Dr. Judith Beck recently posted two blogs for the Huffington Post. Both blogs have received quite of bit of attention. In her first, The How and Why of Cognitive Behavior Therapy (posted June 29, 2010), Dr. Beck compares the empirically based Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) to the psychotherapy often portrayed on TV and in the media. In a follow up blog, Cognitive Behavior Therapy: Myths and Realities (posted July 11,…
Category: Judith S. Beck
Note taking in Session
Recently, there’s been an interesting discussion on the Academy of Cognitive Therapy listserv about the therapy notes patients take home with them to review. Here’s how I make sure a patient is able to remember important ideas we discussed in treatment, specifically the changes a patient makes in his thinking:
Generally, when I ascertain that the patient has modified his thinking during a session (e.g., following Socratic questioning,, behavioral experiments, roleplaying, etc.), I’ll ask the patient for a summary. I might say:
A Cognitive Behavioral Approach to Emotional Eating
A therapist on a listserv I subscribe to asked for a book recommendation for her patient who struggles with emotional eating. I wrote the following reply:
If your patient doesn’t have an eating disorder, she might try the skills in one of the CBT books I’ve written for consumers on dieting and maintenance (www.beckdietsolution.com). People need the same skill set for resisting eating when it’s not a scheduled time to eat—regardless of whether the desire or impulse to eat has an emotional, physiological, environmental, social, or mental trigger.
CBT for Soldiers: A personal message to professionals from Drs. Aaron and Judith Beck
We are trying to address a very serious problem: military personnel who need effective psychological/psychiatric treatment but who are not receiving it. To address this urgent problem, we have embarked upon a new initiative to offer partial scholarships to our Cognitive Behavior Therapy training programs for mental health professionals who treat soldiers, veterans, and their families (www.cbtforsoldiers.org).
Beliefs Can Interfere with Treatment Adherence
I recently read an interesting case description on a professional listserv about a "difficult" client who was not fully adherent with treatment. Apparently he argued with his therapist and did little homework outside of the session. It was apparent to me that the therapist had made a mistake. She was continuing to try to deliver "standard" CBT treatment, without attending to the therapeutic relationship sufficiently. I hypothesized that the client…
When patients get angry in session
Judith S. Beck writes in: Some therapists are quite concerned about their patients becoming angry at them. Yet when therapists respond sensitively, they can help patients learn important lessons. The first thing I do when a patient becomes angry is to elicit their automatic thoughts and positively reinforce them, in a genuine way. "I'm so glad you told me that." And I am glad. If there's a problem, I want…