Theories Flashcards
Psychodynamic Therapies
Psychodynamic
Object Relations
Self Psychology
Attachment-Based
Systems Therapies
General Systems Theory
Bowen Family Therapy
Strategic Family Therapy
Structural Family Therapy
Satir/Communications Therapy
Post Modern Therapies
Narrative Therapy
Solution Focused Therapy
Humanistic/Existential Therapies
Existential Therapy
Experiential Therapy
Client-Centered Therapy
Gestalt Therapy
Cognitive Behavioral Therapies
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
Dialectic Behavioral Therapy
Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy
Psychodynamic - Theory of Change
Change occurs through insight and understanding of early, unresolved issues.
CBT - Theory of Change
Change occurs by learning to modify dysfunctional thought patterns.
CBT - Role of Therapist
- Collaborative teacher
- Maintains the structure of the approach
- Teaches coping skills and provides homework
CBT Treatment Goals
- Learn to recognize negative thought patterns
- Develop positive coping skills
What is a Negative Cognitive Triad?
- A main concept of CBT
- Psychoeducation about this concept is provided to clients in the first session of CBT.
1. View of self: ‘I’m not worth anything.’
2. View of the world: ‘Everybody hates me.’
3. View of prospects for the future: ‘There are no hopes for my future.’
What are Automatic Thoughts?
- A main concept of CBT
- Thoughts about ourselves or others that individuals are often not aware of and thus are not assessed for accuracy or relevancy.
What are Maladaptive Automatic Thoughts?
- CBT main concept
- Automatic thoughts that are typically centered on negative themes or distorted reflections that are accepted as true.
What are Schemas?
- Changing schemas is a major target of CBT.
- A network of rules or templates for information processing shaped by developmental influences and life experiences.
What role do Schemas play in cognitive processes?
- Schemas dictate how individuals think about and interpret the world, regulating self-worth and coping skills.
- CBT
What is Overgeneralization?
A cognitive distortion where a single negative event is seen as a never-ending pattern of defeat. “I never do anything right.”
- CBT
What is Arbitrary Inference?
- A cognitive distortion that leads to drawing conclusions without evidence or facts to support those conclusions.
- CBT
What is Selective Abstraction?
- Attending to detail while ignoring total context, taking detail out of context and missing the totality of the situation.
- CBT
What is Personalization?
- Seeing yourself as a cause of negative external events.
- CBT
What is Cognitive Restructuring?
- CBT intervention
- Cognitive Restructuring teaches clients to identify and question irrational beliefs and generate alternative responses.
What is Self-Monitoring?
- CBT intervention
- Self-Monitoring, or diary work, records thoughts and behaviors to provide insight into negative affirmations.
What are Behavioral Experiments?
- CBT intervention
- Behavioral Experiments involve experiencing, observing, reflecting, and planning through thought testing and discovery.
What is Systematic Desensitization?
- CBT intervention
- Systematic Desensitization pairs relaxation techniques with exposure to stressful stimuli.
What is Anxiety Management Training?
- CBT intervention
- Anxiety Management Training teaches skills for specific situations using imagery and relaxation techniques.
What is Assertiveness Training?
- CBT intervention
- Assertiveness Training helps clients specify their desires and needs using effective responses.
What is Behavioral Activation?
- CBT intervention
- Behavioral Activation increases activity levels in depressed clients through scheduling and incentives.
What is Communication Skills Training?
- CBT intervention
- Communication Skills Training is used in couples therapy to facilitate discussions about feelings and problems.
Examples: Learning to use “I” statements, learning to identify emotional flooding.
What is the Downward Arrow technique?
- CBT intervention
- The Downward Arrow technique uncovers underlying assumptions by asking, ‘If this is true, what does it mean about you and your life?’
What is Labeling Distortions?
- CBT intervention
- Labeling Distortions teaches clients to recognize and label thinking distortions that affect their interpretations.
What are Mastery/Pleasure Ratings?
- CBT intervention
- Mastery/Pleasure Ratings involve clients using an activity chart to rate the mastery or pleasure derived from activities.
What is Problem-Solving Training?
- CBT intervention
- Problem-Solving Training teaches a step-by-step approach to define problems, generate alternatives, and implement solutions.
What is Relaxation Training?
- CBT intervention
- Relaxation Training teaches clients to relax muscles and condition a relaxation response to counter tension.
What is Successive Approximation?
- CBT intervention
- Successive Approximation involves collaborating on a plan for the client to engage in steps that lead to an ultimate goal.
What is the Three-Column Technique?
- CBT intervention
- The Three-Column Technique involves collecting automatic thoughts and listing:
1. Situation in which the thought occurred
2. The automatic thought
3. Feelings associated with the thought
What is a Thought Record?
