Cognitive Therapy and Behavior Therapy

Thesis Statement

Differentiating behavior therapy and cognitive therapy is important especially to therapists in order to effectively handle their patients and offer the most effective treatment.

Body section I

Cognitive therapy

Cognitive therapy refers to a psychological therapy, which seeks to assist the patients to overcome their psychological difficulties and problems by identifying and changing their feelings, emotions and their thoughts about a certain situation (Hofmann, 2011).

Cognitive therapy begins with identifying the distorted thoughts that bring about a negative feeling to an individual about a situation and try to change these thoughts (Hawton, 1989). 

Body section II

Behavior Therapy

Behavioral therapy is a type of psychological therapy that focuses on changing the negative responses or behaviors that individuals have towards certain thoughts and emotions leading to avoidance of activities (Robertson, 2010). 

Body Section III

Comparison of Cognitive and Behavior Therapy

Both are related since they deal with overcoming negative thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of individuals towards a situation (Simos, 2008). Their difference is that cognitive therapy deals with changing the negative thoughts and feelings of human beings while behavior therapy deals with changing the negative behaviors of human beings (Beck, 1995). 

Conclusion

Cognitive therapy is different from behavior therapy but the two are similar in many aspects (Dobson, 2012). The limitations of the two are that none has covered completely the whole subject of changing human behavior from the mental aspects to the behavior aspect. Therapists have been merged together recently to form a cognitive behavior therapy which treats both the negative mental thoughts and feelings and the negative observable human behaviors.