Cbt Vs Cognitive Therapy

The basic idea of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) is that it is used to aid people in controlling their thought processes. Although it is used for many different psychological disorders, but generally it is used for depression and anxiety. CBT has historical and philosophical ties to Stoicism, as the philosophy and the psychological process share similar views. Two paradigms makeup CBT, the cognitive paradigm and the behavioural paradigm. The behavioural paradigm is more based around classical/operant conditioning whereas the cognitive paradigm of CBT has more to do with one's thoughts and attitudes. Since the behavioural and the cognitive paradigms can compete with each other, one or the other may be used during someone’s therapy. Thankfully,
Since behavioural utilizes conditioning it allows for clients to make subconscious and conscious connections between two or more things that need to be made, an example being hoarding in which it is important to switch the mindsets of the hoarders. Jenny, the hoarder in Case # 9 of “Case Studies in Abnormal Psychology” (p 31) needed to work on having positive (or at least neutral) feelings when throwing out unneeded junk and negative (or neutral) feelings when keeping unnecessary things. Cognitive provides the needed thought process changing that has the clients acknowledge their maladaptive thoughts but to move past them. It was seen with PTSD (back when it was still called shell shock) that confronting memories is necessary to grow strength against them, which is a cognitive practice in of itself, though the practice took place much before CBT existed outright. The two-pronged attack works wonders on many different mental issues as it rewires the patients conscious and subconscious thoughts with the behavioural training whilst also providing the patient the cognitive abilities to move passed their problems themselves. The process usually begins with the therapist aiding the patient in finding their negative thoughts. The therapist takes a fairly active role in CBT as they must ask questions, whilst trying to indirectly provide the
Albert Ellis, the founder of Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT); a form of CBT; credited Epictetus (a major philosopher of Stoicism) for his psychotherapy model. The dictionary definition of stoicism gives a fairly primal but not totally accurate idea of what the philosophy actually is, defining it as, “the endurance of pain or hardship without a diiplay of feelings and without complaint.” (google) Actual stoicism can vary by philosopher (of course), but the general idea of it is that humans need to accept moments as they present themselves, that we are in control of our desires, our fears, our anger. It gets much deeper, but understanding the philosophy of stoicism can definitely aid in understanding the roots of what CBT is based around, that ultimately we control our own thoughts, that negative situations are negative because we allow them to