Lecture
Plan.
one.
A. Ellis proceeds rather from the phenomenological position that anxiety, guilt, depression and other psychological problems are not caused by the stressful situations as such, but by how people perceive these events, what they think of them. Ellis says, for example, that you are upset not because you failed an exam, but because you think that failure is a misfortune that indicates your inability. Ellis Therapy seeks to identify, first and foremost, such detrimental personalities (“self-inflicting”) and problem-causing thoughts that the patient has acquired as a result of improper learning, and then help the patient to replace these maladaptive thinking patterns with more realistic ones, using modeling, promotion and logic . As in A. Beck's cognitive therapy, in Ellis's rational emotive therapy, much attention is paid to behavioral techniques, including homework.
So, a new stage in the development of behavioral therapy is marked by the transformation of its classical model, based on the principles of classical and operant conditioning, into a cognitive-behavioral model. The target of a “pure” behavioral therapist is behavior change; The target of a cognitive therapist is a change in the perception of oneself and the surrounding reality. Cognitive behavioral therapists, like their predecessors, are not interested in the past or the causes of neurotic disorders. They say that no one knows the real reasons, and besides, it is not proven that knowledge of the causes is related to healing.
The founder of RET A. Ellis formulated a number of provisions that are actively used in practical correctional psychology. One of these provisions, often quoted by Ellis, is the statement: "People are not hampered by things, but by what they see them."
Based on emphatically-scientific approaches in the structure of individual consciousness, A. Ellis seeks to free the client from the ties and shortages of stereotypes and clichés, to provide a freer and unbiased view of the world. In the concept of A. Ellis, a person is treated as self-assessing, self-supporting and self-speaking.
A. Ellis believes that every person is born with a certain potential, and this potential has two sides: rational and irrational; constructive and destructive, etc. According to A. Ellis, psychological problems appear when a person tries to follow simple preferences (the wishes of love, approval, support) and mistakenly believes that these simple preferences are the absolute measure of his life success. In addition, man is a creature extremely subject to various influences at all levels, from biological to social. Therefore, to reduce all the mutable complexity of human nature to something alone A. Ellis is not inclined.
In RET, there are three leading psychological aspects of human functioning: thoughts (cognitions), feelings and behavior. A. Ellis distinguished two types of cognition: descriptive and evaluative.
Descriptive cognitions contain information about reality, about what a person perceived in the world is “pure” information about reality. Estimated cognitions reflect a person’s attitude to this reality. Descriptive cognitions are necessarily connected with evaluative links of varying degrees of rigidity.
Non-objective events in themselves cause us positive or negative emotions, and our inner perception of these events - their assessment. We feel what we think about the perceived. Disorders in the emotional sphere are the result of cognitive impairments (such as supergeneralization, false conclusions and hard attitudes).
The source of psychological disorders is a system of individual irrational ideas about the world, assimilated, as a rule, in childhood from significant adults. These violations A. Ellis called irrational attitudes. From the point of view of A. Ellis, these are rigid links between descriptive and evaluative cognitions, such as prescriptions, requirements, mandatory orders, which have no exceptions, and they are absolutist. Therefore, irrational attitudes do not correspond to reality in both the strength and quality of this prescription. If irrational attitudes are not realized, they lead to long-lasting, inadequate emotions to the situation, and make it difficult for the individual to do so. The core of the emotional disturbances, according to Ellis, is self-incrimination.
Important in RET is the concept of "trap", i.e. all those cognitive formations that create unwarranted neurotic anxiety. A normally functioning person has a rational evaluative cognition system, which is a system of flexible connections between descriptive and evaluative cognitions. It is probabilistic in nature, rather expresses a wish, a preference for a certain development of events, therefore it leads to moderate emotions, although sometimes they can be intense, but they do not capture the individual for a long time and therefore do not block his activity "do not impede the achievement of goals.
The emergence of psychological problems in the client is connected with the functioning of the system of irrational attitudes.
The concept of Ellis argues that although it is pleasant to be loved in an atmosphere of acceptance, a person should feel quite vulnerable in such an atmosphere and not feel uncomfortable in the absence of an atmosphere of love and full acceptance.
A. Ellis suggested that positive emotions (such as feelings of love or delight) are often related or are the result of inner conviction, expressed in the form of the phrase: "This is good for me." Negative emotions (such as anger or depression) are associated with the conviction expressed by the phrase: “This is bad for me.” He believed that the emotional response to the situation reflects the “label” that is “glued” to it (for example, it is dangerous or pleasant), even in the case when the “label” is not true. To achieve happiness, it is necessary to rationally formulate goals and choose adequate means.
