Psychotherapy

City College International Faculty, University of Sheffield

In psychotherapy, there are several categories that encompass the psychotherapy approaches (Corey, 2005). Each category is exceedingly broad, generally covers 2 or more approaches. Hence, to divide our focus, this paper will concentrate more on action therapies category (Corey, 2005) or known as Cognitive Behaviour. As mention before, each classification has an extensive major to cover; hence, to recognize cognitive behaviour as a whole, we should acknowledge its sub-categories; those are Cognitive Therapy (CT) and Rational Emotive Behavioural therapy (REBT). Even though both CT and REBT remain under the same classification and share basic element of cognitive, there are distinctly different practices in their nature of therapeutic methods and style in the counselling therapy (Corey, 2005). Nevertheless, the discussion in this paper will limit to the CT approach. Furthermore, the basic theoretical principles, how the CT theory fit my personality, and how the knowledge of the CT approach affects my personal life will be the discourse of the discussion.

In deliberating the CT, there are basic assumptions that need to be known. However, before recognizing the assumptions, there are preceding concepts in CT that I find necessary to explore. In their writing, Szymanska and Palmer (2000) stated the identification of human’s 4 modalities, cognitions, physiology, emotions and behaviour (Scott & Dryden, 1996). These 4 modalities are interacting with each other in the ABC format; A for activating events, B stands for belief of the events and C is the consequences. The consequences can appear in the different form of emotional response (e.g. anxiety, happy), behavioural response (e.g. asking, laughing) and physiological response (e.g. sweating, loosen up) as well. However, these responses are not referring to the