Fundamentals of Cognitive Therapy

I know a guy named Art who is a cognitive therapist.  He told me this about the basics of cognitive therapy:

Traditionally the subject of "perpetually or periodically upset emotions with no apparent reason" has been approached in one of three ways:

  1.  behaviourism: Pavlov and his dogs.  You "train" the outer behaviour to be "appropriate" and it supposedly fixes everything.  Problem: only really works on dogs, or people you have nearly 100% control over (in a prison or classroom or doctor's office), and whenever they are off on their own, their behaviour tends to revert back to the original shape.

2.  physiology: a "chemical imbalance."  There are certain chemicals you have too much or too little of.  Problem: no one really knows what "chemical imbalance" really means, you can say it in relation to absolutely anything and act like you know what you're talking about, but it shows no understanding of what causes happy or unhappy chemicals or anything.  Also, theories as to genetics aren't supporting physiological approaches.  Every time you are hungry or thirsty or need to sneeze, there is a "chemical imbalance" that your body then fixes.  What does it mean when you're sad or anxious?  We are chemicals continually adjusting and readjusting.  That's normal.  Impairing or interfering in production of various chemicals is unhealthy, costly and very temporary.  Also doesn't really work well.

3.  psychology: feelings.  Freud.  You are afraid of dogs because when you were five one bit you and your mother didn't do anything about that.  Problem: uncovering reasons of this kind is very hard, does not always fix anything, and isn't always even possible to do in the first place anyway.  You can end up knowing you'll never know why you feel a certain way, and getting upset about that.  You can end up knowing why you feel a certain way, not being able to fix it, and getting dejected about that.

The central problem with each approach is that it ignores the other two, also.

Newish theories involve adding a fourth component (thoughts/beliefs/cognition) to the mix and insisting upon drawing a relationship between all four, seeing them as working off each other.

So, you think you will fall off a balcony when you won't, but you feel really scared anyway, you produce ridiculous amounts of adrenaline and you step back.  Or, you believe a snake is dangerous, so you scream and run away, your body produces adrenaline and tears, and you feel scared.

All of these appear to happen at pretty much the same time, and it isn't clear that any one factor is somehow causing all the other reactions.  In fact, there is a cyclical, "orbiting and feeding off each other" thing that's happening.  None of these operates without affecting the others and being affected by them.  When emotional duress happens, I observed, it is like feedback on a guitar. Or a satellite orbiting and planet and eventually crashing into it, or spinning off from it if it can escape the gravitational pull.

It is clear that one's expectations/thoughts/beliefs can be very irrational, and it isn't their job to be irrational.  A healthy correlation between reality and expectations would appear to be in order.
 

Cognitive therapy draws a formula for stress (emotional duress of any kind) that looks like this:

stress = expectations (to the power of judgment) - reality

so, when reality doesn't match expectations, your feelings respond uncomfortably.  When your expectations are put on steroids by judgments, this increases that effect exponentially.

Signs of judgment-based thinking are over-use of words like should, right/wrong, must/ought and so on.  Also, a refusal to change any beliefs, no matter what reality does.
 

He went on to say that, when dealing with people and pets and so on, we try to understand behaviour and when we can't, we judge.  Judgment, Art says, is an admission that one can't understand and relate to someone or something that happened.

"Why are religious groups better at judging than understanding, when understanding is both better and kind of their job?"  Art and I mused.