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Cognitive Therapy Essay

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The stigma of mental illness has led many to suffer in silence. For those afflicted, acceptance or even treatment is too unrealistic of a notion to seek out the help they so desperately need and want. In the field of psychology, therapy is a way for experts and patients to collaborate, and over the course of their relationship, understand and eliminate problematic behaviors and thought processes that may be affecting their patient’s life. There are quite a few different approaches to therapy; common therapeutic approaches are humanistic, behavior, and cognitive therapies. For someone in need of a way to rectify a mental disorder or as a method of self-improvement, therapeutic assistance in any of these fields may be a boon. For a non-specific …show more content…

Cognitive therapists seek to disrupt the harmful cyclic thinking that fuels many neurotic disorders, such as generalized anxiety disorder and major depressive disorder (Myers, 2004). Cognitive therapy focuses on conscious re-labeling of negative thought processes in order to help a patient develop a constructive world-view and mental thought pattern (Myers, 2004). Cognitive therapists work to systematically correct fallacious thought processes such as personalization (attributing perceived negative events as having to do with oneself), dichotomous thinking (a binary, all-or-nothing pattern of thinking), selective abstraction (acknowledging only certain aspects of an event, usually the most negative), and magnification-minimization (misinterpreting the importance of an event) in order to stabilize the patient’s mood (Herkov, 2016). A subset of cognitive therapy is cognitive-behavior therapy, which combines the behavior-modifying techniques of behavior therapy with the conscious thought re-labeling of cognitive therapy into a cohesive technique. As David G. Myers says on page 671 of Psychology, “it seeks to make people aware of their irrational negative thinking, to replace it with new ways of thinking, and to practice the more positive approach in everyday settings

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