Cognitive Behavior Therapy, Reality Therapy and Feminist Therapy

Cognitive Behavior Therapy

Key Figure:

A.T. Beck

Goals:

1. To challenge clients to confront faulty beliefs with contradictory evidence that they gather and evaluate.
2. Helping clients seek out their dogmatic beliefs and vigorously minimize them.
3. To become aware of automatic thoughts and to change them.

Techniques:

1. Engaging in Socratic dialogue.
2. Debating irrational beliefs
3. Carrying out homework assignments
4. Gathering data on assumptions one has made.
5. Keeping a record of activities.
6. Forming alternative interpretations.
7. Learning new coping skills.
8. Changing one's language and thinking patterns.
9. Role playing.
10. Imagery
11. Confronting faulty beliefs.

 

Reality Therapy

Key Figures:

1. William Glasser
2. Robert Wubbolding

Goals:

1. To help people become more effective in meeting their needs.
2. To enable clients to get reconnected with the people they have chosen to put into their quality worlds and teach clients choice theory.

Techniques:

Various techniques may be used to get clients to evaluate what they are presently doing to see if they are willing to change. If they decide that their present behaviors not effective, they develop a specific plan for change and make a commitment to follow through.

Feminist Therapy

Key Figures:

1. Jean Baker Miller
2. Carolyn Zerbe Enns
3. Oliva Espin
4. Laura Brown

Goals:

1. To bring about transformation both in the individual client and in society.
2. For individual clients the goal is to assist them in recognizing, claiming, and using their personal power to free themselves from the limitations of gender role socialization.
3. To confront all forms of institutional policies that discriminate on the basis of gender.

Techniques:

Feminist practitioners tent to employ consciousness raising techniques aimed at helping clients recognize the impact of gender-role socialization on their lives. Other techniques frequently used include gender-role analysis and intervention, power analysis and intervention, bibliotherapy, journal writing, therapist self-disclosure, assertiveness training, reframing and relabeling, cognitive restructuring, identifying and challenging untested beliefs, role playing, psychodramatic methods, group work and social action.