0.18 Cognitive perspectives on personality development  (Page 23/30)

Both self-esteem and self-acceptance, then, can be had definitionally - for the asking, for the choosing. Take one or the other. Choose! Better yet, take no global rating. Choose your goals and values and rate how you experience them - well or badly. Don’t rate yourself, being, entity, personality at all. Your totality is too complex and too changing to measure. Repeatedly acknowledge that .

Now stop farting around and get on with your life ! (pg. 16; Ellis, 2005)

Discussion Question: Ellis opposes the concept of self-esteem because he believes it requires a person to judge themselves. He advocates instead that we unconditionally accept ourselves, faults included. Does this make sense to you?

Beck’s Cognitive Model of Depression

Having begun his research in an attempt to examine Freud’s theory on the cause of depression, Beck continued studying depression and suicide throughout his career. The reason for this continued focus was the prevalence of depression in society:

Depression is the most common psychiatric disorder treated in office practice and in outpatient clinics. Some authorities have estimated that at least 12 per cent of the adult population will have an episode of depression of sufficient clinical severity to warrant treatment. (pg. vii; Beck, 1967)

Relying on an interplay between clinical work and research, Beck proposed a cognitive model based on automatic thoughts , schemas , and cognitive distortions (Beck, 1967; Beck&Freeman, 1990; Beck, Rush, Shaw,&Emery, 1979; Beck&Weishaar, 1995; Pretzer&Beck, 2005). Automatic thoughts are an individual’s immediate, spontaneous appraisals of a given situation. They shape and elicit a person’s emotional and behavioral responses to that situation. Since they are automatic, they are rarely questioned. Even when they are predominantly negative, the individual accepts them as true and can be overwhelmed by constant questions and images that hurt one’s self-esteem (questions such as “Why am I such a failure,” or seeing oneself as ugly). The reason that even highly negative automatic thoughts are accepted, even when they might be objectively untrue, is that these thoughts do not arise spontaneously. Rather, they are the result of the person’s schemas. Every situation is comprised of many stimuli, and when confronted with an unfamiliar situation a person tends to conceptualize it. Although different people will conceptualize the situation differently, each individual will be consistent. These stable cognitive patterns of interpreting situations are known as schemas. An individual’s schemas then determine how they are likely to respond, automatically, to many situations.

People are also prone to a variety of cognitive distortions, which can amplify the effects of one’s schemas, thus helping to confirm maladaptive schemas even when contradictory evidence is available. Over time, Beck and his colleagues have identified a growing number of such distortions, such as: dichotomous thinking , or seeing things as only black or white, without the possibility of shades of gray; personalization , the tendency to interpret external events as being related directly to oneself; overgeneralization , the application of isolated incidents to either all or at least many other situations; and catastrophizing , treating actual or anticipated negative events as intolerable catastrophes, even though they may be relatively minor problems. Overall, these cognitive distortions lead the individual into extreme, judgmental, global interpretations of the situations they experience, which establish general schemas, which lead to automatic thoughts and feelings that support the idiosyncratic experience of the world (Beck, Rush, Shaw,&Emery, 1979; Beck&Weishaar, 1995; Pretzer&Beck, 2005). The goal of cognitive therapy, therefore, is to help the individual break out of this self-supporting, maladaptive pattern of cognition.