[fabioz]

I believe this view is actually outdated -- it was actually true in the past, but I know that currently "Cognitive Behavioral Therapy" does define things much more objectively than previous approaches...

It's a bit unfortunate that people out of the psychology area don't even really know that there are multiple different Psychotherapies approaches and that they vary wildly in how problems are tackled/studied (source: my wife works in the area).

[megous]

No. CBT is still a mumbo jumbo of concepts and approaches that have no relation to reality (like any other therapeutic school), other than "if you follow these practices, you will maybe get better".

You'll not be able to prove validity of the concepts behind this school of therapy themselves in any other sense, even if you would be able to identify some coherent set of concepts from all the various techniques and approaches that CBT subsumed over the years.

And certainly just because "if you follow these practices, you will maybe get better" metric does not say anything about validity of the concepts of a particular school of therapy in any case, no matter what school you're talking about.

I mean yeah, many people usually care about whether some therapy works and how well, and not whether the concepts that you're told in therapy to justify what the therapy is doing make coherent sense or can be scientifically validated, so this is usually not a problem for people in need of care. But idea that CBT's concepts are more objective than other mumbo jumbo therapies out there is just plain wrong.

[wruza]

if you follow these practices, you will maybe get better

Idk if my therapist used something from outside of CBT, but he definitely marketed himself as a CBT-ist. I was never given this "these practices" thing. I've solved my:

- Environment control anxiety (long story)

- Strong anxiety of being late. Eradicated via specific methods that I fully understand and were specific to me: recollecting the actual source event through pre-sleep questioning, realization of specific anxiety behavior loops (just by talking about my routines) - long preparation and inability to do anything deep 4-5 hours before an appoinment, then few times intentional being late, then later unintentional, now I mostly don't care when it's not a big deal and not my need. Can just do my things up until a notification, or miss it completely.

- Depression with one heavy clinical episode without using pills. Basically I have found a key misconception in my life, work related, and adjusted thoughts radically to a real reality rather than old made-up (which was so comfortable to people I worked with).

Is that mumbo jumbo? Cause if it is, I couldn't care less how anyone calls it. That said, I can see how different people could fail to perform the methods and ideas involved. It really requires a skill of debugging and questioning yourself. Lots of people are too stubborn to even think about being less stubborn for just a minute, ime.

[megous]

Yes, it's still mumbo jumbo. And yes, I acknowledged your view in advance in the last paragraph.

Therapy school can have simplistic invalid theories of functioning of human beings, and still be useful to some people. Just like religion can be psychlogically useful to people but it's all nonsense. Whether some therapy works says nothing about rationales and theories behind it, in other words.

Whether you got better or not is irrelevant to the question of whether CBT views on how human beings function are valid.

[wruza]

I’ll try to take your point and let’s assume that it worked for me due to “therapothropic principle”. But I have three questions, all seem to be related.

1) It still involved structured work without which it couldn’t sort out on itself. Okay, this is still religious. I believed (wanted) that it should work, and it did. But we’re talking about modifying thinking itself here, beliefs themselves. That’s a strange area because how can you even avoid that? It’s sort of an incompleteness theorem thing. Like, a therapist changed me, but he can’t change those who don’t believe in change, while “belief” is a part of the… yadda yadda. Iow, how does one falsify a therapy, I guess?

2) Since we’re talking statistics and not structure (are we?), can it be that naturally only a part of population can be “cured”? Like, you can’t cure really bad medical cases either, and some of these are common. What if there’s a consistent set of prerequisites and “therapothropism” is not random? I guess this question is naive and there’s more to it, but can’t think of anything here.

3) In my experience, religion is much more shallow wrt to “you”, and is fixed. In a sense that cbt solutions are more “meta” and then get tailored to the personal events. While religion is usually an omnidude watching you and many others and rules and requirements are all the same. CBT actively refrains from judging and giving specific advices. Even from both-religious position, is it fair to put both on the same line?

[kirsebaer]

Exposure therapy for PTSD, phobias, and other anxiety disorders has lots of evidence from clinical trials. It is based on animal studies of “fear extinction”. You often see good results after 10-12 hours of focused therapy sessions.

[theGnuMe]

EMDR works as well.