CBT: Comparing Group, Family, and Individual Settings

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy: Comparing Group, Family, and Individual Settings
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Cognitive Behavioral Therapy: Comparing Group, Family, and Individual Settings
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is a psychosocial intervention that combines cognitive and behavioral therapies to help patients learn how to identify and alter negative thought patterns that have a debilitating effect on behavior and emotions. The basic premise of the psychotherapeutic treatment is that unhelpful emotions and behaviors are challenging to treat directly. So the intervention targets those thoughts and behaviors that contribute to and worsen emotional difficulties, anxiety, and depression. Through CBT, these negative thoughts, attitudes, and beliefs affecting one’s emotions and behaviors are identified, tested, and replaced with more accurate and objective thoughts.
CBT typically involves the following steps: recognizing the troubling conditions in the patient’s life; helping the patient become more aware of their emotions, thoughts, and beliefs concerning identified challenges; recognizing flawed and negative thinking; reshaping these negative thoughts into positive coping strategies that address existing issues. There are several approaches to addressing patients’ undesirable emotions and behaviors depending on the setting. This essay will compare cognitive behavioral therapy in group, family, and individual settings.
Traditionally, CBT was practiced individually until a group approach was invented to allow trained professional therapists to cater to more patients within a given period than they can treat individually. The article “Effectiveness of cognitive-behavioral group therapy for depression in routine practice” by Thimm & Antonsen (2014) and published by BMC Psychiatry asserts that group therapy is much more efficient than individual treatment in terms of therapists’ time and results in substantial financial savings for health care systems.
Besides saving time and money, the group approach to CBT has been hailed for its therapeutic factors, including its ability to: provide ready circumstances for challenging negative core beliefs and assumptions by the other group members; normalize negative experiences and reduce associated stigma and shame; facilitate collaborative therapeutic relationships between group members; as well as facilitate positive reinforcement and secondhand learning in a safe environment. However, as is outlined in the “Intro Psych Tutorial #241” video, group therapy has several disadvantages, including communication gaps or disruptive behaviors that may adversely impact group interactions, poor identification of personal problems, and certain interpersonal factors like some peoples’ tendency to dominate group environments. On the other hand, CBT in the family setting is meant to help families marked by conflict, physical abuse, and regret owing to psychiatric, adjustment, and behavioral challenges such as emotional reactivity, poor interpersonal functioning, and aggression. When applied to families, the CBT approach explores the intertwined dynamics of family ...