How does Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) work?
CBT can help you make sense of overwhelming problems by breaking them down into smaller parts. This makes it clearer to see how they are all connected and how they affect you. These parts are: • A situation – a problem/trigger event • Thoughts • Emotions • Physical Feelings • Actions/Behaviours Each of these areas can affect the others. How you think about a problem can affect how you feel physically and emotionally. It can also alter what you do about it. CBT helps to identify vicious cycles that develop between these areas. When you see the parts of the sequence clearly, it is easier to change them, therefore changing how you feel. In humanistic and integrative psychotherapy, the therapist uses techniques to explore the client’s experiences rather than simply understanding events. It is important to understand how a client feels after an event rather than explore the event itself.
A person’s development can get stuck at a particular stage due to trauma and an integrative approach aids movement towards growth. A major source of a person’s anxiety is the gap between the individual’s real self; the way you see yourself, and the ideal self; the way you would like to be. Resolving this difference is an important goal of Humanistic Integrative Therapy. The therapeutic relationship is vital to the process. The therapist should be a real person, not hiding behind professional status, be accepting of the client, and be sensitive and understanding of the client’s experience. Psychodynamic therapy is the oldest of the modern therapies. (Freud’s psychoanalysis is a specific form and subset of psychodynamic therapy), and so relies on a theory of human development and interaction.
It involves looking into events from the past and the affects those events had on you, as a way of gathering information and insight into why you behave in certain ways in the present. Psychodynamic therapy is designed to help patients explore the full range of their emotions, including feelings they may not be aware of. By making the unconscious elements of their life a part of their present experience, psychodynamic therapy helps people understand how their behavior and mood are affected by unresolved issues and unconscious feelings. |