Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Solution

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Solution Focused Therapy Traditionally psychotherapy has been a lengthy process with clients spending years working with a therapist as they explore their past and attempt to untangle the ways in which that past continues to shape (often in unconscious ways) their present. However, in recent years a number of shorter-term forms of therapy have been developed that are designed to provide psychological and emotional relief in a much shorter period of time.

The reasons for the rise in these short-term therapies is at least twofold: They reflect the financial realities of health insurance companies that are looking for less expensive forms of therapy as well as reflecting new understanding of how the human brain works and how human cognition and human emotion are related to each other. This paper explores two of these shorter forms of therapy: Cognitive behavioral therapy and solution based therapy.

Solution-focused therapy has as a core precept that for every client change is constant -- and, moreover, that change is healthy. During the process of working with a solution-based therapist, the therapist and client work together to identify and catalogue all of those aspects of the client's life that s/he wish to change. Just as importantly, the client and therapist work together to identify those aspects of the client's life that are adaptive and that the client wishes to maintain.

This dual emphasis on both change and stability is essential for both practical reasons and psychological ones. Everyone in his or her life has elements that are functional and that it would be non-adaptive (even foolish) to discard. Also, by helping the client understand that s/he has already mastered some behaviors and cognitive patterns that do serve the client well, the therapist can help the client understand that the client does not have to abandon everything familiar and established about her or his life and self.

Solution-focused therapists take as their initial task working with a client to create a clearly delineated vision of what the client wants the rest of her or his life to be in the future. This focus on the future -- rather than psychoanalysis's traditional focus on dissecting the past -- is one of the hallmarks of this form of therapy as well as one of the most important reasons why solution-focused therapy can be so effective in just a few months (O'Connell, 1998, p. 19).

After the solution-focused therapist and the client have constructed a model for the client's future, the two work together to identify any point in the client's past life when conditions were more like what the client what his or her future to look like. Such a brief retrospective view allows the client both to understand what is actually important to him or her and to acknowledge that s/he is capable of creating positive conditions in her or his life (Miller, Hubble, M.A., Duncan, B.L. (1996).

By focusing on the conditions that create the conditions in a client's life that the client sees as supporting a healthy life (these conditions might include the people who are supportive of a client, a job that is rewarding, even the city that the client is living in).

This examination of the features of daily life that contribute to a sense of well-being is based on an established theoretical model based in both psychology and sociology that is called social constructivism, which dictates a close and continual attention to how a person's long-term goals are created through the accumulation of the smallest acts of everyday life -- even the less positive aspects of daily life, as Jones (2008) summarizes: …it is in the problem free areas you find most of the resources to help the client.

It also relaxes them and helps build rapport, and it can give you ideas to use for treatment...Everybody has natural resources that can be utilised. These might be events...or talk about friends or family...The idea behind accessing resources is that it gives you something to work with that you can use to help the client to achieve their goal...Even negative beliefs and opinions can be utilised as resources. (p.

451) Cognitive Behavioral Therapy also works with negative aspects of the client's life as a way to increase the positive aspects of his or her life. Cognitive behavioral therapy is a more established therapy than in solution-based therapy, although the two are conceptually twinned. The major goal of cognitive behavioral therapy is to solve difficulties that arise in the client's life as the result of the presence of behaviors and cognitions (that is, thoughts) along with emotions that are dysfunctional (Albano & Kearney, 2000, p. 81).

Unlike solution-focused therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy can be practiced without a therapist and so is often used in self-help programs (Tanner & Ball, 2001). Cognitive behavioral therapy is based on the premise that often a person's behavior is not in alignment with his or her goals. For example, a person may want to have a job as a partner in a law firm while drinking to excess on a daily basis.

The individual may see this level of drinking as necessary to deal with the stress in his or her life while failing to recognize -- or acknowledge -- that the drinking is in fact causing additional stress. The goal of a cognitive behavioral working with such a client would therefore be to help the client understand the mismatch between the client's behavior and goals and, in.