The Four Types of Psychotherapy

The study of psychotherapy has grown tremendously over the years. The four main types of psychotherapy in use today are: insight therapy, cognitive therapy, behavior therapy, and group therapy. Each different type of therapy focuses on helping a person in a different way. Overall they all try to accomplish the same task of helping treat people with psychological disorders. Most of the time, a person that needs to undergo psychotherapy has a negative outlook on the world around him or herself and needs to change this in order to function in everyday society.

Insight therapy focuses on the person themselves in their self understanding in their beliefs about themselves. Oftentimes, the psychologist treating the patient, we use methods like three Association to understand how a person thinks. What this tries to do is find hidden feelings and motives that the person has. This type of therapy often emphasizes everyday life, and trying to convince the patient to become more honest with everyday situations arise.

Cognitive therapy focuses on changing bad ways of thinking. Oftentimes stress or other hardships in a persons life take over their brain and change the way they think. This type of therapy seeks to correct that, by trying to change negative thoughts into positive ones. A lot of the time, people tend to get trapped in their own self depreciating beliefs, which leads to a cycle of negative thoughts. By correcting these beliefs, a therapist can help the patient get a whole new outlook on life and begin thinking positively about themselves and the world around them.

Behavior therapy tries to teach people how to properly behave in everyday society. Usually a psychologist will use conditioning in order to teach the person how follow social norms. Oftentimes, a therapist will try to help a person to read of a specific phobia or fear that they have. Another thing that they often use, is what is known as a token economy. A token economy rewards the patient with token that they can redeem for something that they want. These rewards help reinforce the new behavior in patients.

Group therapy brings people together and uses all of the above different types of therapies in a social setting. This offers a support group for people that are all suffering similar problems. This method tends to be pretty effective because people realize that they are not alone and that other people are suffering from the same problems that they are.