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History and introduction to cognitive behavioural therapy



Cognitive Behavioural Therapy or CBT is a psychotherapeutic approach utilized by therapists to assist to advertise positive alternation in people by addressing their thought patterns, feelings and behavioural issues. Problems with irrational thinking, dysfunctional thoughts and faulty learning are identified after which treated using CBT. Therapy could be conducted with folks, groups or families and also the goals of CBT will be to restructure one's thoughts, perceptions and responses which facilitate alterations in behaviours.


The first type of CBT was created by a United States Psychologist, Albert Ellis (1913-2007) in 1955, naming his approach Rational Emotive Behavioural Therapy (REBT). Ellis is seen as 'the grandfather of cognitive behavioural therapies' Ellis credits Alfred Korzybski (who developed the idea of general semantics, which influenced NLP) and the book 'Science and Sanity' for starting him on the way of founding REBT.


Within the 1960s a united states Psychiatrist, Aaron T Beck, (below) developed another CBT approach called 'cognitive therapy' that was originally produced for depression but rapidly was a favourite model to review due to the good results it achieved. CBT therapists think that depression is usually related to negatively biased thinking and irrational thoughts. CBT has become accustomed to provide treatment in most psychiatric disorders as well as increases medication compliance, producing a better outcome in mental illness. A significant help with CBT may be the ABC manner of irrational beliefs, the 3 steps are:

A may be the Activating event, the big event leading to some negative thought.

B may be the Beliefs, the client's belief round the event.

C may be the Consequence, the dysfunctional behaviour that ensued in the feelings and thoughts via the big event. A good example could be: Lisa is upset because she had a low mark in her own math's test, the Activating event A is the fact that she failed her test, the idea, B is the fact that she should have a's and b's or she's worthless, the issue C is the fact that Lisa feels depressed. Within the above example, the therapist is needed Lisa identify her irrational beliefs and challenge the mental poison in line with the evidence from her experience after which reframe it, meaning, to re-interpretate it in a more realistic light. Another very helpful help with CBT would be to help a customer recognize 10 distorted thinking patterns:

1 Anything thinking - seeing things in white or black, in case your performance fails to deliver of perfect, the thing is yourself like a total failure.

2 Overgeneralization - visiting a single negative event like an endless pattern of defeat.

3 Mental Filter - you choose out just one negative defeat and obsess with it in order how well you see of reality becomes darkened.

4 Disqualifying the positive - you dismiss positive experiences by insisting they 'don't count' maintaining an adverse belief.

5 Jumping to conclusions - you are making an adverse interpretation despite the fact that there aren't any definite facts that convincingly support your conclusion, including 'mind reading' and 'fortune telling' or 'assuming.

6 Magnification (Catastrophising) minimization - exaggerating things or minimizing things, this is known as the 'binocular trick'.

7 Emotional reasoning - let's assume that your negative emotions reflect the way in which things actually are, 'I feel it, therefore, it should be true'.

8 Should statements - 'shoulds', 'musts' and 'oughts' are offenders.

9 Labeling and mislabeling - rather than describing your error, you fasten a negative label into it, ie 'Im a loser'.

10 Personalisation - the thing is yourself because the reason for some negative external event which actually you weren't accountable for.


These are merely a few of the approaches Cognitive Behavioural Therapy London, other medication is, relaxation tecniques, communication skills training, assertiveness training, social skills training and giving the customer homework assignments.