E245B Cognitive Behavioral Therapy: Overview, Strategies, and Interventions for Common Clinical Presentations and Problems

Course overview

CBT is a reliable therapy found to work well in real-world settings for a host of problems and presentations. Intended for social workers, psychologists, marriage and family therapists, and counselors, participants of this course likely have some interest in and experience with CBT. Probable motivations for clinicians taking this course are either to improve their CBT practice to be more effective with their difficult to treat clients or to learn new interventions to add to their toolbox. This learning material is designed with these goals in mind. Although CBT does have a host of potent interventions which are examined in this course, it is more important for participants to learn to think like a CBT therapist. The true power of a CBT therapist is in knowing how and where to intervene. Learning to form individualized case conceptualizations and being familiar with diagnosis-specific models helps clinicians be more strategic with their interventions. In practice, CBT is a way of thinking that is driven by hypothesis testing and case formulation. CBT is among the most studied form of psychotherapy. Although it may sometimes be inaccurately conceptualized as a collection of interventions and strategies, the model is better characterized as a way of thinking, or a theory-driven philosophy (Beck & Dozois, 2011), which can be used to guide the selection of interventions (Rosenbaum & Ronen, 1998). This working formulation (i.e., the cognitive behavioral case conceptualization) evolves over the course of treatment, serving as a guide for treatment and a lens for understanding the client. This learning material first reviews the basic components of the model and then applies those principles to real world cases to illustrate how to use it with clients.