Theories

Question 1

trauma informed therapy, EMDR, TF-CBT, prolonged exposure

Answer 1

Trauma treatment theories

Question 2

behavioral therapy, cognitive therapy, CBT, DBT, rational emotive behavior therapy, exposure therapy,

Answer 2

cognitive and behavioral therapy theories

Question 3

attachment theory, structural family theory, strategic family therapy, bowen family systems,

Answer 3

family therapy theories

Question 4

To be aware of the complex impact of trauma on a client,
including how it affects their efforts to cope and function in all areas of life. This approach integrates the impact of trauma into every aspect of treatment.
This includes having an understanding of not only the psychological impacts of trauma, but also the neurological, biological, and interpersonal effects of trauma.
● This includes the view of the client having been hurt by someone or something.
● Emotional/psychological and physical safety are crucial. Trauma treatments do not
begin while the trauma is still actively occurring; safety must be established first.
● Treatment focuses on clients gaining back control and empowerment in their lives.

Answer 4

trauma informed therapy

Question 5

Alleviates symptoms of trauma through Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing of trauma.
This treatment is based on a highly structured 8 step protocol.
● It is used for people who experienced trauma and are still emotionally affected by it.
● Based on the idea that trauma overwhelms normal cognitive and neurological coping.
● During treatment, clients recall distressing images/memories while engaging in bilateral
stimulations/controlled eye movements.
● Utilizes desensitization techniques.

Answer 5

EMDR

Question 6

An evidence-based treatment for children and adolescents used to treat the effects of
trauma.
TF-CBT involves the child’s parents/caregivers, with individual sessions for both the child and the parents, as well as joint parent-child sessions.
● It helps reduce emotional and behavioral trauma symptoms and is a relatively short term
treatment (generally 8-25 sessions).
● TF-CBT includes three stages:

1. Stabilization: Stabilization skills are needed to help the child and parent tolerate the
   trauma processing that will occur in stage two. This stage includes psychoeducation,
   relaxation skills, and parenting skills.
2. Trauma narrative: The trauma narrative allows the child to tell the story of their
   trauma. Over the course of several sessions, the child gives increasing details of
   what happened during the traumatic event. It often begins with factual details and
   then moves into their thoughts and feelings from this time as well. This intervention
   helps make sense of their experience and serves as a form of exposure therapy to
   the painful memories; over time as the child repeats their narrative, the emotional
   and physiological reactivity progressively decreases.
3. Integration and consolidation: This is the final phase of TF-CBT and occurs after the creation and processing of the trauma narrative. It focuses on enhancing personal
   safety and future growth.

Answer 6

TF- CBT

Question 7

An evidence-based treatment for PTSD.
This therapy helps clients to gradually approach 1. their trauma-related memories and
subsequent feelings, and 2. situations and places that cause anxiety as a result of their
trauma.
● Uses both imaginal and in-vivo (in person) exposure.
Imaginal exposure includes the retelling of the trauma memory.

Answer 7

prolonged exposure therapy

Question 8

Change of behavior occurs through reinforcements and punishment.
Reinforcement is about increasing a behavior.
● Punishment is about decreasing a behavior.
● For behaviorism, positive does not mean “good” and negative does not mean “bad”
○ Positive means you are adding something (think of a + sign).
○ Negative means you are taking something away (think of a – sign).
● Positive Reinforcement: This occurs when a behavior is followed by the addition of a
stimulus that is rewarding, increasing the likelihood the behavior will occur again.
○ Example: A child gets a sticker (adding something) when they complete a chore
(desired behavior), increasing the likelihood of continuing to complete chores.
● Negative Reinforcement: This occurs when a behavior is followed by the removal of an
aversive (undesirable) stimulus, increasing the likelihood the behavior will occur again.
○ Example: A teacher cancels the classroom’s homework assignment for the night
(removing something) after they worked hard in class that day (desired behavior),
thereby increasing the likelihood they will work hard in the future
Positive Punishment: This occurs when an undesired behavior is followed by an
undesirable stimulus (adding something), such as introducing a shock or loud noise,
resulting in a decrease in that behavior (punishment).
○ Example: spanking (adding something) a child when they hit their sibling
(undesired behavior), thereby decreasing the likelihood they will hit their sibling again.
● Negative Punishment: This occurs when a behavior is followed by the removal of a
desired stimulus.
○ Example: taking away a teen’s phone (removing something) after they stayed out
past curfew (undesired behavior), resulting in a decrease in that behavior in the
future.
● Token Economy (Contingency Management): an exchange system using the principles
of operant conditioning where a token is given as a reward for a desired behavior.
Tokens may later be exchanged for a desired prize or reward such as power, prestige,
goods, or services.
● Shaping is a form of operant conditioning in which the increasingly accurate
approximations of a desired response are reinforced.
○ Example: teaching a child to make their bed. You may begin by having them help
straighten the comforter with you, rewarding that behavior (either through
positive reinforcement-adding something desirable like a sticker, or negative
reinforcement-taking away something undesirable like a chore), then
progressively giving more and more of the responsibility to them until they are
fully making the bed on their own
● Good for children with behavioral problems.

