Treatment Approaches
COGNITIVE BEHAVIOR THERAPY (CBT)
Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) is a psychotherapeutic model that is more present-
centered and future focused than traditional therapies.
It is aimed at influencing disturbed emotions and behaviors that are not helpful by identifying and modifying irrational or maladaptive thoughts, assumptions and beliefs; replacing them with more realistic and self-helping alternatives. As such, CBT is a cognitive, affective and behavioral approach to healing that is used with individuals and groups.
Goal: To enable clients to think and act more rationally.
Method: Clients identify irrational beliefs and assumptions that are causing or
maintaining disturbances and work toward correcting them.
REALITY THERAPY
Reality Therapy a psycho-educational brand of cognitive theory, similar in many ways to other forms of education, tutoring or coaching. It purports that thinking is at the core of human experience and that beliefs are vital tools in creating the reality we experience.
Beliefs create our emotional states; affect our bodies, and therefore, our health. Beliefs also affect our responses to life, our relationships and determine the choices we make.
Hence, various studies show that beliefs lead to feelings, feelings to behaviors and behaviors impact results.
Goal: Enabling clients to think affirmatively as a basis for rational behavior.
Method: Clients identify particular types of errors enshrouded in irrational beliefs and work at thinking more and more realistically.
AFROTHERAPY (AT)
Afrotherapy is a modified version of Reality Therapy. As a developmental and transformational process, it is culturally specific, not universal. This is based on the multi-cultural premise that a group must recognize and affirm itself before it is able to share and appreciate the difference in others, AT therefore emphasizes cultural identity and reflection on history as spiritual practices.
AT affirms that treatment of African Americans would be incomplete without an examination of their African past. Sankofa indicates that background knowledge is relevant to psychotherapy, since understanding the past is vital to the healing process.
According to Santayana, “Those who ignore the past are likely to repeat it.”
Pain, like fire, has the power to destroy or transform. AT teaches clients how to transcend feelings of shame and humiliation about their past while creating the optimism necessary for using their history, including the experience of slavery, as a catalyst for recovery and transformation.
Goal: To help clients think realistically.
Method: Clients identify particular types of cognitive errors which are sometimes concealed in erroneous beliefs as a basis for cognitive restructuring and Reality Thinking.
