Cognitive Behavior Management Theory Concepts
While the underlying theory of cognitive behavioral management is related to social learning theory, there are many theoretical constructs which concern us in delineating a full understanding of how it is used. While it is relatively easy to suggest that thought controls behavior, meaning of course, that if you believe that you are superman, you will try to fly, this simple construct is not easy. It requires much more, because in many senses it is self reflective. Not only do we need to help people with problems in living learn to attend to their internal dialogue as a means to making choices about change, but we must understand that as theorists and clinicians, we must also attend and make choices. The simple becomes difficult when we attempt to break through our own belief systems and deal with the dichotomies of our own internal realities and those of a broader world perspective. In order to help you examine these issues we include short papers on a a variety of subjects.
Theory Content
11 Perspective & Personality
…ambiguity is pervasive; but the conscious experience of ambiguity is quite rare. [Baar] The illusion to your left has eight different perspectives or ways of delineating relative positions. Some people with study will be able to see all eight perspective and others...
12 Elements of Cognitive Change
INTRODUCTION When a person has an experience, s/he interprets the experience based either upon an ever expanding range of utility [pleasure/pain], upon prior knowledge or based on analogy with prior knowledge. Over time, these interpretations accumulate until the...
13 Reality
The classical ideal of objectivity – the idea that the world has a definite state of existence independent of our observing it, has been effectively ravaged by quantum physics. “The actual state of existence depends in part on how we observe it and what we choose to see. Objective reality must be replaced by observer created reality.” [Pagels – 1982] The conceptual framework of observer created reality is carried into the macroworld through the functioning of the mind.
14 Science
Mundus vult decipi: the world wants to be deceived. The truth is too complex and frightening; the taste for the truth is an acquired taste that few people acquire. Not all deceptions are palatable. Untruths are too easy to come by, too quickly exploded, too cheap and...
15 Emotions
Anyone can become angry - that is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way - that is not easy. Aristotle, The Nichomachean Ethics The question of emotions is one that is...
16 Fear Anxiety and Attachment
These affects or as generally referred to, emotions, are the major methods of human beings of valuing an event or experience and contribute a great deal to the way we experience the world and how we create our world view.
17 Consciousness
In 1988 Bernard J. Baars published A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness which provides the final piece of our theoretical puzzle. The book is concerned with conscious and nonconscious processes. Consciousness is not something we can observe directly, other than in...
18 Creating Me
Each of us creates our own reality and decides how we will relate to that reality. The style and attitudes we choose creates our personality, for what are we if not our thoughts, feelings and behaviors.
19 Self
Most of us intuitively believe we have a self and that this self is in some way capable of ‘free will’. Some, with a metaphysical bent, contrast the self and the soul, or combine the self and the soul, thus making two non-definable entities into one. Self is in some way also connected to another non-definable concept of the ‘mind’.
20 Cognitive Behavior Management Orientation
Our awareness is the end product of an immensely complicated and imperfectly understood process, taking place in the central nervous system. What reaches our brain via the nervous system is not a meaningful picture of freestanding objects, but a deluge of nerve impulses.