So, let's talk about some more therapy.
Cognitive therapy, ya'll now know plenty about cognitive theory
we talked about social cognitive theory, we talked about how
biases forms, scheme is formed how that
that skews are processing of reality such that we are more likely to interpret it
consistently with what we already believe it to be regardless of the
quote-unquote facts
our perceptions are not pure translations of reality
they are constructed constructs
of reality we make them internally after perceiving things,
and cognition matters. What you think matters. Now the behaviorists
were straight up look at the behavior only cause its operationalizable. Right? You
could be really concrete
about what your operational definitions are, you can look at some very
straightforward
variables that are easy to measure, that are easy to manipulate,
and easy to determine outcomes, there's a lot utility in that,
but they didn't care to study the old behaviors, the old school behaviors,
didn't care to study cognition cause they thought that's in the black box.
Can't look at, can't be objective about, you can only rely on people to
tell you
what they're thinking, and they may not in fact know themselves what they're
thinking or
why they're thinking it, and they may not be entirely honest if they
did know those things, so you don't have any guarantees of objectivity however, we
don't
we don't seriously consider for a moment that human beings aren't thinking animals.
We're the highest thinking animals that we know of
in the universe and as such what we think matters,
and what we think skews are our life's.
It can skew it in a positive way or it can skew it in a negative way,
and that may change over time, and it may change moment to moment, but that we find people
have trends in a way they conceptualize the world
in their worldviews, and then we see that they have trends in the way they
conceptualize themselves in terms of self-concept,
and the way we conceptualize ourself has a lot to do with whether or not we're
happy,
or satisfied with the lives we lead, or the relationships that we're engaged in,
or opportunities that we see or don't see
available to us. So, looking at cognition we're talking about changing thoughts.
What kind of thoughts? The kind of thoughts that are usually automatic.
The kind of thoughts that are usually schema driven. The kind of thoughts that we don't normally challenge
we just assume the validity of, but we challenge them,
and we find out that maybe they're not valid, but if they're unchallenged they
they drive your reality. So, rational emotive behavior therapy,
REBT, is a really good one to know for your test. Thank ya'll for coming today.
Based on Albert Ellis'
idea that we develop psychological disorders because of distorted thinking.
That we have irrational and self-defeating beliefs,
and then he connects the thinking to emotion. Originally, it was just
RET, rational emotive therapy where he says your emotions
are reflections of your thinking, and then people criticized him for not talking
about behavior and of course behavior was assumed
so he just added that in there, rational emotive behavioral therapy so now,
a really long convoluted thing to say everything right, but where he's really
focused on what you're thinking,
and how that affects your emotions, and how that affects your behaviors,
and ways that then you engage in behaviors that confirm
your original thoughts. For example, and he was kind of an asshole
the way he was presented by many people he just seemed like a unfeeling, uncaring,
just unrelenting challenger of every thought you had,
but what he was doing was really not trying to make you feel dumb
or make you feel inadequate but to make you think about your thinking
because we don't usually think about our thinking, that's metacognition
to make you assess the validity of deeply-held beliefs about yourself and
the world.
For example if a person says, well I'm really lonely
in my life I don't have anybody that cares about me, and I don't date anybody I'm a
loser, and nobody cares,
and I'll never get a a lover or a partner.
And he would say, why is that? and he's like, well people, people just don't want to go out with me.
And he would like say, well how many people have you asked out in the last year?
And the person said, well none. Well, why wouldn't you have asked anybody out?
Well, because nobody would say yes. How do you know that nobody would say yes right?
How many people do you need to say yes? Well, one would be nice.
Well, why don't you go ask a hundred people this week out.
I couldn't do that!
You couldn't do it or you wouldn't do it
because if we were to put it to the test, and he's not saying you should go to the
extreme,
but what he's doing is challenging. If you asked hypothetically
a hundred people in a sincere manner, would you like to go out to dinner?
What are the odds that one of them, assuming they were single, would say
yes? They're pretty high right, but
the persons not actually challenging the belief, the persons actually
doing everything they can to sustain the belief
without challenging it and that's the idea is a lot of our self-defeating
ideas and self-defeating concepts
are unchallenged and they wouldn't be verified if we put 'em to tests,
and so his point there is to think about your thinking
especially automatic negative thoughts.
