What Does Psychotherapy Look Like? (Part II)

Welcome back, everybody. As I have mentioned in Part I, today we will cover the two approaches falling between behaviorism and psychoanalysis: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) & psychodanymics.

Let's take a closer look at Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). As everybody can see, Actually, its name is quite self-explanatory by adding new components to Behaviorism. The picture on the

left well illustrates its essential parts : thought, feelings and behaviors. The students of this school of psychology believe that as long as thinking errors (eg. over-generalization, personalization)  are identified and corrected and emotions are in alignment, problematic behavioral symptoms will be alleviated or eventually eradicated. This type of psychotherapy will be carried out in a highly structured manner.

People who are more "symptom-focused" and "action-oriented" than "root-cause-digging" would usually be drawn to CBT. During brief course of CBT treatment, patients will come across activities like thinking errors identification, role playing, guided discovery, behavioral experiments, homework, etc.

Last but not the least, psychodynamics is an equally important and interesting approach to work with mental and emotional conditions. The following chart may help visualize its relationship with the other three:

Compared to Behaviorism and CBT, psychodanymics tend to be more insight-oriented, less structured without homework and longer in duration since like psychoanalysis, it deals with deeper layers of personality of the client.

For those who are not a big fan of therapists taking the lead and setting the agenda for their treatment, or sense that they might respond to treatment better if allowed to "dig deep" with adequate amount of time and space, psychodanymics can create an non-judgmental setting for them to "spill their guts" without being pressed to conform to someone else' schedule to explore both here-and-now and personal history

Please note that the above explanation of each school is merely bare-bones given the need to offer you, our reader, here a sketchy outline. Every one of them can easily expand to volumes for their inner richness and complexities, not to mention many new approaches that derive from them.

As we can see, every single approach has legitimate arguments about their effectiveness, and naturally appeals to different clinicians and clients. I hope this post can bring to your attention which treatment philosophy is a better fit for you.

For those who want to know how to pick a therapist that best meets your needs, please come back later for my next post.  Have a good weekend and I "see" you later. :)

© Minjun (Christine) Wang 2016 Liberty Psychotherapy Professional Clinical Counselor, Inc.