Vertices Psychologists, in its centers in Madrid and the , in Las Rozas, Majadahonda, Torrelodones, Pozuelo, Boadilla, Galapagar, El Escorial and Villalba, applies the Cognitive-Behavioral therapy in those cases in which problems of depression, stress, obsessions, phobias, addictions, psychosomatic disorders or eating disorders need to be resolved, such as , , , etc.
The first time the patient meets with their psychotherapist, they will talk about any problems they are having, how they are feeling, and their goals for their treatment. After several sessions, it is decided how often they will be carried out, and the patient can meet with his psychotherapist every week, or just once a month. The objectives are agreed between the psychologist and the patient and an intervention plan is formulated structuredadapted to the particular needs and characteristics that have been evaluated.
While the patient is receiving this type of psychotherapy, they will learn new ways of to think about the situations that bother. You will also learn new ways to deal with your feelings. Cognitive psychotherapy can also help you with feelings of anger, anxiety, shyness or panic.
The theory Cognitive-Behavioral supposes that the control of the reactions of our emotionality and behavior can remain continuously under our control or, what is the same, we are the creators of our mental health or illness, of our happiness or our misery. All of the above is especially valid for manifest psychogenic disturbances. The patient’s distortions are called in this type of psychotherapy, as cognitive triad.
The cognitive triad consists in three patterns main cognitive factors that induce the subject to consider himself, his future and his experiences, in an idiosyncratic way.
The first component of the triad focuses on the negative view of the patient about himself. He tends to attribute his unpleasant experiences to a defect of his mental, moral or physical nature. Due to this way of approaching life, the patient believes that because of these defects, he is a Useless worthless. Finally, you feel that you lack the essential attributes to achieve success. happiness and happiness.
The second component of the cognitive triad focuses, in the case of the person depressive, in interpreting their experiences in a negative way. The individual feels that the world makes exaggerated demands and/or presents obstacles insurmountable to achieve your goals. Likewise, he interprets his interactions with the environment in terms of relations of defeat or frustration. These negative interpretations become evident when observing how the patient constructs situations in one direction. negativeeven if more plausible alternative interpretations could be made.
The third and last component of the cognitive triad, focuses on the negative view of the future. The individual expects endless pain, frustration, and privation. When he thinks about taking over a certain task in the immediate future, his expectations are inevitably high. failure.
The cognitive model considers the rest of the signs and symptoms, for example of a depressive syndrome, as a consequence of the patterns cognitive negatives. For example, if the patient thinks wrongly that he is going to be rejected, he will react with the same negative effect (sadness, anger) as when the rejection is real. If you mistakenly think that you live on the fringes of society, you will feel lonely. Cognitive therapy is used to treat depression, eating disorders, anxiety, phobiasas well as other forms of psychological disorders. The objective of this psychotherapy is to recognize the thought distorted that causes the disorders and learn to replace it with ideas substitutes more realistic. Based on all the above, it could be concluded that the cause of many of the depressions are the irrational thoughts.
The motivational symptoms (for example, low willpower, desire to escape or evasion) are also explicable as a consequence of the negative cognitions. In this line of reasoning, low willpower is caused by the pessimism and despairpatient’s no. Likewise, if the patient expects a negative result, he cannot commit himself to carry out a certain task and this causes a blockage. The wishes of suicide can be interpreted as an extreme expression of the desire to escape from what appear to be problems irresolvable or an intolerable situation.
the growing dependence it can also be understood in cognitive terms. Since the patient sees himself as inept and since he overestimates the difficulty of tasks, he expects to fail at everything. In this way, he tends to look for help and security in others who he considers more competent and trained.
In addition, cognitive therapy is often used in conjunction with emotion-stabilizing medication to treat Bipolar disorder.
Finally, the cognitive model can also explain the physical symptoms of a depression. Apathy and low energy may be the consequence of the patient’s conviction that he is predestined to fail in everything that is proposed. The negative vision of the future can produce a psychomotor inhibition.
How Cognitive Therapy Works
In cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy, thoughts they are considered the cause of emotions and not the other way around. When we apply cognitive therapy at , we invert the causal order usually used by psychotherapists. The therapeutic methodology essentially consists of:
- identify those thoughts irrational that make the patient suffer.
- Identify what is irrational in them; This is achieved by working self analysis by the patient, which the therapist must promote and supervise.
once the thoughts irrational (false or incorrect) are detected, we move on to the modification phase, which is central to cognitive therapy and consists of replacing old irrational habits with others more adjusted to the reality Yet the logic. This is done through an effort to reject distorted thoughts and replace them with more exact and more happy.
This effort of observation and criticism that the patient makes of his own distorted thoughts should not be confused with the tendency known as “Positive thinking”which only promotes self-indoctrination through positive or optimistic phrases (“I deserve to be happy”, “I am a valuable person”, etc.), since cognitive therapy uses thinking critical to achieve change in their patients and not in a dogmatic imposition of predetermined thoughts.
Cognitive therapy is not a process”One day to another“. Even when the patient has learned to recognize when and where his thought process has gone awry, it can take months of concentrated therapeutic effort to replace a thought invalid for one more adequateeither. With patience and a good psychologist, cognitive therapy can be an invaluable tool in recovery.
Negative thinking in depression may be the result of sources biological (endogenous depression), the educational influence of parents, or other different causes. The depressed person often experiences negative thoughts as beyond your control. At , we offer techniques to give the patient a greater degree of control over negative thinking, correcting “cognitive distortions” or distorted thoughts in a process called cognitive restructuring.
In Vertices Psychologists we apply in cognitive-behavioral therapy the technique of four columns, where the first three allow us to analyze the process by which the patient has become depressed. The first column records the objective situation; in the second, the patient writes down the negative thoughts that occur to him; the third column records negative feelings and behaviors dysfunctional that resulted from them. The negative thoughts in the second column are considered a bridge that connects the situation with feelings distressing. Finally, the fourth columnis used to challenge negative thinking based on evidence from the patient’s experience.
Finally, this type of therapy can also be used to treat obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), making use of classical conditioning through extinction and habituation.