Behaviour And Humanistic Therapies

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Behaviour therapy

Behaviour therapy deals with the modification of abnormal behaviour, e.g. phobias or obsessional behaviour, and involves systems of gradual densensiti-zation and counter-conditioning to promote a more normal response to the stimuli. The patient constructs a list of scenes he or she would not find at all stressful working up to a scene which provokes unbearable anxiety.

A patient with a life-long snake phobia might, for example, have to imagine and talk about drawings of snakes and snake-like things, then progress to photographs of earth-worms, then perhaps handling earth-worms and so on until the patient can imagine the most fear-arousing scene-an encounter with a real snake with the normal amount of anxiety expected.

For patients coping with an addiction (e.g. to drugs, alcohol or food), aver-sive therapy links the subtance they desire with unpleasant feelings. An alcoholic may be forced to drink some alcohol after he has been given a nauseainducing drug. Outside the therapist's office, however, this therapy probably has very little effect. Behaviour therapy also includes those therapies which seek to socially educate the patient, such as through step-by-step training in assertiveness, or through role-paying

Humanistic therapies

The humanistic approach is more patient-centred, that is, encouraging the patient to help himself through non-directive techniques that never advise the patient but reiterate what the patient has seemed to express his or herself. One exponent of this system was Carl Rogers in the early 1940s. This technique holds that personality development is like growth but that sometimes this growth is stunted because the patient is out of touch with his or her own feelings.

It is the therapist's role to create a relationship between therapist and client that allows the feelings to be released and for growth to resume. Humanistic therapists have to have an empathic role, unconditionally accepting patients to show them that they are held in esteem and so that they in turn may feel their own self worth.