Cognitive-behavioral therapy consists of the combination of cognitive therapy and behavioral therapy, which is a type of psychotherapy that was developed in the 1960s, which focuses on how the person processes and interprets situations and that can generate suffering.
Interpretations, representations or attribution of meaning to certain situations or people, are reflected in automatic thoughts, which in turn activate unconscious basic structures: schemes and beliefs.
Thus, this type of approach aims at identifying dysfunctional beliefs and thoughts, called cognitive distortions, verifying reality and correcting them, in order to change those distorted beliefs, which are underlying these thoughts.
How it works
Behavioral therapy focuses on current cognitive distortions, without discarding past situations, helping the person to modify the behavior, beliefs and distortions in relation to the situation that is creating suffering and the emotional reaction he has in that circumstance, by learning a new one. way to react.
Initially, the psychologist makes a complete anamnesis in order to understand the patient's mental state. During the sessions, there is an active participation between the therapist and the patient, who talks about what is going wrong, and in which the psychologist focuses on the problems that interfere in his life, as well as on the interpretations or meaning attributed to them, helping to understand these problems. In this way, maladaptive behavior patterns are corrected and personality development is promoted.
Most common cognitive distortions
Cognitive distortions are distorted ways that people have to interpret certain everyday situations, and that have negative consequences for their lives.
The same situation can trigger various interpretations and behaviors, but generally, people with cognitive distortions, always interpret them in a negative way.
The most common cognitive distortions are:
- Catastrophization, in which the person is pessimistic and negative about a situation that has happened or will happen, without taking into account other possible outcomes. Emotional reasoning, which happens when the person assumes that their emotions are a fact, that is, considers what he feels as absolute truth; Polarization, in which the person sees situations in only two exclusive categories, interpreting situations or people in absolute terms; Selective abstraction, in which only one aspect of a given situation is highlighted, especially the negative, ignoring the positive aspects; mental reading, which consists of guessing and believing, without evidence, in what other people are thinking, discarding other hypotheses; labeling, which consists of labeling a person and defining him by a certain situation, isolated; minimization and maximization, which is characterized by minimizing personal characteristics and experiences and maximizing defects; imperatives, which consists of thinking about situations as they should have been, instead of focusing on how things are in reality.
Understand and see examples of one of these cognitive distortions.
