can help you to control the symptoms.It is unlikely to have a negative effect on your life, apart from the time you need to give up to do it. Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT) is a form of psychotherapy and a philosophy of living created by Albert Ellis in the 1950's.
Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy was first called Rational Therapy, later Rational Emotive Therapy, and then changed to Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy. Dr. Albert Ellis who had become increasing frustrated with the ineffectiveness of psychotherapy. Ellis drew from his knowledge of philosophy and psychology to devise a method which he believed was more directive, efficient, and effective.
Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy's (REBT) central premise is that events alone do not cause a person to feel depressed, enraged, or highly anxious. Rather, it is one’s beliefs about the events which contribute to unhealthy feelings and self-defeating behaviours. Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy teaches the client to identify, evaluate, dispute, and act against his or her irrational self- defeating beliefs, thus helping the client to not only feel better but to get better According to Albert Ellis and to REBT, the vast majority of us want to be happy.We want to be happy whether we are alone or with others; we want to get along with others—especially with one or two close friends; we want to be well informed and educated; we want a good job with good pay; and we want to enjoy our leisure time. Of course life doesn't always allow us to have what we want; our goal of being happy is often thwarted by the "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. " When our goals are blocked, we can respond in ways that are healthy and helpful, or we can react in ways that are unhealthy and unhelpful.
REBT is one of the first forms of Cognitive Behaviour Therapy and was first expounded by Ellis in 1953.Fundamental to Rebt is the concept that emotional suffering results primarily, though not completely, from our evaluations of a negative event, not solely by the events themselves. In other words, human beings on the basis of their belief system actively, though not always consciously, disturb themselves, and even disturb themselves about their disturbances. The Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy framework assumes that humans have both rational and irrational tendencies. Irrational thought/images prevent goal attainment, lead to inner conflict, lead to more conflict with others and poor mental health.Rational thought/images lead to goal attainment and more inner harmony.
In other words rational beliefs reduce conflicts with others and improved health. REBT claims that irrational and self-defeating thinking, emoting and behaving are correlated with emotional difficulties such as self-blame, jealousy, guilt, Low Frustration Tolerance, depression, and anxiety. This is a view shared with some other well-known therapies, such as Re-evaluation Counselling and Person-centred counselling - as these both arose in the mid-50s, Ellis is thought to have had an influence on them.REBT is an educational and active-directive process in which the therapist teaches the client how to identify irrational and self-defeating tendencies which in nature are unrealistic, illogical and absolutist, and then to forcefully and emotionally dispute them, and replace them with more rational and self-helping ones.
By using different methods and activities, the client, together with help from the therapist and in homework exercises, can gain a more rational, logical and constructive rational way of thinking, emoting and behaving.
