Principles of Cognitive Therapy
Epictetus:"People are disturbed
not by things, but by the views they take of them."
Shakespeare
"There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."
Milton:
"The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n"
The Bible (Proverbs 23:7):
"As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he."
Bill Cosby; "I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody."
"Cognitive therapy" or "Cognitive Behavioural therapy" is a form of psychotherapy which has become increasingly influential and common in recent years. Cognitive therapy was developed by an American Psychiatrist, Aaron Beck in the 1960's. The ideas behind Cognitive therapy have been around for a lot longer, as the quote above from the Philosopher Epictetus shows. Cognitive theory postulates that disorders such as depression are as much "cognitive" disorders as emotional ones. "Cognitive" means "thinking".
Beck noted that all emotions are the consequence of thoughts. No emotion simply springs up "de novo" without the igniting spark of a thought or thoughts.
If we focus unduly on the setbacks, flaws and reversals our negative thoughts can build up leading to pessimistic assumptions. "No matter how hard I work at things I shall always fail ".
Should our thinking become infused with this negative bias we can develope underlying beliefs or assumptions known as core beliefs, for example "I am incompetent".
These core belief "systems" can become self fulfilling perpetuating ones negative view of oneself. Even positive events can be "turned around" or distorted. For example; " I got an A in that exam, but only because I worked so much harder than everyone else, im sure if any of the others had done the slightest bit they would have scored higher than I did" and so on.
Cognitive therapy helps people to become more aware of these destructive biases and to overcome these thinking errors.
