| Behavior Therapy Daniel M Burrello According to Behavior Therapy, How does the Personality Become Maladjusted? Some of the earliest work that could be construed as psychological was done in the behaviorist field. From Pavlov�s dogs to Skinner�s box, the roots of our basic behavior have a long history, relatively speaking. The field of behavior therapy is based well within the paradigm of classical and operant conditioning. Unless a person is suffering from an organic dysfunction due to illness or injury to the brain, the maladjusted client is seen as different from the norm in that they have not acquired basic coping competencies for problems with day-to-day living; or, have established a pattern of reinforced reactions that are faulty and continually maintained due to the reward system; or both of these. Past traumas are not explored, and one�s inner conflicts are not addressed. Rather, the behavior therapist decides on the designated maladaptive behaviors to be modified and charts a course toward their elimination or modification in order to help the client toward a more adaptive and functional life. Therapists also specify a particular procedure to follow for the desired result. What is the Overall Goal of Behavior Therapy? In behavior therapy the goals must be concrete, clear, understood and fully agreed upon by both the counselor and the client. Overall, the behavior therapist seeks to create a new environment for learning, where the client plays an active role in deciding upon treatment modality. This simple idea gives the client a certain ownership of the procedures at hand and increases the likelihood of success from a behavioral point of view. To do this one must clearly identify the problem(www.barksdale.latech.edu/ Merryman/COUN%20460/Ch10%20Main.ppt). Therapists seek to extinguish or counter-condition the maladaptive reactions that the client has been conditioned toward; Or, to manipulate the environmental contingencies to shape overt reactions (for a hard-lined behaviorist, personality only exists as a collection of habits, open to modification). This goal of alteration in maladaptive behaviors is especially achievable, at least from a conscious level, when the client is conscious of the desired behavior and the reason for the reinforcement. The overall goal, ultimately, for behavior therapy is to bring the locus or control to the client, who instead of exhibiting desired reactions to stimuli for reward, they self-monitor and automatically react with the set of therapy conditioned responses. What Techniques and Interventions are utilized in Achieving that Goal? Several techniques are utilized to bring about these behavioral changes with the client. Treatment is extremely collaborative and the client begins to self-monitor almost immediately. Treatment is also very aggressive, seeking out the heart of the problem and getting to matters of treating and changing without, according to the behaviorists, undue beating around the bush or the problem. The Therapists duty is seen as one of �watchdog� always looking for clues from the client and always seeking information. The therapist must help to clarify the problem, design a target behavior, set specific goals with the client, identify the main conditions, implement the plan for change, evaluate the results, conduct follow-up assessments, and be a role model for the client. Guided Exposure The first technique we will discuss to that end is guided exposure. This technique is the gradual extinguishing of a learned response of anxiety to benign stimuli by exposing the client to the stimuli causing all the trouble. This kind of technique comes as one of two methods: �systematic desensitization�, in which the client is slowly exposed to the troubling stimuli by imagining themselves exposed, gradually extinguishing the unwarranted response. Sometimes hypnosis is used to relax clients and sometimes the treatment can occur in a group setting as well as in a marathon form. First built upon the prototype of Mary Cover Jones� work and later fully developed by Joseph Wolpe (Butcher, Carson, & Mineka p.655). This kind of therapy is especially effective with an anxiety disorder. The second form of guided exposure therapy is �in vivo exposure� in which the client is directly and experientially exposed to the stimuli which causes the anxiety. Perhaps a therapist will take the client to the top of a tall building to demonstrate the likelihood of a safe and trouble free experience there. Since this can be too dangerous in some situations. In this case, in vivo exposure is not the treatment of choice. Clients can also be so fearful of a situation that they cannot bring themselves to start in vivo and must work with imagination first. Aversion therapy is the use of punishment to reinforce aversion to desired stimuli. For instance, if one is attempting to stop smoking, perhaps keeping a rubber band around the wrist and popping it hard each time a craving arises will be enough to cause associative aversion to the addiction. This treatment has been used effectively (as was shown, somewhat unrealistically, in the movie Clockwork Orange) with sexual offenders and violence prone convicts. In the film, however, there was also a string association with music played during the aversion therapy sessions, creating an unwanted aversion to Beethoven�s ninth symphony (Tavris & Wade, 2000 p.625). Modeling is learning by imitation. Sometimes quite effective with profoundly retarded clients in teaching basic skills and with introverted clients to help with social situations. This is the systematic use of reinforcement to suppress and extinguish undesired behaviors and to bring about desire responses and maintain them in the client. Response shaping is a technique in which positive reinforcement is often used to slowly and deliberately create the desired response where there was none. Token economies are pseudo financial systems set up to reinforce desire behaviors usually in a group. Tokens can but are not always exchangeable for actual items. These economies are set up to develop intrinsic rather than extrinsic reinforcement. (A job well done is its own reinforcement) Behavioral contracting is an actual agreement between parties in a therapeutic situation. The benefit of contracting is a kind of perfect clarity on the definition of unacceptable behaviors, causes of these behaviors and the desired results. Often contracts are temporary interruptions in self-reinforcing negative behavioral habits. The physiological systems of heart rate, skin response and blood pressure seemed total out of the reach of conscious control until the early sixties when a few researchers such as H.D. Kimmel, began to demonstrate that conscious control could be learned by direct feedback methods. Biofeedback treatment takes place by monitoring the physiological responses to be modified, converting the response into a graduated visual or auditory signal, providing a means of prompt feedback-which indicates to the client exactly when the change is taking place. (Butcher, Carson, & Mineka p.661) References Butcher, J. Carson, R, & Mineka, S. (2000) Abnormal Psychology and Modern Life (11th ed.) . Needham Heights, MA: Allyn and Bacon. Merryman, H. (2002) Behavior Therapy, [Power Point Presentation on the Web site Louisiana Technical University, Barksdale]. Retrieved July 25, 2004, from the World Wide Web: www.barksdale.latech.edu/ Merryman/COUN%20460/Ch10%20Main.ppt Tavris, C & Wade, C (2000). Psychology (6th ed.). Upper Saddle River NJ: Prentis Hall. |