- CBT intervention
- A Thought Record expands on the Three-Column Technique by adding columns for alternative responses and outcomes.
What occurs in the Beginning Phase of treatment in CBT?
- Establish safe, supportive therapeutic relationship.
- Assess and define the problem and negative thought patterns.
- Educate about CBT and set collaborative goals.
What occurs in the Early/Middle Phase of treatment in CBT?
- Identify/uncover negative thought patterns and schemas.
- Assign homework, label cognitive distortions.
- Reframe thoughts, practice new skills.
What occurs in the End Phase of treatment in CBT?
- Review gains
- Identify skilled learned
- Rehearse and anticipate for future struggles
How is REBT different than CBT?
CBT - Therapist helps clients gain tools in challenging their own belief system.
REBT - Therapist style is confrontational, the therapist is the one who is challenging the client’s irrational beliefs.
- REBT is not as collaborative as CBT.
REBT - Theory of Change
Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy
Change occurs by changing irrational beliefs to rational ones, which improves clients’ emotional and behavioral functioning.
REBT - Role of the Therapist
Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy
- Instructor
- Confrontational
- Direct
- Blunt, honest, logical
REBT - Treatment Goals
Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy
Help clients alter illogical beliefs and thinking patterns.
What does ‘A’ stand for in the ABC model?
- REBT key concept
A – Activating Event: Something happens in the environment around you.
What does ‘B’ represent in the ABC model?
- REBT key concept
B – Beliefs: You hold a belief about the event or situation.
What does ‘C’ signify in the ABC model?
- REBT key concept
C – Consequence: You have an emotional response to your belief.
What are common Irrational Beliefs?
- REBT key concept
1. Feeling excessively upset over other people’s mistakes.
2. Believing that you must be 100% competent/successful in everything to be valued.
3. Believing that you will be happier if you avoid life’s difficulties or challenges.
4. Feeling that you have no control over your own happiness; dependent upon external forces.
What is Self-Acceptance?
- REBT key concept
I have both good and bad points. I am allowed to have flaws. Despite my good and bad points, I am no more worthy or less worthy.
What is Other-Acceptance?
- REBT key concept
- Sometimes other people will not treat me fairly. There is no law that other people have to treat me fairly all of the time. People who don’t treat me fairly are no more worthy or less worthy.
What is Life-Acceptance?
- REBT key concept
Life does not always work out the way that you want. There is no rule that life has to go the way that you want. Although life will not always be pleasant, it is never awful or completely unbearable.
What occurs in the Beginning Phase of Treatment in REBT?
- Provide psychoeducation about REBT.
- Identify underlying irrational thought patterns and beliefs and resulting feelings and behaviors.
What occurs in the Middle Phase of Treatment in REBT?
- Challenge mistake beliefs
- Therapist must confront/dispute these beliefs
- Clients encouraged to use meditation, journaling, guided imagery.
What occurs in the End Phase of Treatment in REBT?
- Review progress made
- Apply learned skills to anticipate future struggles
DBT - Theory of Change
- Change happens through mindfulness, developing skills to manage distress tolerance and emotional regulation, and improving interpersonal problem-solving skills.
- Emphasis on accepting uncomfortable thoughts instead of struggling with them.
DBT - Role of the Therapist
- Ally
- Coach
- Validate and offer alternatives
DBT - Treatment Goals
- For clients to improve their emotional and cognitive regulation
How is DBT different from CBT?
- Mindfulness is what sets DBT apart from CBT.
- In DBT there is an acceptance of the thoughts/feelings without judgement.
What is Mindfulness?
- DBT intervention
- The practice of being fully aware and present in this one moment.
What is Distress Tolerance?
- DBT key concept
- How to tolerate pain in difficult situations, not change it.
What is Interpersonal Effectiveness?
- DBT key concept
- How to ask for what you want and say no while maintaining self-respect and relationships with others.
What is Emotion Regulation?
- DBT key concept
- How to change emotions that you want to change.
What occurs in the Beginning phase of treatment in DBT?
- Move client from being out of control to achieving behavioral control.
- Mindfulness and distress tolerance skills are taught.
What occurs in the Middle phase of treatment in DBT?
- Fuller emotional experience; support the client to learn to live.
- Define life goals
- Build self-respect
- Find peace and happiness.
What occurs in the End phase of treatment in DBT?
- Finding a deeper meaning through a spiritual existence.
Satir/Communications - Theory of Change
- Change happens through self-awareness and improved communication.
- A Humanistic Family/Systems approach
Satir/Communications - Role of the Therapist
- Active facilitator
- Resource detective
- Trustworthy other - real human
- Genuine, warm, honest, direct
Satir/Communications - Treatment Goals
- To increase congruent communication.
