Cognitive therapy was developed in the early 1960s by Aaron beck. The goal of this therapy is to identify distorted beliefs and by changing these beliefs alter a person’s behaviors and emotions. Cognitive therapy recognizes three cognitive levels: automatic thoughts, underlying assumptions, and core beliefs (PsycClips, 2011).
Cognitive therapy has four basic characteristics. These are; cognitive therapy is empirically-based, goal-oriented, problem-focused, collaborative, and active and has homework. Cognitive therapy is based on empirical research and is thus highly effective in treatment and management of depressions and other behavioral disorders. Since it is goal oriented, cognitive therapy ensures that the patient works together with the therapist to determine the objective of the treatment process and use these objectives to measure the patient’s progress. As a problem-focused therapy, cognitive therapy is made to focus directly on the problems thus reducing specific symptoms (Sanders, & Wills, 2005). A collaborative practice, the therapy ensures that the patient and the therapist work as a team to identify and comprehend the problems in order to make appropriate changes in the patient’s life. As an active for of therapy, it ensures that the client takes lessons from the therapist to help him understand his condition and work towards overcoming it. Finally, the therapist gives the client some assignments as homework to help him/her simply the therapy process.
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The role of the client/therapist relationship is to crate an excellent rapport between the therapist and the client to ensure that the clients completely trust the therapists. Once a client trusts the therapist, he/she will be able to accept his care by the therapists thus increasing the chances of recovery (Sanders & Wills, 2005).
There is several cognitive therapy approaches used in Tim’s case. First, there is collaboration between Tim and the therapist which is collaborative empiricism approach. Second, Tim with the help of the therapist develops goals which the therapy aims at eliminating this is guided discovery. Finally, the therapist also uses Socratic questioning (PsycClips, 2011).
If I were to continue with the therapy on Tim, I would continue using the techniques the previous therapists has been using. These include collaborative imperialism, guided discovery and Socratic questioning. With these, I will aim to achieve so much more for the patient. I will indulge the patient in internal dialogue, work towards the elimination of irrational beliefs teach the patient copying mechanism, and stress in inoculation. I will also help my clients to indemnify stress inoculation, unconditional “should,” absolute musts, and faulty assumptions. I will also seek to foster in the patient proper automatic thinking, self-evaluating, self-sustaining, and schema restructuring. I will help the patient avoid cognitive distortions/errors, autosuggestion, blame, and arbitrary inferences.
Certainly cognitive therapy can help client improve their well being by avoiding distortions of reality, disputing irrational beliefs, over generalization, and polarized thinking. The therapy can help realize cognitive restructuring, which is changing the patient’s entire belief system.