Dysfunctions and Their Therapies Dysfunctions and Remedies

Dysfunctions and Their Therapies

Dysfunctions and Remedies involved

Treatment and Control of Dysfunctions

The Thought Focused Treatment System

The thought focused treatment systems are those which narrow down to thought processes and systems of belief. The system believes in the child developing process being the cause of dysfunction. Social learning and modeling of ideas result to the personalities of an individual. The personalities result to experiences such as thoughts and feelings, critical learning, and the imitation of these behaviors. For instance, the child develops thoughts and behaviors from the parents. If the parents hide their feelings and never cry, the child grows knowing that crying is not the solution. The environment directly affects the child's thoughts. Therefore, if an individual's development is distorted in any manner, there is likely to be an experience of dysfunctional issues or poor health. An individual learns how to cope with stress and problems in life and imitates the life patterns of the people surrounding them. It is, therefore, the environment one is brought up in, that defines one behavior, and resistance to dysfunctional effects. The treatment system, seeks to change irrationality and faulty thinking capacity of an individual, through education on thought and behavioral related matters. The therapy is, therefore, effective only when the individual thoughts and behavior are normal (Grohol, 2004).

Psychoanalytical / Psychodynamic approach

In this theory, unlike the thought focused treatment system, model of illness focuses on what is lacking in the individual. The scholars of this theory define an individual's development as a process that is "dynamic" from childhood to end of life. The dysfunctional state of adult individuals is related to their childhood. The stages of development including the ego, super ego and identity, are used to determine the individual's personality. The adult's lives are analyzed, to ensure they hardly missed some of the stages of development, which include the psychosexual development in childhood. Any mental disorders, according to this theory, are linked to unsuccessful progress in the early stages of life development, which in turn affect the personality structure of an individual. In most cases, the therapists use interpretations to analyze the position of an individual, in terms of behavior. The therapists need time with clients to watch their behaviors closely, and determine their thoughts and even feelings (Grohol, 2004).

Irrational beliefs used by REBT therapists

The Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT) is a philosophical therapy which was created by Ellis Albert. The therapists aim at analyzing how different individuals distort information in different ways. The focus of the therapy is the Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD). The list of original distortions include; personalization, catastrophizing, arbitrary inference, selective abstraction, overgeneralizing, labeling and dichotomous thinking. For the purpose of this paper, critical analysis is done for the personalization and selective abstraction.

Personalization

Personalization is usually experienced when attributes of certain events which are external are related to an individual. For instance, when one goes to a shop, and the attendant speaks in a rude manner, then the individual realizes and acknowledges to being the cause of the disagreement, then there will be a plausible form of explanation for such behavior.

Selective abstraction

The distortion happens when an individual makes decisions and judgments basing on specific information and disregarding other information. For example, one goes to a party and really has a good time. In the course of enjoying, someone accidentally steps on the shoe. The individual concludes the party was bad, and leaves out the enjoyable parts experienced.

Common cognitive distortion

Cognitive distortions happen when the mind convinces individuals of imaginary things, which are in fact hardly true. The inaccurate thoughts usually lead to individual shaving emotions and negative feelings. The distortions were proposed by Aaron Beck, though Burns was responsible for popularizing the distortions (Grohol, 2004). The distortions include filtering; where individuals take their negative aspects and magnify them look big. This is done while filtering all the positive aspects of life. The next distortion is the polarized thinking, where one is perceived as either good or bad. All the other variables and factors are ignored. Overgeneralization is also a distortion where conclusions are made using a single incident, without factoring in any other evidences. Also, there is the jumping to conclusions distortion, where one makes conclusions without any consultation or interaction with the victim, but just by their reactions and action. Other distortions include catastrophizing, personalization, control fallacies, blaming, fallacy of fairness, should, emotional reasoning, fallacy of change, labeling, heaven reward fallacy and the always be right distortion, where individuals try every other time to prove justify their actions and make their opinions known (Grohol, 2011). Analysis will be done for the catastrophizing and control fallacies distortions.

Catastrophizing

This form of distortion happens when one believes that regardless of the situation, disaster has to occur. The distortion is also referred to as the magnifying or minimizing. For instance, one could exaggerate much importance on basic things like mistakes, to look like terrible happenings, and also reduce the magnitude of quite serious aspects, like individual imperfections, to seem normal.

Control fallacies

When one feels extremely controlled by the surrounding and the people in it, then this is the control fallacy distortion. This distortion causes one to be victimized by certain authoritative aspects such as leadership. For instance, when a college colleague is unhappy, one could relate the situation, and act as if the unhappy state was caused by another individual.

'Shaping' and 'Token Economies'

Shaping is the process entailed in ensuring certain behavior in individuals. The approach was originally Skinners idea. In the real sense, the approach begins with reinforcing certain behavior, which is similar to the actual behavior. Once the individual adopts the vague idea other variations can be successfully implemented. Behavior is, therefore, is reached after successive stages. For instance, if clients need to focus and be attentive for 30 minutes and above, the therapist has to ensure that prior to the 30 minutes period, there has to be earlier reinforcement of about 10 minutes of reinforcement periods.