- Improve self-esteem/confidence and personal growth.
- Value each individuals uniqueness and respect differences.
What is Incongruent Communication?
- Discrepancies between verbal and non-verbal cues.
- Satir/Communications key concept
What is the key concept “Styles of Communication”?
What theory does it derive from?
- The rules that govern family interaction ensuring the preservation of the family’s current functioning level.
- Satir/Communications key concept
What characterizes a Placater?
- Apologizing, never disagreeing, trying to please.
- A style of communication according to Satir/Communications that maintains the families current level of functioning.
What characterizes a Blamer?
- Attacking others, fault finder, dictator, boss.
- A style of communication according to Satir/Communications that maintains the families current level of functioning.
What characterizes a Computer?
- Super reasonable, intellectual, distant, always correct.
- A style of communication according to Satir/Communications that maintains the families current level of functioning.
What characterizes a Distracter?
- Seeking approval by acting out, irrelevant.
- A style of communication according to Satir/Communications that maintains the families current level of functioning.
What characterizes a Leveler?
- Congruent in their beliefs about self and others.
- A style of communication according to Satir/Communications that maintains the families current level of functioning.
What is Modeling Communication?
- Therapist uses ‘I’ messages; expresses thoughts and feelings directly; avoids statements about what others are thinking or feeling; is honest.
- Satir/Communications intervention
What is Family Life Chronology?
- Gathering history as far back as possible. What the family has been through and how those events impact the family.
- Satir/Communications intervention
What is Family Sculpting?
- Put people into a spatial metaphor – a physical representation of family members characterizations.
- Satir/Communications intervention
What is the intervention “Taking Responsibility”?
- Encouraging clients to take responsibility for how they felt, what they experienced, what meaning they made, what feelings they had about their feelings.
- Satir/Communications intervention
What occurs in the Beginning phase of treatment in Satir/Communications?
- Establish rapport, a sense of equality and hope.
- Assess communication patterns.
- Identify treatment focus and goals.
What occurs in the Middle phase of treatment in Satir/Communications?
- Increase the family’s congruent communication.
- Support and strengthen each individual’s sense of uniqueness and self-esteem.
What occurs in the End phase of treatment in Satir/Communications?
- Help family practice, implement, and integrate changes
- Increase awareness of larger familial patterns.
Structural Family Therapy - Theory of Change
Change occurs through restructuring the family’s organization.
Structural Family Therapy - Role of the Therapist
- “Friendly Uncle”
Friendly - active and engaged
Uncle - therapist is joining with/part of the family. - Helps the family understand how to change family structure, the impact of rituals and rules, and integrate new patterns of interaction.
Structural Family Therapy - Treatment Goals
- Restructure the family system.
- Change dysfunctional transactional patterns and create new ways of relating.
- Help create flexible boundaries.
What are Alliances in Structural Family Therapy?
- Subgroups based on gender, generation, and developmental tasks.
- Key concept of Structural Family Therapy
What are Coalitions in Structural Family Therapy?
- Alignments where 2 or more family members join together to form a bond against another family member.
- Key concept of Structural Family Therapy
What is the Power Hierarchy in a family system?
- Leadership and direction must be provided by the adults, chaos can occur if parents are intimidated or insecure.
- Key concept of Structural Family Therapy
What are Subsystems in a family?
- Families organize themselves by generation, relationship, and necessity. Examples: marital subsystem (spouses), parental subsystem (parents), executive subsystem (people who run the family), and sibling subsystem (kids).
- Key concept of Structural Family Therapy
What is a Family Map?
- Tool used by the therapist to depict relationship dynamics in the family. It is conceptual and not shared with the family.
- Key concept of Structural Family Therapy
What are Disengaged Boundaries?
- Where family members are isolated from each other, which can lead to AOD use and results from rigid boundaries.
- Key concept of Structural Family Therapy
What are Enmeshed Boundaries?
- Family members are overly dependent and too closely involved, which can lead to incest.
- Key concept of Structural Family Therapy
What is the Joining Intervention?
- The therapist’s first task; involves blending in with the family and adapting to their affect, style, and language.
- Structural Family Therapy Intervention
What is Tracking?
- The therapist pays close attention to family members and their interactions during enactments, noticing boundaries, coalitions, roles, and rules.
- Structural Family Therapy Intervention
What is Mimesis?
- The therapist tracks and uses the family’s style of communication.
- Structural Family Therapy Intervention
What is Unbalancing?
- Supporting someone in a one-down position to change the hierarchical position.
- Structural Family Therapy Intervention
What is Enactment?
- The actualization of transactional patterns under the therapist’s control, allowing observation of how family members regulate their behaviors.