So, I noticed for example when I do something that I don't like
if I make a mistake I'll say to myself, stupid!
Damn, that was stupid. In other words, I will put myself down
for making a mistake that if somebody else
had made the mistake and they're like, aw that's terrible. I would go, oh don't worry about it everybody
makes mistakes.
Alright, I would forgive them but not myself,
so becoming aware of a trend inside myself
to negatively evaluate what I would consider for anybody else to be normal
human error I could then challenge whether or not that's valid
sometimes I might concur, yeah I should have known better
but other times I might concur, you know what a lot of people know better but we
don't have attention that's fully
capable of assessing every moment of our lives, I let it slip like everybody else
did
I made a mistake, I'll fix it. That's very different than
than shooting upon myself and he would say, don't shoot upon yourself right.
Don't be shooting on yourself because we can make our lives very miserable
if we're really guilty about we what we should have done
right, and what you should be doing instead of just going, well what am I doing and how can I be
happy with that,
and what are the ways in which I could engage life differently that might lead
to different kinds of outcomes where I don't feel like I have to do it one particular
way
maybe there are lots of ways to be. So, cognitive behavior therapy
actually combines cognitive therapy and behavioral therapy
more formally, but really it's
it's become a collection of tons of different techniques.
It has a theoretical framework that is rooted originally in behaviorism
and in cognitive psychology, but what you see is it comes together over time as an
empirically supported treatment meaning,
it is shown to be better than placebo
at helping people deal with all kinds of issues
if they will engage it with motivation, if they get somebody that they trust,
if they then put forth the effort and stay with it long enough
and apply these techniques they find, on average, much improved experiences in the
world.
So, you look at cognitive behavior and you're like,
where's the motion, where's affect?
Well, I can talk to you about your thoughts and you can assess your
thoughts
you might even assess your emotions, but that's you thinking about your emotions right,
and I can talk to you about your behaviors and the kind of things you do or
don't do that you might do,
but I can't tell you feel differently. Right?
But if you change the way you think about yourself or situations
or you change the way you behave or engage situations
so that your improving your efficiency or your adaptivity,
you're likely to feel better. So, the idea is that you're triangulating what you
can manipulate
should have a positive affect on what we consider to be our emotional state
that I should feel happier if I engage in
in a more positive lifestyle.
Cognitive restructuring is just one of the technique therapies there's
really lots and lots that can fall under that, but basically
if I've got a maladaptive pattern of thought that's causing maladaptive
behavior responses
then the idea is to change it, but keep in mind we don't change
attitudes easily you remember when we talked about social cognitive stuff, right we talked
about schema's,
and biases, and attitude change, and central route, and peripheral route, and things like that.
When we have come to a lifetime of conclusions
we don't change those conclusions randomly
or easily, so to change thoughts about yourself and how you think about the
world in the way that you
process information and engage in behavior is a difficult thing that requires
effort and persistence, and it helps to have guidance.
Just for your happy assessment, since you are trying to get better than 50 percent
of them right, Aaron Beck is a big,
a big theorist in cognitive theory.
So, he uh is got the gold standard measure of depressions called the Beck
Depression Inventory,
and that's probably used across the world more than any other single measure
for quantifying the level of somebody's depression
self-report measure, you remember we talked about self-report measures of
the objective kind
in the personality chapter that's a objective measure
of depression and Aaron Beck is a is well
well known and well respected for his work in the cognitive
area of Clinical Psychology.
Eclectic therapy is what you typically get now, back in the old school days you
got trained
in a paradigm you were a psychoanalyst, for example,
or you were a behaviorist, for example, or you were a gestalt
psychologist, or you were a family systems person,
or you or whatever your dominant paradigm of the graduate program was
when you were done with the graduate program, but that was before
we had lots and lots of research accumulate which shows that some
therapies are more effective at some at treating some disorders than are others,
and over time what you see now is an amalgam where very rarely somebody trained only in
a paradigm, and if they are trained only in a paradigm it's usually
cognitive-behavioral.
Because, cognitive-behavioral is so broad it includes a lot of elements from a lot of
other therapies,
so that what we see is people are being trained in what's affective not just in a
theoretical orientation.
We should expect people to engage in therapeutic activities that are shown to
work
better than placebo.