Summary: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

The skills that I had as I started this class this semester were the classes that were taken in the undergraduate years and for the past year and a half as a graduate student. Also, the work I have accomplished at my full-time employer, Easter Seals of NJ. Following treatment plans, supplementing this with progress notes related to whether there were deviations with consumers under my care at the group home level.
Would I have gone further in the counseling field I feel I would have embraced the common factors approach. It had been postulated going back as far as the 1930’s by Rosenzweig that no matter what the presenting theory being demonstrated in a counseling setting may be, as long as the theory is accepted in the field as being therapeutically
Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is credited to Aaron Beck (Shea, 2014). CBT is in as much related to behavior modification. Thinking about the behavior we need to do in order to be accepted within general societal norms. We are expected to act in a certain way depending on what environment we are in at any given time. We behave differently based on our environmental settings. For example, we don’t act the same way at home as we would at school, or work, or the mall or going out to dinner necessarily. Learned behavior comes from these environmental cues that have been long engrained based on what we have learned throughout our lives. Hence, in this case, the old argument of nurture, how one is raised stands out prominently here. While one could find different arguments for and against this in the scientific empirical literature, one can’t argue that nurture has ties to learned behavior and how one needs to behave appropriately to the environmental surroundings that they are
Burnout is a distinct possibility also, as discussed in class over the past semester. This was discussed in the earlier assignment we did this semester related to self-care. So, these things, coupled with the common factors approach is how I would approach a counseling career if I would have continued to move forward in this area. While in theory I believe that I understand what I need to do to be a successful counselor, the skill set that I currently possess related to the counseling profession hasn’t progressed to the point that would make me feel comfortable as a counselor listening to other peoples’ problems. So with that being said, I will now move on to different endeavors. While I have not ever quit an academic program, seeing everything through that I have ever started, this time will not be the case. Looking back at the year and a half that I have spent studying at Kutztown University, I would not consider the entire time a total loss. Having performed well in most of my other theory classes, graduating summa cum laude from DeSales University with a Bachelor of Science degree in psychology, I believe proves that I have the intellect to excel at the undergraduate and graduate level, but not from a clinical