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Cognitive Behavioral Theory


            
             Cognitive Behavioral Therapy looks at psycho/social/behavioral issues. Cognitive Behavioral therapists work to identify and treat difficulties caused by irrational thinking, misperceptions, dysfunctional thoughts, or faulty learning. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is a strategy used by counselors and therapists to help one bring about positive changes, by alleviating emotional distress, such as anxiety, or depression. The goal is to restructure thought, perceptions and beliefs, to replace what isn't working with something that does work. .
             Much, of behavior therapy derives from Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov's demonstration that events occurring closely together in time are likely to be stored in the brain in a sort of mental package. Since the 1920s, the well-accepted studies in psychology had dealt with respondent, classical or Pavlovian, conditioning and operant conditioning, instrumental learning or behavior modification. As a result, early behavior therapy consisted of applying the respondent and operant conditioning paradigms to helping people in distress. Behavioral Therapy acquired a well-deserved reputation for overcoming certain problems quickly and effectively " something that didn't often happen with the psychoanalytic and "existential/humanistic" therapies. However by the 1960s, Behaviorism was slipping out of favor, both among academic researchers and among applied psychologists who looked to the lab for guidance in developing new therapeutic tools. Valuable as they had been, respondent and operant conditioning didn't go far enough in explaining human behavior. As a result, Behavioral Therapy couldn't go far enough either. Too much was missing and unaccounted for, and most of what was missing was the role of cognitive processes such as thoughts, beliefs, assumptions, attitudes, memories, mental imagery and fantasies. As time went both in research settings and in the therapeutic trenches behaviorism gave way to the cognitive revolution in psychology.


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