→ Psychotherapy generally → Behavioural TherapyBehavioural Therapy
The behavioural therapy is based on methods and insight from the instructional psychology research. It is assumed that most behaviours aren’t congenital but learned. Like we learn and adopt many positive habits and behaviours of thinking, feeling and acting during our life, we can also adopt negative attitudes which encumber ourselves or make life with other people harder.
At the beginning of a behavioural therapy, the therapist and the patient will do the following together:
- take the patient’s problems that need to be dealt with apart into separate, concretely describable behaviours and habits,
- examine why the patient has taken these bothering behaviours and habits and why they’ve kept them as long.
Later on the therapist assists the patient in discarding their disturbing behaviours and habits (“unlearning” them) and in “learning” new, better suited behaviours and habits.
Behavioural therapists have developed a multitude of approaches for changing behaviours and habits, mostly based on rules and techniques which have been proved experimentally. Their goal is to cause concretely verifiable improvements.
The various techniques and methodes of behavioural therapy are:
- Systematic desensitisation, gradual approach and decomposition of fears by using relaxation techniques,
- self assurance training in order to remove interpersonal inferiority feelings and inhibitions, reinforce self-esteem and self-confidence and improve contact and communication abilities,
- self-control techniques to empower the patient to self-help in reducing annoying habits,
- aimed training to realistically establish new behaviours and to cope annoying situations.