CBT strategies to overcome the challenges
espond to of your colleagues by recommending CBT strategies to overcome the challenges your colleagues have identified. Support your recommendations with evidence-based literature and/or your own experiences with clients.
(NOTE: POSITIVE COMMENT)
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Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is one of the mostly uses approaches and techniques to psychotherapy. In fact, it has been described by scholars as a gold standard for psychotherapy (David, Cristea & Hofmann, 2018). CBT can be used in family and in individual settings. However, the therapist needs to be aware of the different approaches and techniques that should be utilized to make CBT effective in either setting.When CBT started to be applied in families, behavior therapy was optimized on by using reward and punishment in order to modify behavior. For instance, parents were taught how to use punishment and rewards in order to modify the behavior of their children. In the beginning of the 20th century, cognitive strategies were also included when suing CBT in family settings (Nichols & Davis, 2020). For example, couples may be taught how to communicate their desires using positive reinforcement instead of using aversive control. Therefore, when CBT is used in family settings as described, assumptions that are underlying are identified and reconsidered because they are the ones that support a particular behavioral problem (Nichols & Davis, 2020). On the other hand, when CBT is used on individuals, the focus is always on their way of thinking and their behavior that affect how they feel and their emotions. This is always achieved by focusing on individual automatic thoughts, their underlying beliefs and their cognitive distortions (Chand, Kuckel & Huecker, 2019). From the above illustrations, it is clear that the main difference that exists between CBT in individual and in family setting is that in the latter, there is always the need to integrate the general systems theory with CBT in a fashion that appreciates the conjoint nature of members of a family (Patterson, 2014).
From the practicum experience, there are very many cases that can be used as example to illustrate the differences. For instance, when a client is dealing with anxiety, CBT is used to help the client to deal with his or her beliefs and cognitive distortions that will eventually help them have less disturbance. After the therapy, the client is always able to control his or her worries and feel better. However, when it is a family setting, there is always a need to appreciate the family as a system where different units relate with each other and affect each other. Thus, the issues that always have to be addressed affect members of a family in a collective manner and this means that the strategies used in CBT ought to be applied collectively. One challenge that therapists might face in using CBT in family settings is that families may have different values and assumptions as well as deep emotional problems, making it hard for the therapist to be effective. At times, it is the assumptions and values of the therapist about family that might act as a hindrance to effective utilization of CBT. In addition, how a family s organized as a system is important (Nichols & Davis, 2020). A therapist may fail to appreciate they organization of a particular family system and this may present challenges when using CBT in family settings. Individuals in a family also have different experiences and this may affect their personal interpretation about events in the family. As such, when using CBT in family settings, therapists may find it hard to address the interest and needs of individual members. In the video, even though each client had different experiences, it seemed like they had their own understanding and interpretation of the events. The latest felt like talking about it as they were added more distress to her. Maybe this explains why for a while CBT was used to treat issues facing individual family members that helping families (Dattili & Collins, 2018).
References
Chand, S. P., Kuckel, D. P., & Huecker, M. R. (2019). Cognitive behavior therapy (CBT). In StatPearls [Internet]. StatPearls Publishing
David, D., Cristea, I., & Hofmann, S. G. (2018). Why cognitive behavioral therapy is the current gold standard of psychotherapy. Frontiers in psychiatry, 9, 4
Dattilio, F. M., & Collins, M. H. (2018). Cognitive-behavioral family therapy. Guilford Press
Nichols, M., & Davis, S. D. (2020). The essentials of family therapy (7th ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson.
