Over the years, psychology has adopted a number of theories to understand and address how humans work. Each of them has its own practical application based on different theoretical concepts. For more than three decades, cognitive behavioral therapy has become the psychotherapeutic guide with greater scientific evidence of effectiveness.
This type of therapy has had excellent results thanks to its application to the most diverse problems, so it is a very effective and also very flexible option.
- Significant changes can be made in a short period of time.
- And the plurality of techniques available to the therapist gives the therapist great freedom of action to adapt to the person’s specific problem.
The dominant psychological current has varied a lot over time, being different for each era. There have been and are countless alternatives with different objectives.
Two of them, conductism and cognitivism, came together to form, in their origin, what we now call cognitive behavioral therapy, so first of all, let’s try to understand what each of these lines brings.
Conductism focuses on visible behavior, whose object of study is only the behavior emitted by the individual and which can be observed and measured directly.
According to this trend, behaviors are responses to certain stimuli, and their frequency increases or decreases depending on the consequences of their emission, so we can change a person’s behavior by varying the relationship between stimulus, response and consequence.
For example, the person who has a phobia of dogs associated with a moment of his life with dogs and the feeling of fear, and therefore avoids any contact with that animal, if we can break this association, the dogs will no longer be aversive stimulus and the person will stop running away from their presence.
On the other hand, if we want a child to increase the frequency of vegetable consumption, we have to create a positive consequence every time the child eats vegetables.
This theory of psychology focuses on the study of cognition, i. e. mental thoughts and processes, she is interested in knowing the process that occurs in humans after receiving the information, how he treats it and how he interprets it.
The foundation of cognitivism is that we do not perceive reality as it is, but as we are, each of us, with its own internal processes, gives a different meaning to the reality we perceive.
For example, if you call a friend and he doesn’t answer you, you might think he didn’t hear the call, but you can also interpret that he doesn’t want to talk to you because he doesn’t really like you. The facts are the same, but the internal process is completely different.
Cognitive behavioral therapy then appears as a combination of the two currents presented above, combining thoughts and behaviors.
He claims that there is an intrinsic relationship between thought, emotions and behavior, and that changes in one component will affect others.
In this way, it uses very diverse techniques to modify one of these three elements, knowing that in this way the change will extend to the human being as a whole.
Cognitive behavioral therapy is a very complex, flexible and effective theory, in a very short time it is possible to achieve very significant improvements for a wide variety of disorders and conditions.
In addition, it is the psychological guide with the greatest amount of experimental evidence about its effectiveness, however, when looking for a therapy suitable for you, it is advisable to know all the available alternatives and choose the goal with which you identify. More.