Third Wave Behavior Therapies
This is an excellent thread, Sharkey, because it forced me to do some research and critical thinking. I was pleasantly surprised at just how much empirical support I found for "third wave" approaches, but I found nothing that would indicate that it could be integrated into the CT "orthodoxy". As an individual, you could use both approaches in a manner described in the last paragraph of Dieter's post, but I would tread very carefully in that terrain. One possible conflict that immediately springs to mind: In CT, it's expected that the clinician will clearly explain the cognitive model at the beginning of therapy. The patient's intellectual understanding of the relationship between cognition and affect are supposed to serve as a kind of bedrock for real change and enhance the therapuetic alliance by serving as an experience in which the therapist shows that he/she knows what they're talking about thereby instilling confidence in the patient. If, however, you go through this process and then, at some point, introduce "acceptance" (which, at least in appearance, seems to conflict a major aspect of the cognitive model that you've invested so much in "selling" to the patient) then you've cracked that bedrock, underminded the patient's basis of a belief in change, and their confidence in you as a clinician.
Last edited by JustBen; August 13th, 2004 at 08:26 AM..
Reason: Misleading title
|