Describe Thought Focused Theories and Cognitive Therapy (Essay Sample)

Thought Focused Theories and Cognitive Therapy
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Thought Focused Theories and Cognitive Therapy
Substance abuse counselors encounter varying cases of cognitive distortion where client’s information processing is inaccurate. One cognitive distortion that such counselors face is the overgeneralization. When the addict experiences a few negative events in life such as financial issues they generalize the event and allow the single event to affect the rest of their future. The counselor should guide the client to evaluate and identify ways of remedying the cognitive distortion. A substance abuse counselor can use the self-monitoring technique to help the client identify inaccurate thinking. The client keeps a record of feelings, thoughts, and events in audiotapes, a diary, or filling questionnaires. The recorded thoughts are reviewed in subsequent counseling sessions, and this enables the client to learn and evaluate their thoughts. Doing this presents an opportunity to modify the distortion (Seligman & Reichenberg, 2010).
The second distortion that substance abusers exhibit is a negative prediction. Substance abuse affects the cognitive process and makes the client have feelings of worthlessness. Subsequently, the client predicts that no matter the effort the put in beating the addiction they will not win. Having a negative mindset hinders achievement of goal because there is a predetermined notion that they will fail. Scales and questionnaires can be used by the abuse counselor to attempt and infer the cognitive schemas the thoughts represent. Different cognitive insights can be reported from one session to another as the client learns about the cognitive distortion (Sharf, 2015). The cognitive distortions should progressively decrease as the client learns to eliminate the negative feelings.
The third cognitive distortion is labeling and mislabeling. Erratic self-labeling makes the client have a negative view. For example, the client tells the counselor that “I am a loser.” Such an inaccurate sense of identit...