Discussion Board DUE Sunday 7/4 @3 PM EST

Classmate 2:

Week 5 Discussion

Chapter 13 Cognitive Behavior Therapy

Compare and contrast Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck’s approaches to cognitive behavioral therapy.

Ellis confronted patients and disputed their beliefs in order to convince them that their philosophies were unrealistic. In contrast, Beck’s approach is a cooperative relationship with patients to identify and solve problems, overcoming their difficulties by altering thinking, behaviors, or emotional responses (Beck & Weishaar, 2014).

Discuss the use of CBT with children who are depressed.

CBT models for depression often consist of four levels of treatment: (1) behavioral procedures, such as contingent reinforcement, shaping, prompting, and modeling, to increase social interaction; (2) CBT interventions, which include pairing successful task completion with positive self-statements and reinforcement for those self-statements; (3) cognitive interventions, which are used with social-skills training, role-playing, and self-management; and (4) self-control procedures such as self-evaluation and self-reinforcement. McLaughlin and Christner (2012) outline ways to accomplish those tasks.

List the problem-solving steps of CBT and give an example of the steps being used.

The counselor teaches problem-solving skills to children and eventually encourages them to generate their own strategies. Socratic questioning, a problem-solving worksheet, and role-playing are used to help problem-solving. The basic steps in problem solving involve first.

(Step 1) identifying the problem in specific, concrete terms.

(Step 2) generating solutions to the situation. This brainstorming phase helps the child produce several alternatives.

Step 3 involves evaluation of the option by looking carefully at short-term and long-term consequences of each possibility. Recording those ideas on paper makes them more concrete for the child. After deliberating the options and consequences of each solution, the counselor and child develop an implementation plan for the best option.

The final step is the child rewarding himself or herself for trying out the solution (Friedberg & McClure, 2002).

Chapter 14 Transactional Analysis

List and describe different types of strokes according to Transactional Analysis.

Positive strokes, such as compliments, handshakes, open affection, or uninterrupted listening, are the most desirable.

Negative strokes, such as hatred or disagreement, are better than no recognition at all.

A middle ground is maintenance strokes, which keep transactions going by giving recognition to the speaker but neither positive nor negative feedback.

Give examples of the different types of ego states in transactional analysis.

Everything in TA emerges from the belief that the human personality has three separate ego states: Parent, Adult, and Child (PAC). These ego states are consistent patterns of feeling and experience with a related consistent pattern of behavior.

The Child ego state is preserved intact from childhood, or, as Prochaska and Norcross explain, it is as if the person has a nonerasable inner tape from their lives at age 8 and younger that can be turned on at any time.

The Parent ego includes the same type of recordings from childhood but can be modified as a person changes in life. The Parent ego also comes from childhood and incorporates the behaviors and attitudes that mimic authority figures from childhood.

The Adult ego includes the unfeeling, data-processing part of personality. This ego state develops gradually and emerges through the person’s interactions with the environment.

Chapter 15 Family Counseling

Explain enmeshment, disengaged, detriangulation, and first-order and second-order change.

A key point of interest to all family therapists is the balance families maintain between the several sets of bipolar extremes that characterize dysfunctional families. For example, families may struggle to find a healthy balance between too much involvement in each other’s lives (enmeshment) and too much detachment from each other (disengagement).

Triangulation, another important concept in Bowen’s theory, refers to the practice of two family members bringing a third family member into conflictual situations (Appleton & Dykeman, 2007). Therapists attend to the extent a husband or wife involves one of their children in a problem situation that the two of them should handle. Another example of triangulation is involvement of a person outside the marital dyad, such as a lover, to fulfill unmet needs in the marriage.

First-order change occurs when the symptom is temporarily removed, only to reappear later because the family system has not been changed. Haley (1976) points out that the behaviors of family members do not occur in isolation. Rather, family behaviors occur in a sequence in which one member’s behavior is both the result of and the catalyst for other members’ behaviors. Fixing the symptom while failing to fix the system does not fix the family. First-order change is typical for dysfunctional families who work hard to maintain the status quo.

Second-order change occurs when the symptom and the system are repaired and the need for the symptom does not reappear. For example, Mom and Dad quarrel, the children start a fight, Mom and Dad stop their quarrel to deal with their children, and a period of family peace is achieved. Until Mom and Dad find a better way to resolve conflicts, the sequence repeats frequently, and the peace is only temporary. Healthy families with an adaptive facility for repairing the family system when it is broken engage in second-order change.

Choose two models of family therapy and compare and contrast those models.​

In the simulated family game, various family members simulate each other’s behavior; for example, the son plays the mother. The therapist may also ask family members to pretend that they are a different family. After this enactment, the counselor and family members discuss how they differ from or identify with the roles. They also allow family members to experience new interactional patterns through identification of their current behavior and insight into possible alternatives. By using the growth vitality game and the leveling role, families can experience movement from a pathological system of interaction to a growth-producing one.

Communication games are aimed at establishing communication skills. Satir believed that an insincere or phony message is almost impossible to deliver if the communicator has skin contact, steady eye contact, or both forms of contact with the listener.

Discuss Virginia Satir's approach to family therapy.

Satir’s theory of counseling is built on communication rules. She believed that four components in a family situation are subject to change and correction: the members’ feelings of self-worth, the family’s communication abilities, the system, and the rules of the family. The rules are the way things are accomplished in the family. Rules are the most difficult component to uncover during therapy sessions because they usually are not verbalized or are consciously known to all members of the family. Satir wanted all members of a family to understand the rules that govern their emotional interchanges, including (1) freedom to comment, (2) freedom to express what one is seeing or hearing, (3) freedom to agree or disapprove, and (4) freedom to ask questions when one does not understand (pg.489).