/CBT-Cognitive-Behavioral-Therapy

Curating Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

Curating CBT Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

  • Cognitive behavioral therapy

    Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is a psycho-social intervention that aims to improve mental health. CBT focuses on challenging and changing unhelpful cognitive distortions (e.g. thoughts, beliefs, and attitudes) and behaviors, improving emotional regulation, and the development of personal coping strategies that target solving current problems. Originally, it was designed to treat depression, but its uses have been expanded to include treatment of a number of mental health conditions, including anxiety. CBT includes a number of cognitive or behavior psychotherapies that treat defined psychopathologies using evidence-based techniques and strategies.

  • A curated guide to digital cognitive behavioral therapy resources.

Aaron Beck

A Conversation with Aaron T. Beck - Annual Reviews - Audio

From my research work, I was getting the idea that patients— depressed patients—had a negative representation of the self, as indicated in the dreams. Then I saw that they were having cognitive distortions. I got the notion that people had negative beliefs, and the negative beliefs would act as a kind of prism and would block out positive things and only allow in negative things. It was also a warped prism, so the interpretations that people would make of what was going on were distorted.

Now we have the representations and we have the distortions, and then the question is, “What do you do about it?” At that particular time, I became aware of the work of Albert Ellis. Ellis had actually come before me in terms of seeing a relationship between people’s thinking and their affect, or their thinking and their behavior. He had already written a book on this, and he had developed a therapy that he called rational emotive therapy.

I borrowed some of his thoughts—some of Ellis’s techniques—and I had people now start to examine their thinking, not challenge it, which was Ellis’s term, but to start to explore, investigate, evaluate their automatic thoughts. We would do this in a variety of ways. One is: If a person had a negative thought such as, “My wife doesn’t love me because she ran off without saying goodbye,” we’d say, “First of all, is this the only time she’s done this, or does she do this a lot? That’s selective abstraction. Are you making some general statement? This is overgeneralization,” and so on. Then we’d say, “Now, is there some alternative explanation? Does it logically follow that the reason she went off is because she didn’t care for you?”—a whole variety of techniques.

What happened, and this was my next surprise, was when I started to have people look at their automatic thoughts, they started to get better. While I could have patients doing analytic therapy with me for two or three years, after about 10 or 12 sessions the patient would say, “Well, doctor, you’ve helped me a lot. Bye-bye.” My caseload shrunk, and pretty soon I was down to very few patients.

Cognitive Therapy - Judith S. Beck

The theory of CT was influenced by Greek Stoic philosophers and by a number of contemporary theorists such as Adler, Alexander, Horney, Sullivan, Kelly, Arnold, Ellis, Lazarus, Bandura, Lewinsohn, and Meichenbaum. Breaking with psychoanalytic models of theory and practice, Beck incorporated behavioral approaches as espoused by social learning, stress inoculation training, problem solving training, and self‐control therapy, with a primary emphasis on changing cognition as well as behavior.

Albert Ellis

  • Albert Ellis Institute
  • Bibliography
  • en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Ellis

    From the late 1940s onwards, Ellis worked on rational emotive behavioral therapy (REBT), and by January 1953 his break with psychoanalysis was complete, and he began calling himself a rational therapist. Ellis was now advocating a new more active and directive type of psychotherapy. In 1955, he presented rational therapy (RT). In RT, the therapist sought to help the client understand—and act on the understanding—that his personal philosophy contained beliefs that contributed to his own emotional pain. This new approach stressed actively working to change a client's self-defeating beliefs and behaviours by demonstrating their irrationality, self-defeatism and rigidity. Ellis believed that through rational analysis and cognitive reconstruction, people could understand their self-defeatingness in light of their core irrational beliefs and then develop more rational constructs.

    In 1954, Ellis began teaching his new techniques to other therapists, and by 1957, he formally set forth the first cognitive behavioral therapy by proposing that therapists help people adjust their thinking and behavior as the treatment for emotional and behavioral problems. Two years later, Ellis published How to Live with a Neurotic, which elaborated on his new method.

REBT

Debbie Joffe Ellis

Dr Debbie Joffe Ellis is a licensed psychologist (Australia) and mental health counselor (New York), adjunct professor at Columbia University TC, and is affiliated with several major psychological associations and societies − including being a Member of the Australian Psychological Society, and an International Affiliate Member of the American Psychological Association. She has a doctorate in alternative medicine (MDAM) from the Indian Board of Alternative Medicine in affiliation with the World Health Organization, from whom she also received a gold medal (1993) in recognition of her service to the field of alternative and holistic medicine.

Dedicated to her husband, the great pioneering and remarkable psychologist Albert Ellis PhD, they worked together for several years giving public presentations and professional trainings on Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT), as well as collaborating on writing and research projects, until his death in 2007. She continues to present, practice and write about his groundbreaking approach of REBT.

David Burns - Feeling Good - TEAM-CBT

Courses

Syllabi