Cognitive Therapy Quizlet
Cognitive therapy is a psychotherapeutic technique that teaches clients practical skills to alter their thinking and behavior. Its primary focus lies on altering beliefs, but it also addresses emotions and physical reactions.
Therapist and client collaborate to identify the causes of distressing symptoms, understand the connection between thoughts and feelings, and devise methods to alter thinking patterns. Treatment is typically brief, active, problem-focused, and goal oriented.
Psychological strategies to reduce stress include positive affirmations, relaxation techniques and self-soothing activities. These aid clients in managing negative feelings, relieving anxiety and increasing confidence levels.
This cognitive therapy approach is founded on the idea that difficult emotions and behaviors are caused by one’s thoughts. The primary goal is to alter irrational thinking and beliefs, while teaching coping skills and strategies for avoiding relapses.
REBT consists of three components: role playing, cognitive restructuring and emotional inoculation training (MET). Role playing helps clients recognize and confront their irrational thinking by reliving situations where they have experienced maladaptive thoughts and feelings.
Cognitive restructuring is a technique to replace maladaptive core beliefs, the least accessible level of cognition, with more adaptive ones. These attitudes often develop early in life through personal experience and identification with important people.
These beliefs often have deep-seated personal implications, so people need to revisit their past and process their emotions before they can truly understand them. Therapy helps clients discover these meanings through introspection and dialogue with a therapist.
The therapist encourages the client to re-experience an event in a more realistic and accurate way, using both antecedent and reaction events as motivation for change. For instance, if they have been struggling with chronic low self-esteem, the therapist could ask them to keep track of all times they think or believe they are useless to others. Once these thoughts have been challenged by evidence contrary to them, further therapy may ensue.
Cognitive therapy also utilizes decatastrophizing, which involves helping the client envision the worst possible scenario that could occur to them. This helps them realize that even if this scenario unfolds, there will always be hope for a more positive outcome.
Therapists can teach their clients to utilize these strategies independently in future scenarios. For instance, if a welder is scheduled for an interview for a promotion, the therapist might suggest that they write down any negative automatic thoughts that may arise before the meeting.
During this process, therapists might also employ emotion-based strategies like de-escalation or positive reassurance. This type of coping strategy can be especially helpful to welders who have been struggling with low self-esteem issues.
