Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy: What Is It And What Principles Is It Based On?
The cognitive behavioral therapy It is one of the most important concepts in applied psychology, since it allows us to address very diverse problems by applying techniques that have scientific support.
This is a form of intervention inherited from the theoretical-practical principles of behavioral psychology, to which methods and objectives of cognitive therapy are added. In this article we will see what it is and why it is so used among psychologists.
Within the fields of psychological intervention and Clinical Psychology there is a large number of proposals that are offered to many types of patients and problems. The offer is very varied, and It is easy to get lost in the jungle of labels, names and descriptions of therapeutic approaches.
However, one of these types of therapy receives special attention nowadays, both in consultations and clinics and in psychology faculties.
This is cognitive-behavioral therapy, a therapeutic orientation that has a scientifically proven effectiveness in different types of intervention. Furthermore, one of its most characteristic aspects is that it adapts to a wide variety of needs and problems to be addressed in the treatment of patients.
Modifying behaviors and thoughts
If you have ever stopped to think about the conventional idea of what a “psychological problem” is, you may have realized that this type of problem has two sides.
On the one hand, a material and objective aspect, which is recognizable by many people and which can be measured using specific scales. On the other hand, one side that responds to the subjective states of consciousness, that is, aspects of the mental and private life of the person who has the problem and that usually have a translation in emotional terms.
Cognitive-behavioral therapy responds to the need to intervene in these two areas. And he does it by pushing himself thanks to the synergies established between the part of the intervention focused on mental processes and that which is oriented towards actions and changes in the patient’s material environment. That is, this therapeutic orientation that acts on both actions and thoughts.
The foundations of this form of psychological intervention
Cognitive behavioral therapy is considered It is born from the fusion of behavioral therapies and those derived from Cognitive Psychology.
On the one hand, behaviorism (and especially the radical behaviorism of BF Skinner) serves as an example of an exhaustive methodology that is very close to the precepts of the scientific method, which allows you to objectively assess the progress that is being made during therapy.
On the other hand, Cognitive Therapy emphasizes the need not to renounce the consideration of directly unobservable mental processes, since much of the usefulness of a therapy lies in the subjective well-being of the patients and this factor does not have to be able to be recorded through pure behavior analysis.
However, and although within cognitive-behavioral therapy in any of its forms we work with constructs that refer to the “mental world” that is not directly observable, Efforts are made so that the mental elements that come into play in the diagnosis and intervention respond to well-defined and translatable categories. to quantitative variables to be able to exhaustively monitor the changes that are made at a subjective level.
Therefore, all types of esoteric and ambiguous formulations about the person’s way of thinking are avoided and category systems are created in which recurring ideas are classified one within another in classifications that respond to a single criterion.
Delving into the differences with behaviorism
Cognitive-behavioral therapy is heir to certain foundations of Behavioral Psychology such as the emphasis on practical learning processes and the idea that partnership is a central concept in therapy. However, it incorporates the need to act, in addition to behavior, on the person’s thoughts. Mainly, intervention on the “mental” part focuses on the cognitive schemes and conceptual categories from which the person interprets reality.
Maladaptive beliefs are also explored, once these have been located, to train the client in their ability to locate facts from their daily life that contradict these assumptions. Thus, if the person has self-esteem problems, they can be taught to pay attention to signs of admiration from their friends and family, which are a type of stimulus that is easily ignored when self-image is very damaged.
In short, any type of cognitive-behavioral therapy is based on the idea that emotions and behavioral styles do not depend only on the physical stimuli that come to us from the environment but also on the thoughts that shape our way of perceiving. both those stimuli and our own mental processes.
How is this type of therapy intervened?
In cognitive-behavioral therapy, we work by teaching to recognize the thinking styles that predispose us to reach conclusions that are not useful for the patient, or dysfunctional thoughts. For this, it is necessary to train the person to be able to reflect on their own way of thinking and consider which points are conflictive and which are not. Thus, The aim is for the client to have more capacity to question the categories with which they work. (such as “success and failure”) and detect typical thinking patterns that cause problems.
The process by which the patient is able to recognize the cognitive aspects that cause discomfort and be able to act on them is based on an action model inspired by the socratic dialogue. This implies that during part of the cognitive-behavioral therapy sessions, the professional will return the feedback necessary for the patient so that he, on his own, detects the contradictions or unwanted conclusions to which his thinking styles and cognitive schemes lead him.
The therapist does not guide the patient in this process, but rather asks questions and highlights statements that the client himself has made so that the latter can go deeper into the study of his own thinking.
The second part of cognitive-behavioral therapy involves intervening on the cognitive and material foci that have been detected. This entails, on the one hand, setting specific objectives to be met, and on the other, train the patient so that he is able to determine from his own criteria the strategies that bring him closer and further away from these goals. Furthermore, since the objectives have been defined in such a way that it can be verified impartially whether they have been met or not, it is easy to measure the progress that is being made and the pace at which it occurs to take note of it and, if it occurs, If necessary, introduce changes in the intervention program.
Meeting goals by going through a program of sessions with cognitive-behavioral therapy may mean, for example, significantly minimize the effects of a phobia, ending an addiction or abandoning an obsessive thinking style. In short, problems with a material aspect and another subjective or emotional aspect.
In what cases is it used?
Cognitive-behavioral therapy can be applied practically in all ages and in a wide variety of problems. For example, it is used to intervene in anxiety disorders and phobias, dysthymia, Bipolar Disorder, depression, etc. It can also be used to help in cases of neurological disorders in which it is necessary to provide support to know how to manage symptoms in the best possible way, and even in psychotic disorders related to schizophrenia.
Of course, in some disorders, behavioral therapy has proven to be practically as effective as cognitive-behavioral therapy, without the need to perform tasks to modify beliefs and thought patterns. For example, it is common for psychologists to resort to behavioral therapy, and not cognitive-behavioral therapy, when they have to care for very young children, given that they do not yet control well abstract thinking and the articulation of concepts through of language.
The effectiveness of this type of psychotherapy
Cognitive behavioral therapy is currently considered to be the only type of psychotherapy whose results have been validated through the scientific method. With this it is understood that its effectiveness is supported by empirical observations in which many groups of patients who have undergone treatment with Cognitive Behavioral Therapy have improved significantly more than what would be expected if they had not attended therapy or had followed a placebo effect program.
When it is said that cognitive-behavioral therapy has been shown to be effective through the application of the scientific method, this means that there are powerful reasons to think that the improvement experienced by people who have tried this type of therapy is caused by the use of these psychological interventions, and not by other variables. This It does not imply that 100% of the people who go to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy sessions will improve, but a very significant portion will. of these.
Furthermore, this improvement can be translated into objective and observable criteria, such as success or failure when quitting smoking. This is a characteristic that distinguishes cognitive-behavioral therapy from other forms of intervention, many of which, by not setting measurable objectives under well-defined criteria, can hardly be subjected to empirical examination to determine their effectiveness through the scientific method. .
On the other hand, it must be taken into account that the degree of effectiveness of each type of therapy depends on the disorder to be treated; Taking this into account, cognitive-behavioral therapy is the one that has been shown to be effective in a greater number of psychological disorders.
