New set of 6 counselling / psychology bookmarks

HIGH QUALITY LAMINATED BOOKMARKS

Bookmark number 1 in photograph:

Aaron Beck: cognitive therapy

The front of the bookmark has a picture of Aaron Beck and reads:

COGNITIVE THERAPY

Beck maintains that people with psychological problems usually commit characteristic errors, which shifts objective reality in the direction of self-depreciation. Cognitive therapy perceives psychological problems as stemming from commonplace processes such as faulty thinking, making incorrect conclusions on the basis of too little or incorrect information, and failing to distinguish between fantasy and reality.  Some of these cognitive distortions are:

Arbitrary inferences: Making conclusions without the supporting and relevant evidence.

Dichotomous thinking: Thinking that everything is either very good or very bad.

Fortune telling: You assume what is going to happen in the future before it happens.

The back of the bookmark reads:

COGNITIVE DISTORTIONS

Labelling and mislabelling: Explaining one’s identity on the basis of imperfections and mistakes and allowing them to define one’s true personality.                                                                                                                                                                                                              

Mental filter: You concentrate so strongly on one aspect of a task or a situation that you can't even see the rest.                                                                                         

Mind reading: You arbitrarily conclude that someone is reacting negatively to you and don't bother to check it out.                                                                           

Minimalization and Maximization: Getting things out of perspective: e.g. underestimating ones own performance or overestimating the importance of a negative event.                                                                                                                                                                                  

Overgeneralization: Drawing general conclusions from a single event.                                                                                                                                             

Personalization: When individuals relate external events to themselves, even when there is no basis for making the association.                                                        

Polarized thinking: Thinking and interpreting in an all-or-nothing manner or classifying experience in either-or extremes.                                                                     

Selective abstraction: When other information is ignored, and the significance of the total context is missed.

Bookmark number 2 in photograph:

Eric Berne: Transactional analysis

The front of the bookmark has a picture of Eric Berne and reads:

TRANSACTIONAL ANALYSIS

Contracts: TA practice is based upon mutual contracting for change.                       

Discounting: The process of ignoring or minimizing certain aspects of reality e.g. ignoring ones resources or certain aspects of a situation.                     

Drivers: Messages or instructions we feel compelled to follow e.g. "Be Perfect” or “Be Strong”     

Ego States: An entire system of thoughts, feelings, and behaviours from which we interact with one another.                                  

Games: Repetitive transactions intended to obtain strokes but instead they reinforce negative feelings and self-concepts, and mask the direct expression of thoughts and emotions.              I

I'm OK - You're OK: A person’s basic beliefs about self and others.  One of the four life positions.

The back of the bookmark reads:

Injunction: A messages we received that usually begin with the word "Don't" and are instructions on how to behave e.g. "Don't be you".

Intimacy:  A mode of time-structuring in which people express authentic feelings and wants to each other without censoring.

Life Script: An unconscious life-plan made in childhood.

Marshmallow-throwing: Giving out insincere positive strokes.

Racket: A familiar emotion or behavioural trait that was encouraged in childhood and currently acts as a substitute for another feeling that was prohibited e.g. feeling guilt instead of the authentic emotion fear.

Redecision: The capacity to re-decide negative decisions made as a child.

Stamp: A racket feeling which the individual has stored away with the intention of cashing it in later for some negative payoff.

Stroke: A unit of interpersonal recognition.

Stroke economy:  A set of restrictive parental rules regarding stroking.

Transaction: Communication exchanges between people e.g. Parent ego state to Child ego state.

Ulterior transaction: A transaction in which an overt message and a covert message are conveyed at the same time.

Bookmark number 3 in photograph:

Albert Ellis: rational emotive behaviour therapy

The front of the bookmark has a picture of Albert Ellis and reads:

RATIONAL EMOTIVE BEHAVIOURAL THERAPY

Rational Emotive Behavioural Therapy (REBT) is one of the first forms of Cognitive Behaviour Therapy and was first expounded by Albert Ellis in 1950’s.  The basic assumption of REBT is that people contribute to their own psychological problems and symptoms by the way they interpret events and situations. REBT’s basic hypothesis is that our emotions stem mainly from our beliefs, evaluations and reactions to life situations.

The back of the bookmark reads:

THE ABC THEORY OF PERSONALITY

A)  Activating event: e.g. divorce.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                

B)  Belief: e.g. “I’m a failure”                                                                     

C)  Emotional and behavioural consequences: e.g. depression

D)  Disputing intervention: There are three components to the disputing process: detecting, debating and discriminating.  First clients learn how to detect their irrational beliefs, particularly their ‘shoulds’. Then clients debate their beliefs by learning how to question them. Finally, clients learn to discriminate irrational beliefs from rational beliefs.                             