Ellis developed a kind of "neurotic code", i.e. set of erroneous judgments, the desire to fulfill which leads to psychological problems:
A. Ellis proposed his personality structure, which he named after the first letters of the Latin alphabet “ABC-theory”: A - an activating event; B - client's opinion about the event; C — the emotional or behavioral consequences of an event; O— subsequent reaction to an event as a result of mental processing; E - the final value inference (constructive or destructive).
This conceptual scheme has found wide application in practical correctional psychology, since it allows the client himself to keep effective self-observation and self-analysis in the form of diary entries.
Analysis of the client's behavior or self-analysis / according to the scheme “event - perception of an event — reaction — deliberation — conclusion” has a high productivity and training effect.
“ABC-scheme” is used to help the client in a problem situation to switch from irrational attitudes to rational ones. The work is built in several stages.
The first stage is the clarification, clarification of the parameters of the event (A), including the parameters that most emotionally affected the client, which caused inadequate reactions. The cause of emotional disorder is in the belief of the individual that his desires should be satisfied. At this stage, there is a personal assessment of the event. Clarification allows the client to differentiate events that can be and which cannot be changed. At the same time, the purpose of the correction is not to encourage the client to avoid a collision with an event, not to change it (for example, transfer to a new job if there is an insoluble conflict with the boss), but to realize the system of evaluating co-complications that impede the resolution of this conflict, restructuring this system and only after that - the decision to change the situation. Otherwise, the client saves potential vulnerability in similar situations.
The second stage is the identification of the emotional and behavioral consequences of the perceived event (C). The purpose of this stage is to identify the full range of emotional reactions to an event (since not all emotions are easily differentiated by a person, and some are suppressed and not realized due to the inclusion of rationalization and other defense mechanisms).
The third stage is the reconstruction of irrational installations. The reconstruction should be started when the client easily identifies irrational installations in a problem situation. It can proceed: at the cognitive level, the level of imagination, the level of behavior - direct action.
Reconstruction at the cognitive level includes the client’s proof of the truth of the installation, the need to preserve it in this situation. In the process of this kind of evidence, the client sees even more clearly the negative consequences of the preservation of this installation. The use of auxiliary modeling (like others would solve this problem, what attitudes they would have at the same time) allows to form new rational attitudes at the cognitive level.
NLP emerged in the early 1970s and was the fruit of the collaboration of John Grinder, who was then an assistant professor of linguistics at the University of California at Santa Cruz, and Richard Bendler, a psychology student at the same university.
Bandler and Grinder did not intend to open a new therapy school at all, they just wanted to identify the patterns used by prominent therapists and pass them on to others. They were not interested in the theory, they created models of successful therapy that worked in practice and which could be learned. The three therapists they modeled were individuals that were very different from each other, and yet they used surprisingly similar basic patterns. Bandler and Grinder uncovered these patterns, refined them and built an elegant model that can be applied in effective communication, personal change, accelerated learning and, of course, in receiving more pleasure from life.
NLP developed in two complementary directions. First, as the process of discovering patterns of mastery in any field of human activity. Secondly, as an effective way of thinking and communication, practiced by prominent people. These patterns and skills can be used on their own, but they can also serve as feedback in the modeling process to make it even more powerful.
In 1977, John and Richard held a series of highly successful public workshops throughout America. NLP is spreading rapidly: in America, to date, about 100 thousand people have undergone NLP training in one form or another.
In the spring of 1976, John and Richard hid in a log cabin high in the mountains near Santa Cruz, bringing together all the insights and discoveries they had made. By the end of the marathon, which lasted 36 hours, they opened a bottle of red Californian wine and asked themselves: “What will it be called?”
The result was neuro-linguistic programming, a cumbersome phrase that hides three simple ideas. The “Subsurface” part reflects the fundamental idea that behavior originates in the neurological processes of vision, hearing, smell, taste, touch and sensation. We perceive the world through our five senses, we extract the “meaning” from information and then follow it. Our neuroscience includes not only invisible thought processes, but also our visible physiological reactions to ideas and events. One is simply a reflection of the other on the physical level. Body and mind form an inseparable unity, a human being.
The "linguistic" part of the title indicates that we use language to streamline our thoughts and behavior and to communicate with other people. "Programming" refers to the ways in which we organize our ideas and actions to get results.
