CBT

By Erin Heath, New Harbinger Publications Blog Editor

The Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies (ABCT) Annual Convention is a four-day conference devoted to bringing the cognitive behavioral community together to “stimulate thinking about the myriad issues that surround cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and how it intersects with other disciplines,” as the organization puts it. New Harbinger staff have returned to our Oakland office, letting the experience of the conference sink in.

The goal of psychotherapy should be to increase a client’s psychological flexibility. When it comes to clients with emotion regulation disorders, research shows that experiential avoidance and distress intolerance are the two transdiagnostic factors that are responsible for much of the inflexibility that they experience.

When working with people with psychosis, a compassionate approach is critical, given the high rates of trauma history and the trauma that can be experienced as a result of psychosis symptoms. In some cases, the treatment of psychosis itself can even be traumatizing (for example, being brought into treatment involuntarily by the police).

Across the board of contemporary psychotherapy modalities, some iteration of defusion-like techniques have been incorporated successfully to yield behavioral change. But when it comes to cognitive behavioral therapy, defusion and cognitive restructuring appear to be very much at odds: the latter assumes that thoughts must change for behavior to change, while the former assumes that thought change doesn’t matter.