According to Raymond J. Corsini (2011), psychotherapy is a process that focuses on the person and helps people find the ways they think, feel, or behave in ways that do not satisfy them. In psychotherapy, the individual is not given information, suggestions or commands on a subject. It is aimed at understanding oneself. Guidance is given to the client to create his own solutions to his problem or problems. A person who has received psychotherapy training and performs psychotherapy is called a psychotherapist. Psychotherapists are people with high general knowledge who use unusual theories, that is, systems of thought, or who bring some or all theories together and use one or more applications to achieve the results they want. All psychotherapists can also be considered method instructors. Most psychotherapies are aimed at changing people. It makes people think, feel and act differently. Cognitive therapy aims to process the necessary information about the client and initiate positive change in the client's life. Coming from the background of human development and individual learning; The technical system that includes the actions of people thinking, feeling, attributing different meanings, perceiving and interpreting vital events is called the cognitive system.
The cognitive system processes the information coming from the physical and social environments of the human being and the individual must react accordingly. In order to react, the individual has the ability to participate in stimuli, events, memories, and thoughts with an emotional response. At the same time, the response must consciously or unconsciously interact with the mechanisms and psychological systems that give rise to the behavior, ensure its continuity and direct it. According to Aaron Beck's (1996) cognitive model, there are many levels of cognitive evaluations. The first layer is the automatic thoughts that arise from them, come towards the person, are associated with responsible behavior or disturbing emotions; such as mind reading, personalization, imprinting, clairvoyance, scarification or binary (all or nothing) thinking.
Automatic thoughts can be true or false. Sometimes the reactions given may be incompatible due to misunderstanding and interpretation of events or meaningless interpretation. General People are surprised to learn that their emotions are actually a result of the way they think about an event, and that they can have very different emotions when they change their interpretation. People come to therapy not because they cannot think rationally; It may be because their emotions, behavior and relationships are problematic. It should be known at this stage that; Thoughts and emotions are separate phenomena, however, thoughts create emotions (and behaviors). Emotions are a way of experiencing feelings. You may feel anxious, depressed, angry, fearful, hopeful, strange, helpless, and self-critical. Emotions cannot be discussed, but only the thoughts that lead to an emotion can be discussed. Therapists can explain to clients how thoughts create emotions and how they can increase or decrease an emotion.
Emotions can be changed by using positive thinking methods that can replace negative thoughts. These changing emotions provide gains to the individual. The client learns to look at the same problem from different perspectives. The client learns to question and interpret automatic thoughts that are true or false. This learning process proceeds quite systematically.
Cognitive therapy is a highly structured, short-term therapy that lasts between 12-16 weeks in total. The aim of cognitive therapy is to take positive steps in receiving and processing information. During the therapy process, which requires these steps to be met, the therapist and the client collaboratively examine and examine the client himself, others apart from the client, and the client's beliefs about the world. Behavioral experiments and verbal practices are used to examine alternative interpretations of the client's dysfunctional thoughts and judgments and to produce results that support more acceptable beliefs and enable therapeutic change.
Cognitive therapy does not replace negative behaviors with positive ones. Desire is based on fact, not thinking. Similarly, cognitive therapy does not assume that people's problems are a figment of their imagination. Clients may have both serious social, economic, or health problems and functional impairment. However, in addition to the problems, they also have prejudiced thoughts about themselves, their situation and their resources, and their reaction styles. affects them and prevents them from finding solutions. For example; An individual who cannot enjoy life and experiences intense unrest has negative ideas and negative prejudices about himself, the world and the future. The individual denies the existence of evidence that falsifies him/her and selectively focuses on information that fits the negativity of the feeling of unhappiness. The cognitive model explores both forms of evidence to examine them. According to the contemporary cognitive model developed by Beck and his friends, the angle of scientific thought that pursues the "non-confirmation" or "falsification" of a belief, that is, the proof of how a belief is wrong and insufficient, rather than just looking for confirmatory evidence, should be examined. In various disease states, such as having difficulty controlling the degree of anxiety or state of anxiety, experiencing intense unhappiness or behavioral and emotional exaggeration, being overly suspicious (distrustful) or overly obsessive, and others, a certain bias influences how the person will absorb new information. So, for example, a person suffering from intense anxiety has a bias and cognition towards selective interpretation of themes that may be dangerous to him or her. Under conditions of extreme suspicion and distrust, the prevailing misinterpretation leads to abuse or conflict. Fears and anxieties are based on people's fearful experiences. These include fear of snakes, fear of loneliness, darkness, open spaces, socializing, rejection, competition, confrontation, restlessness, making mistakes, loss, evaluation, and fear of being scared. However, even if people realize that their fears do not threaten their lives and sometimes perceive them as absurd, fears can continue to exist in their lives. According to William J. Knaus, fears and anxieties; by educating oneself against unnecessary thoughts and reactions, by learning to configure emotional tolerance, and by controlling fearful behaviors and desensitizing the person to his fears; It can be overcome very effectively with this method we call cognitive therapy.
If people did not have the ability to receive relevant information from the environment, interpret it and have a structured, controlled action plan based on this interpretation, they would die or die immediately. It would be inevitable to be destroyed or we would become typical robots. However, although individuals' perceptions of themselves and others, their goals and expectations, memories, fantasies, and previously learned knowledge do not control the decision-making mechanism regarding survival, they significantly affect it. Some beliefs depend on an individual's culture, gender role, religion, or socioeconomic status. Therapy can focus on problem solving by understanding how these beliefs affect the client.
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