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.

What Does Psychotherapy Look Like? (Part I)

The past few decades had witnessed exponential increase in societal acceptance of psychology /psychotherapy due to the fact that its profound healing effect on human well-being has been repeatedly reported and documented by clinicians, medical professionals, patients and even scientific researchers. 

Psychology, as a term in modern English, can be traced back to late 17th century in modern Latin ("Psychologia"). The more ancient form of psychological intervention, such as Sleep Temple, was recorded over 4000 years in Ancient Egypt. It is safe to say that human beings had had a long history to utilize psychological intervention for treatment of various mental and emotional conditions. Unfortunately, under-utilization of such a powerful tool for restoration of mental health had been a fact in many parts of the world, including well-developed countries because of mistaken beliefs and social stigmas. 

Demystification usually starts with accurate and updated knowledge about the subject. This also holds true for psychotherapy. Today we are going to dissect different major schools of psychology in hopes that this comparison will serve as a clear illustration for our readers. For the ease of writing and reading, I will start from the two on both extremes in the field. 

           Now, let's first look at the behaviorism. The following picture can be a fun way to get the
get behaviorist ​​beliefs across. Behaviorism believes that like animals, human beings' behaviors can be shaped and predicted through stimulus-response conditioning process since introspection / independent thinking does not significantly impact this process.

If you're convinced that human beings are more subject to external stimuli and force of habit than the effect of internal conflicts /unresolved business, or even consider it minimal, you probably see eye to eye with this school of thoughts. In therapy, you can expect to experience relaxation training, modeling, social skills training, behavioral rehearsal, systematic desensitization, exposure & response prevention, and the like.

         Next, please allow me to introduce the opposite of behaviorism--psychoanalysis. Yes, you  

are right------ Sigmund Freud, childhood development analysis, classical couch, therapist sitting behind, controversial topics (psycho-sexuality), seemingly detached "blank slate " / "sounding board" role assumed by the therapists. 

psychoanalytic clinicians believe that insight into unconscious conflicts or long forgotten events in early childhood can help patient "dis-empower" the factors that perpetuate their symptoms and problems. If you suspect that some of your feelings, thoughts, attitudes and behaviors seem to be driven by something vague other than lack of knowledge, skills and awareness, then you can lean more toward this approach (compared to behaviorism). In the sessions, you will likely go through dream analysis, free association (naming things coming up in your mind freely), fantasies, etc. 

       All right, we have outlined the two extreme approaches in the field of psychotherapy. Do some of the practicing therapists use one of them? Maybe.  But the majority of clinicians fall somewhere on the continuum.  In the next post, I will bring up two other major schools that fall in between: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and Psychodynamics. (I “see” you later in Part II)  

     ©Minjun Wang 2016 Liberty Psychotherapy, Inc.