- Structural Family Therapy Intervention
What is Boundary Making?
- A special case of enactment where the therapist defines areas of interaction open to certain members but closed to others.
Example: a son is asked to leave his chair (in between his parents) and go to another chair on the opposite side of the room.
- Structural Family Therapy Intervention
What occurs in the beginning phase of treatment in Structural Family Therapy?
- Join with family, assess hierarchy, alignments, and boundaries; reframe the problem.
What occurs in the middle phase of treatment in Structural Family Therapy?
- Highlight and modify interactions; utilize enactments to challenge participants to unbalance the system.
What occurs in the end phase of treatment in Structural Family Therapy?
- Review progress, reinforce structural change, and provide tools for the future.
What are the four characteristics that Structural family therapy believes healthy families possess?
1 - Clear generational hierarchy.
2 - Parental coalition - parents are aligned together.
3 - Spouses have a clear sub-system to themselves.
4 - Clear boundaries between all individuals and individual sub-systems
Strategic Therapy - Theory of Change
- Change occurs through action-oriented directives and paradoxical interventions.
- Strategic = Strategies
This theory is defined by it’s interventions.
Strategic Therapy - Role of the Therapist
- The therapist delivers directives that facilitate change, focuses on solving problems, and designs a specific approach for each person’s presenting problem.
Strategic Therapy - Treatment Goals
- Solve the presenting problems
- Change dysfunctional patterns of interaction.
What are Paradoxical Directives?
- Maneuvers that are in apparent contradiction to the goals of therapy but are designed to achieve them.
- Helps avoid resistance of therapists instructions by keeping the clients in charge.
- Strategic intervention
What is Positioning?
- The therapist takes a more exaggerated view of the problem, leading the family to rebel and recognize their competencies.
- Strategic intervention
What is Prescribing the Symptom?
- A strategy where the therapist encourages the client to engage in or practice the symptom.
- Strategic intervention
What is Restraining?
- The therapist discourages change or changing too quickly to elicit the desire to change from the client.
- Strategic intervention
What are Ordeals?
- A type of symptom prescription where clients carry out harmless but unpleasant tasks whenever symptoms occur; for example, cleaning the basement when unable to sleep.
- Strategic intervention
What occurs in the Beginning phase of treatment in Strategic Therapy?
- Define the problem, assess client’s understanding of the problem
- Assess family’s destructive patterns of relating and communicating the continued problem.
- State goals for behavior change.
What occurs in the Middle phase of treatment in Strategic Therapy?
- Review attempted solutions
- Interventions: assign ordeals, prescribe the problem, relabel behavior and instruct new responses.
What occurs in the End phase of treatment in Strategic Therapy?
- Plan for maintenance of new behavior and future challenges
- Emphasizing positive changes made.
Bowen Family Therapy - Theory of Change
- Change occurs by understanding multigenerational dynamics and differentiation.
- Bowen is the only theory concerned with the past 3 generations of a client’s family.
Bowen Family Therapy - Role of Therapist
- Coach/educator
- Supervisor
- Investigator
- Neutral
What are the treatment goals in Bowen Family Therapy?
Reduce anxiety and emotional turmoil in family system, self-differentiation within the context of family, decrease emotional fusion, improve communication skills, decrease recurrence of dysfunctional patterns, reduce emotional reactivity, and facilitate de-triangulation.
What is a triangle in Bowen Family Therapy?
A triangle is a three-person relationship system and the smallest stable relationship system.
What is differentiation of self?
It refers to how individuals vary in susceptibility to group think and the pressure exerted for conformity.
What is the nuclear family emotional system?
It describes four basic relationship patterns that govern where problems develop in a family.
What is the family projection process?
It describes how parents transmit their emotional problems to a child, impairing their functioning.
What is the multigenerational transmission process?
It describes how small differences in differentiation between parents and offspring lead to marked differences over generations.
What is emotional cutoff?
It describes managing unresolved emotional issues by reducing or cutting off emotional contact with family members.
What is a genogram?
An extensive study of a family’s history, acting as both an assessment and treatment tool.
What are some interventions used in Bowen Family Therapy?
Reduce emotional reactivity, reframing the presenting problem, creating a genogram, de-triangulation, increasing differentiation, teaching ‘I’ statements, opening cutoff relationships, interacting with family, modeling new interactions, and bibliotherapy.
What occurs in the Beginning Phase of treatment in Bowen Family Therapy?
- Create a family diagram and assess levels of differentiation.
What occurs in the Early/Middle phase of treatment in Bowen Family Therapy?
- Teach differentiation and encourage reunification.
What occurs in the End Phase of treatment in Bowen Family Therapy?
- Review new skills and knowledge gained.
