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Guidance and Counseling

Notes was feeling upset in some way, the thoughts were usually negative and neither realistic nor helpful.
Beck found that identifying these thoughts was the key to the client understanding and overcoming
his or her difficulties.
Beck called it cognitive therapy because of the importance it places on thinking. It’s now known as
cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) because the therapy employs behavioral techniques as well. The
balance between the cognitive and the behavioral elements varies among the different therapies of
this type, but all come under the umbrella term cognitive behavior therapy. CBT has since undergone
successful scientific trials in many places by different teams, and has been applied to a wide variety
of problems.

CBT is particularly helpful in tacking problems such as anxiety, depression, post-traumatic
stress disorder, eating disorders and drug misuse.
Unlike other talking treatments, such as psychotherapy, CBT focuses on the problems
and difficulties you have now, rather than issues from your past. It looks for practical
ways you can improve your state of mind on a daily basis.

23.4 Cognitive Distortions

Cognitive therapy recognizes 10 common patterns of faulty thinking, which are known as cognitive
distortions.

• All-or-Nothing Thinking : Failing to recognize that there may be some middle ground.
Characterized by absolute terms like always, never, and forever.
• Overgeneralization : Taking an isolated case and assuming that all others are the same.
• Mental Filter : Mentally singling out the bad events in one’s life and overlooking the positive.
• Disqualifying the positive : Treating positive events like they don’t really count.
• Jumping to Conclusions : Assuming the worst about a situation even though there is no
evidence to back their conclusion.
• Magnification and Minimization : Downplaying positive events while paying an inordinate
amount of attention to negative ones.
• Emotional Reasoning : Allowing your emotions to govern what you think about a situation
rather than objectively looking at the facts.
• Should Statements : Rigidly focusing on how you think things should be rather than finding
strategies for dealing with how things are.
• Labeling and Mislabeling : Applying false and harsh labels to oneself and others.
• Personalization : Blaming yourself for things that are out of your control.
23.4.1 The Effect of Negative Thoughts
CBT is based on a model or theory that it’s not events themselves that us, but the meanings we give
them. If our thoughts are too negative, it can block us seeing things or doing things that don’t fit -
that disconfirm - what we believe is true. In other words, we continue to hold on to the same old
thoughts and fail to learn anything new.
For example, a depressed woman may think, “I can’t face going into work today: I can’t do it.
Nothing will go right. I’ll feel awful.” As a result of having these thoughts - and of believing them
- she may well ring in sick. By behaving like this, she won’t have the chance to find out that her
prediction was wrong. She might have found some things she could do, and at least some things

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