TREATMENT APPROACH

1 | 2 | 3 | 4

How does cognitive-behavior therapy work?

Cognitive-behavior therapy works by helping people to look more objectively at their feelings, thoughts, behaviors and physical reactions in situations which they find problematic. Such understanding helps them to identify and modify their distorted perceptions of reality, as well as their dysfunctional coping patterns.

In cognitive-behavior therapy, people's emotions are very important. Emotions are viewed as adaptive information about how our perception of reality affects us. Is very common that people seek therapy because they do not like the way they feel and would like to change such experience. However, emotions cannot be changed directly. In order to change the way we feel, we must change the way we perceive the situations. Most of the time, we must first change what we think to change what we feel and what we do; however, other times, we first must change our behaviors to a situation before we can generate significant changes in the way we feel and think. Yet, in other cases, an attempt to change environmental factors (e.g., looking for a new job, getting out of an abusive relationship) may be one of the first choices for intervention.

Because skills acquisition requires practice and a therapy goal is to foster learning outside the clinical setting, patients are encourage to complete homework assignments. Such therapeutic tasks are designed to reinforce the learning process taking place during the sessions so it can be applied to out-of-therapy contexts, such as at home, work, school, social gatherings, etc.

CIP home | Contact Us | Send this site to a friend |