NLP deals with the structure of a person’s subjective experience: how we organize what we see, hear and feel, and how we edit and filter through the senses what we get from the outside world. NLP also explores how we describe it in language and how we act - intentionally or unintentionally - to get a result.
We use our senses to perceive the outside world, to study and transform it. The world is an infinite variety of all sorts of sensory manifestations, but we are able to perceive only a very small part of this diversity. And the part that we perceive is filtered by our unique experience, culture, language, beliefs, values, interests, and assumptions. Each of us lives in a unique reality, built from our own sensory impressions and individual life experience, and we act based on what we perceive - our model of the world.
The world is so wide and rich that we have to simplify it in order to make sense of it. Mapping is a good example of how we comprehend the outside world. Maps are selective: they both carry information and miss it, but they turn out to be invaluable helpers in exploring the territory. What kind of map you make depends on what you notice and where you want to go.
The map is not the territory it describes. We pay attention to those aspects of the world that interest us and ignore others. The world is always richer than the ideas we have about it. The filters that we impose on our perception determine the world in which we live. They tell the story of Picasso, to whom the stranger turned and asked him why he does not paint things as they really are.
Picasso looked puzzled. “I don’t quite understand what you mean,” he replied.
The man got a photo of his wife. “Look, here’s how,” he said. “That’s what my wife really looks like.”
The appearance of Picasso betrayed doubt. "It is very small, is it not? And slightly flat?"
An artist, a lumberjack and a botanist, walking through the forest, will get very different experiences and will notice a variety of things. If you go around the world looking for mastery, you will find mastery. If you go around the world. looking for problems, then you will find problems. Arabic proverb says: "How a piece of bread looks like depends on whether you are hungry or full."
Very narrow beliefs and interests will make the perception of the world dull, predictable and joyless. The same world can become filled and exciting. The difference lies not in the world itself, but in those filters through which we perceive it.
We have a lot of natural, useful and necessary filters. Language is a filter.This is a map of our thoughts and experiences, separated from the real world. Consider for a moment what the word "beauty" means to you. Undoubtedly, you have memories and experiences, internal pictures, sounds and sensations that allow you to understand this word. Equally, someone else will have different memories and experiences and will think of this word in a different way. Which of you is right? Both are right, and each is within his own reality. A word is not an experience that it describes, and yet people will fight, and sometimes even die, believing that geography is the territory. Our beliefs also act as filters, forcing us to act in a certain way and pay attention to some things to the detriment of others.NLP offers some way to think about ourselves and the world around us, it is itself a filter. To apply NLP, you are not required to change your beliefs or values, you just need to be curious and ready to experiment.
There are several basic ideas in NLP that are very useful. We suggest you begin to behave as if these ideas were true, and notice the changes that will arise as a result of these assumptions. Changing your filters. You can change your world.
Some basic NLP filters are called behavioral frameworks. They are a way of understanding how we act. The first frame is a result orientation, not a problem. This means that you are looking for what you aspire to, find the necessary solutions and use them to move towards your goal. Problem orientation is usually referred to as the “charge frame”. It consists in a careful analysis of the reasons that something is going wrong. This means questions like "Why did I have this problem? How does it limit me? Whose error is it?" This kind of questions seldom lead to anything useful. The formulation of such questions will make you feel even worse and will not advance you in any way to a solution.
The second frame is to ask the question “how?” And not “why?”. The question is “how?” will lead you to an understanding of the structure of the problem. The question “why?” will most likely help to find justifying circumstances and reasons without changing anything.
The third frame is feedback instead of failure. There is no such thing as failure, there are results. They can be used as feedback, adjustment, an excellent opportunity to notice something that you did not attach importance to before. Failure is just a way of describing the result you were aiming for. You can use the results to adjust the direction of your efforts. Feedback keeps the goal in your field of vision. Failure is a dead end. Two very similar words, and yet they represent two completely different ways of thinking.
The fourth frame is to consider opportunity, not necessity. And again this is only a change in point of view. Focus on what you can do, on the opportunities available, and not on the circumstances that limit you. Often the barriers are not as impregnable as it seemed at first.
Finally, NLP welcomes the position of curiosity and surprise instead of pretense. This very simple idea has profound implications. Small children learn extremely quickly, and their curiosity helps them in this. They do not know much and understand it. Therefore, they do not worry at all that they will look stupid if they ask questions.
Literature.
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The basics of psychotherapy
Terms: The basics of psychotherapy