E)  Effective rational beliefs:  Eventually clients arrive at E, a new and effective belief system.                                                                          

F)  New feeling: If the above is successful the client creates F, a new set of feelings.                            

Bookmark number 4 in photograph:

Sigmund Freud: Psychanalysis

The front of the bookmark has a picture of Sigmund Freud and reads:

PSYCHOANALYSIS

Countertransference: The therapist’s displacement of emotion onto the client or the therapist’s reaction to the client’s transference.

Defence mechanisms: Strategies that people use in order to cope with inner conflict and to reduce anxiety.

Denial: Unconsciously denying thoughts, feelings or needs so as to avoid distress.

Displacement: Emotion or behaviour directed towards someone or something else other than which it was originally intended.

Ego: The division of the mind that is conscious and controls thought and behaviour; the part most in touch with external reality.

Free association: A technique in which the client’s is encouraged to freely articulate in order to reveal unconscious thoughts.

The back of the bookmark reads:

Id: The primitive area of their personality, which is present from birth and filled with instinctual energy.

Psychosexual stages: The focus of physical and psychological energy starting from birth and affecting character formation. The 5 stages are: Oral, Anal, Phallic, Latency, and Genital.

Regression: Reverting to earlier or more childlike behaviour.

Repression: The process of pushing unacceptable feelings into the unconscious so as to avoid anxiety.

Resistance: The process in which the ego opposes the conscious recall of anxiety-producing experiences.

Superego: The division of the unconscious that is formed through the internalisation of moral judgements that are absorbed through parental and societal influence.

Transference: The process by which emotions and desires originally associated with one person, such as a parent or teacher, are unconsciously shifted to the therapist.

Unconscious: Information about ourselves that we have no immediate access to.

Bookmark number 5 in photograph:

Fritz Perls: Gestalt

The front of the bookmark has a picture of Fritz Perls and reads:

GESTALT THERAPY

KEY CONCEPTS

Contact cycle: A way of understanding the flow of awareness and tracking the formation, interruption and completion or emerging figures.

Deflection: Ignoring an internal impulse or one from the environment in order to prevent full awareness e.

Empty chair technique: A technique in which an absent person or another part of the same person is ‘placed’ in an empty chair and a dialogue conducted.

Exaggeration: A technique in which the client is asked to exaggerate a behaviour (usually, for example a body movement) leading to heightened awareness.

The back of the bookmark reads:

GESTALT THERAPY: KEY CONCEPTS

Figure and ground: Figure refers to the individual’s need at any given moment e.g. the need for food or love.  Ground refers to that which is background to the person’s awareness.

Here and now: The focus of gestalt therapy is on what the client feels, thinks and does in the present.

Language: The therapist has the client use language that allows them to say what they mean and mean what they say.

Introjection: A process whereby an opinion or attitude is unquestionably absorbed from the environment and deemed true.

Retroflection: When a person holds back their impulse to take actions e.g. feelings, behaviour or speech.

Topdog/underdog: The topdog is your inner dictator who tells you what you should do. The underdog plays the victim/rebel and schemes to thwart and avoid doing as the topdog demands.

Unfinished business: Refers to situations in the past that have not achieved satisfactory closure

Wholeness: The client’s total involvement – physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual.

Bookmark number 6 in photograph:

Carl Rogers

The front of the bookmark has a picture of Carl Rogers and reads:

THE NECESSARY AND SUFFICIENT CONDITIONS

(1) Two persons are in psychological contact.

(2) The first, whom we shall term the client, is in a state of incongruence, being vulnerable or anxious.

(3) The second person, whom we shall term the therapist, is congruent or integrated in the relationship.

(4) The therapist experiences unconditional positive regard for the client.

(5) The therapist experiences an empathic understanding of the client’s internal frame of reference, and endeavours to communicate this to the client.

(6) The communication to the client of the therapist’s empathic understanding and unconditional positive regard is to a minimal extent achieved.

                         (Rogers, 1959

The back of the bookmark reads:

PERSON-CENTRED THERAPY

Carl Rogers was one of the most influential psychologists and psychotherapists of our time. His unique view of human nature led him to originate an approach to psychotherapy called Person-Centred Therapy.

Rogers believed that there is, in every individual, the capacity to actualize the self, and if freed, will result in the person solving his or her own problems. Contrary to the professional assumption at the time, the Person Centred therapist did not present him or herself as an expert who understood the problem and decided how it should be solved. The theory asserts that it is when the person perceives unconditional positive regard in the context of empathic understanding from a congruent individual (the therapist) that the actualizing tendency of the client is freed and the client can answer his or her own problems.

EMPATHY * CONGRUENCE * UNCONDITIONAL POSITIVE REGARD (UPR)