Behavior Therapy Is A Treatment That Can Help Change Self Destructing Behaviors

Systematic desensitisation includes three steps. The first step is to help the person construct an anxiety hierarchy. An anxiety hierarchy is a list of stimuli related to the specific source of anxiety, in this case being in a busy public place. The stimuli are ranked from the least to the most feared or avoided. An example of an anxiety hierarchy for someone with agoraphobia might include:

Behavioural therapy looks at the way people act and respond when they are distressed or under pressure. It helps to modify unhelpful behaviours such as avoidance, which may exacerbate the problems or the way the client feels. This usually means gradually facing up to feared and avoided situations e.g. Demi’s self-harm and bulimia. As a consequence, new behaviours to deal with problems and situations are learned.

Self defeating behaviours are present in every person on earth once they have developed enough and are able to copy, consequently our parents and siblings contribute In this essay I intend to describe what self defeating behaviours are, how they arise and describe how cognitive behaviour therapy and/or a person centred approach can be helpful in treating the client who presents for therapy to make changes to their lives.

While the media definitely plays a role in how we view ourselves, anorexia is a way of coping with what’s going on in a teen’s life. Stress, pain, anger, acceptance, confusion and fear can all become triggers for this debilitating eating disorder. The goal is one of trying to make their whole life better.

"Systematic desensitization is a procedure in which the patient is exposed to the phobic object gradually, so that fear and discomfort are kept to a minimum and extinction is allowed to occur" (Mazur, 2013, p.69). When applying this to a person with an anxiety disorder the individual would need to compose a list of things that are upsetting and cause the anxiety listing them from least upsetting to most upsetting. The next part of the process would be teaching the person relaxation techniques such as deep breathing and muscle relaxation in order to empower them use these when they feel they are getting anxious. Now that the initial procedure are in place the process would begin by introducing the least upsetting and then telling them to relax, then they would repeat this process

I feel that behavior therapy is useful and effective in therapy because it provides the client with a set goal to target. Furthermore, the client can keep track of their progress. Clients may feel they have made no progress since the initial sessions. The one aspect I like the most about behavior therapy is that the client can go back to their chart and monitor progress. I like that behavior therapy contains techniques like substitution and role playing. These techniques can be used an altered depending on the situation. Another aspect I feel is important is that the therapist has a clear concept of when therapy will end. In other types of therapy for instance psychoanalysis, there is no clear time frame for when therapy will end.

To begin with, when treating the client with anxiety disorders it’s important to learn relaxation techniques during therapeutic treatment because relaxation is used over the course of sessions. Once, the method is used it progressively relaxes the muscles while using vivid imagery. Next, treating phobic behaviors the therapist utilizing systematic desensitization focus on relaxation methods and vivid imagery, to study the client and his/her fears of objects or situations, because of their high intense anxiety. “For example, the type of relaxation methods used are relaxing the muscles, arms, face, neck shoulders, chest, stomach, and legs before any session begins” (Sharf, 2016, p. 301).

Lastly, the final behaviourist therapy would be systematic desensitisation and this was introduced by Joseph Wolpe. According to Wolpe (1965) cited by (Gross, 1999, p.1) ‘if a response inhibitory of anxiety can be made to occur in the presence of anxiety-evoking stimuli it will weaken the bond between these stimuli and the anxiety.’ This quote basically states that it would be humanly impossible to experience two opposite emotions at the same time (e.g. fear and relaxation.) Systematic desensitisation (SD) is where the patient themselves would make a hierarchy of fear, including the fear itself (conditioned stimulus). This would go from the least fearful to the most fearful. For example, a person with a fear of spiders… the lowest rank on the hierarchy would be the word ‘spider’ written on a piece of paper whereas the highest rank would be to hold a spider. The patients would have a series of contact with the stimuli and keep moving up to the next step of the hierarchy when the current level they are on can be completed without feeling any anxiety. Sometimes this was very difficult to conduct as Wolpe, sometimes had to use imagination to his patients as their phobias were too complex. But, findings show that systematic desensitisation is extremely effective for phobias with a success rate between 60% -90%. Ranchman and Wilson (1980) believe SD is very effective but is more effective for the treatment on smaller phobias such as animals and blood.

F. Dudley McGlynn (2010) explored systematic desensitization and results of the study demonstrated that systematic desensitization is a behavior therapy developed by Joseph Wolpe (1915–1997) for fear and anxiety. The therapy begins with an assessment that describes the objects and/or events that elicit fearfulness.

Behavior therapy uses principles of learning to increase the frequency of desired behaviors and decrease the frequency of problem behaviors (Desmarais, Gerrig, Ivanco, Zimbardo, 2012). Different forms of behavior therapy include counterconditioning, contingency management, and social learning theory (Desmarais, et al, 2012). In counterconditioning a new response is conditioned to replace a maladaptive response (Desmarais, et al, 2012). Counter- conditioning techniques include exposure therapy and systemic desensitization, where individuals confront the anxiety precipitating cause (Desmarais, et al, 2012). Joseph Wolpe noted that the nervous system cannot be relaxed and agitated at the same time. He taught his patients relaxation techniques

Behavarior Therapy is a fairly common modality that uses concepts like reinforcement and consequences to treat symptoms such as phobias and different types of anxiety, it is also based on the principles and procedures of Scientific Method, it is also focuses with the client’s current problems and the factors influencing them. Behaviorally oriented therapists tend to be active and directive and to function as consultants and problem solvers. Behavior therapist rely deeply on empirical evidence about the effectiveness of the techniques that they will going to use with their clients. These are some of the techniques that use in Behavior therapy, the first is Reinforcement(Operant & Classical conditioning) next is systematic desensitization, this is very specific therapeutic technique that used for Fears or intense anxiety around a specific object, the object of the fear can be a person, a situation, or event, next is Vivo techniques and they can be divided into two categories, graduated and intense, in graduated the client moves toward the object of fear while the intense type would experience the object of fear at all once.

Behavior therapists play a very active role in the therapeutic process. Building a relationship with the client is one primary role. This relationship affords the therapists the opportunity to establish a rapport with the client. The therapists, as a result, can effectively assess the client's problem from an objective standpoint. This data provides the therapists with the most effective treatment route.

There have been many different psychologists that have researched the concept of behaviorism and how effective this approach is to learning. Dygdon and and Dienes use the topic of depression to prove that behavioral learning theory is very effective. They started conducting research on the effectiveness of behavioral learning theory concepts to help eliminate or lessen the depression; their results have shown that this theory is effective in reducing depressive symptoms. Reducing depressing by behavioral theory is done by using operant conditioning, which is using reinforcements. One of the ways that Dygdon and Dienes (2013) state that depression can be reduced or eliminated is using extinction. Learned helplessness is another concept of behavioral

“Deep muscle relaxation is the most frequently used competing response in systematic desensitization” (Spiegler & Guevremont, 2010, p. 208). This involves training the client on how to relax certain muscle groups of the body, and is also the first step in systematic desensitization therapy that the participants would receive. The second step would be to create what is called an anxiety hierarchy. For this, participants would list fear-inducing scenes involving spiders in order from least to greatest. The third step of this therapy is to have the participants imagine the scenes from their anxiety hierarchy one by one, while engaging in relaxation techniques (p.

Systematic Desensitization is carefully controlled and gradual exposure to anxiety provoking stimuli. An example of this being done that I have seen was when my sister was deathly afraid of bridges. Any time my family would take a trip or even go into town we would drive over bridges and this would make my sister break into terrible panic attacks. She would cry and scream and sometimes is was so bad that after we crossed the bridge my mother would have to pull the car over and comfort my