Aaron Beck's cognitive therapy Essay

Aaron Becks cognitive therapy is also an insight focused therapy that emphasizes recognizing and changing negative thoughts and beliefs and can help with anxiety. According to Beck, people become disturbed when they label and evaluate themselves by a set of unrealistic rules. When people suppress their selfactualizing tendency they experience emotional pain and suffering and never grow to their full potential. It is also important to learn about our past and uncover why we have feelings of inferiority or unhappiness. We must also look at life events that occurred in our childhood that made and impact on our lives. These experiences have played a large role in the development in our present personality. In having a greater understanding of our past and present we can change our future. It is important to explore any lies we have told ourselves and find where mistakes were made. Through this process clients can change their previous though processes and change old patterns of negative behavior. Clients are now better prepared to make positive choices which will help them become fulfilled.

I concur that it is the therapists role to help clients discover misconceptions or cognitive distortions for themselves. Ellis believes the therapist should be more directive. The focus should be on working with thinking and acting, rather than primarily with expressing feeling. Expressing feeling is equally effective and therapeutic. I also disagree that human beings do not need love and acceptance from significant others to feel worthwhile. I believe a person needs to have at least one close relationship with another person to be emotionally healthy.

In reality therapy, William Glasser believes that mental illness is the result of an individuals unsatisfying present relationships. To achieve and maintain the relationships we need, we must stop choosing to coerce, force, punish, blame, criticize, manipulate or complain. We must replace these behaviors with choosing to care, listen, encourage, support, trust, love and accept. All people have five basic needs survival, belonging, power, love, freedom and fun. Glasser believes that people need to accept personal responsibility for their own lives and stop blaming other people for their problems, dwelling on the past or complaining about negative life situations. It is stated that we are products of our past, but not victims, unless we choose to be. I agree, but I think there is value in talking about issues that occurred in the past. After a client has identified acknowledged and dealt with incidents in the past which may have cause incompetent ways of coping or looking at life, they will be more ready to move on and deal more effectively with the present. Glasser emphasizes teaching clients to focus on making responsible choices and to evaluate whether their behaviors are getting them what they need and want and to implement specific procedures that lead to change if they are not. Reality therapists also understand the importance of a positive, satisfying therapistsclient relationship. The therapists should be caring, mildly confrontational, yet not critical, blaming or complain.