Cognitive restructuring: what is this therapeutic strategy like?

This psychotherapy resource helps the patient's beliefs and attitudes to change for the better.

Cognitive restructuring is one of those concepts that, through the practice of psychotherapy, have become part of the main pillars of the cognitivist current, the dominant paradigm in psychology today. Since the psychologist Albert Ellis established its foundations in the mid-twentieth century, this resource has become one of the main pillars of psychological intervention based on the cognitivist paradigm, the dominant one today.

In this article we will see what exactly is cognitive restructuring and how it helps to map the logic that psychotherapy has to follow. But, to answer this question we must first understand what cognitive schemas are.

The concept of cognitive schema

When it comes to understanding the complexity of the human mind, most psychologists use a concept known as cognitive schema. A cognitive schema is a set of beliefs, concepts and "mental images" that, by the way they relate to each other, create a system that shapes the way we interpret reality and makes us more likely to act in one way than another.

Thus, the cognitive schemas on which the idea of cognitive restructuring is based are, basically, the structure of our mentalityThe way in which we have learned to shape what we think and say, and what leads us to behave as we normally do of our own free will.

It should be kept in mind, however, that a cognitive schema is a useful representation of what is actually going on in our brains. As a representation that it is, it does not accurately capture the functioning of human thought, but simplifies it so that it is possible for us toRather, it simplifies it so that we can make hypotheses and predictions about how we act and how we interpret things.

In reality, in mental processes the content of our thoughts is not something separate from the neural "circuits" through which they pass, which means that the concept of cognitive schema does not perfectly capture the dynamic and changing character of our brain.

Cognitive restructuring: a definition

As we have seen, mental processes, although they have a certain stability (otherwise we could not speak of personality or cognitive schemas), are also very changeable and malleable. Cognitive restructuring takes advantage of this duality to offer a psychological intervention strategy useful for cognitive-behavioral therapies..

Specifically, what is proposed is that, through cognitive restructuring, we are able to modify our way of thinking and interpreting things in favor of the objective established in the therapy. Many times, a good part of the problems that patients have in psychotherapy consultations have to do with the impossibility of looking for alternative explanations about what is happening, while the ideas from which they start lead to a dead end causing anxiety, sadness, etc.

Thus, cognitive restructuring can be defined as a strategy used to improve the chances of psychotherapy patients to modify their cognitive schemas in the most adaptive way possible. to modify their cognitive schemas in the most adaptive way possible.. That is to say, it helps us not to be simple receivers of environmental influences, but to be able to shape our mentality and our habits in a way that makes us happy and allows us to live better.

Mental flexibility is not something new

Maybe for some people the idea of changing the structural aspects of our way of thinking for the sake of our happiness sounds too good to be true. The belief that past childhood and adolescence individuals do not change is widespread. However, although we may not realize it, there are many situations that show us otherwise.

Even outside the framework of psychotherapy and cognitive restructuring, there are contexts in which we are able to act in a way that does not define us. In fact, although it may not seem so, our mentality is constantly changingThe simple fact of being in certain contexts and not in others can cause us to have very different opinions and beliefs from those that would normally define us, in a matter of minutes.

For example, social pressure can lead us to perform acts that we would never have said we would be able to perform, as the various iterations of Milgram's experiment show. In the same way, the existence of sects based on fundamentalism shows us that all kinds of people are capable of leaving their family aside to devote all their efforts to making their religious community prosper.

In these cases, not only do people's actions change, but also their thoughts, which become relatively consistent with what they believe in. become relatively consistent with what they do, at least for a while.at least for a while.

In short, although sometimes we have the feeling that inside people's heads there is a way of thinking that is totally stable and that shows us the essence of that particular individual, this is an illusion. What happens is that normally people try not to expose themselves to situations that lead them to face situations that lead them to confront their fundamental beliefs.with which these changes in the cognitive schemes are in the habit of being slow and to pass unnoticed.

• Article related: "Types of psychological therapies".

The Difficult Part of Psychotherapy Sessions

As we have seen, in special situations our actions may not correspond to the kind of ideas and beliefs that we would say define us. The challenge is, however, to make these changes relatively stable and permanent rather than appearing only when we are in that particular type of situation, and to make them point toward the goals we are pursuing. making them point towards the goals pursued with the therapy, and not towards any otherand not in any of the others.

Cognitive restructuring is just that, an effort to make our mental processes take a different course than usual, and all this in a directed way, without leaving it to chance to determine what kind of changes will take place in people's attitudes and beliefs.

On the other hand, it must also be clear that cognitive restructuring must be part of a program that seeks to change not only the beliefs, the "theory" of what a person believes. It is also necessary to modify the practice, what the person does on a daily basis. In fact, if reality shows us something, as we have seen, it is that ideas and beliefs are not born spontaneously in our head, but are part of our dynamics.They are part of our dynamic interactions with the environment, the situations we go through. Our actions modify our environment as much as our environment modifies the mental processes that guide them.