Answer 8

behavioral therapy

Question 9

Change occurs through learning to modify dysfunctional thought patterns.
● Clients explore patterns of thinking and beliefs that lead to self-destructive/undesired
behaviors.
● Once a client understands the relationship between thoughts and feelings, the individual
is able to modify or change existing patterns of thinking to cope with stressors in a more
helpful manner.
● Therapy focuses on automatic thoughts, schemas, assumptions, and beliefs.
● Good for treating anxiety and depression

Answer 9

cognitive therapy

Question 10

A type of behavioral therapy in which behavioral change occurs by learning to modify
dysfunctional thought patterns. Once a client understands the relationship between thoughts,
feelings, and behaviors, they are able to modify or change the patterns of thinking to cope with stressors in a more helpful way. The change in thoughts causes a positive shift in emotions, and the change in emotions causes a change in the problematic behaviors.
The therapist is a collaborative teacher who uses structured learning in sessions and
provides homework for clients to continue to work on behavior change in-between
sessions.
● The therapist teaches clients to monitor and write down their negative thoughts and
mental images and subsequent emotions and behaviors. The goal is to recognize how
their thoughts affect their mood and behavior.
● Clients learn to recognize negative patterns of thought, evaluate their validity, and
replace them with healthier ways of thinking.
● Negative Cognitive Triad:
1. View of self (Example: “I’m not worth anything.”)
2. View of the world (Example: “Everybody hates me.”)
3. View of prospects for the future (Example: “There are no hopes for my future.”)
● Automatic Thoughts: Thoughts about ourselves or others that individuals are often not aware of and thus are not assessed for accuracy or relevancy.
● Schemas: A network of rules or templates for information processing that are shaped by
developmental influences and other life experiences. These rules dictate how individuals
think about and interpret the world and play a role in regulating self-worth and coping skills. Changing schemas is a major target of CBT.
● Reframing: Thinking differently by “reframing” negative or untrue assumptions and thoughts into ones that promote adaptive behavior and lessen anxiety and depression.
● Cognitive Restructuring: Teach the client to identify irrational, maladaptive, or distorted beliefs, question evidence for the belief, and generate alternative thoughts.
● Thought Record: Used to record the situation, automatic thought, emotion, behaviors,
and alternative thoughts/response

Answer 10

CBT

Question 11

A type of behavioral therapy that aims to change behavioral, emotional, and cognitive
patterns associated with dysfunction by helping clients improve their emotional and cognitive regulation. Change happens through mindfulness, developing skills to manage distress tolerance and emotional regulation, and improving interpersonal problem solving skills.
● An evidence-based treatment for BPD.
○ It is also used for clients struggling with chronic suicidal ideation and/or self-injury, eating disorders, and substance use disorders.
● DBT emphasizes accepting uncomfortable thoughts and feelings and learning how to
cope with them.
● Clients have access to their therapist in between sessions for ‘coaching calls’ (or texts)
to get support in using the skills they are learning in treatment instead of engaging in
undesired coping mechanisms.
● The modules of DBT include: Mindfulness, Distress Tolerance, Interpersonal
Effectiveness, and Emotion Regulation:
○ Mindfulness: The practice of being fully aware and present in this one moment without trying to change the moment.
Distress Tolerance: Teaching skills for tolerating unpleasant thoughts, feelings, and situations without engaging in undesired coping mechanisms.
○ Interpersonal Effectiveness: Teaching skills to build and maintain positive relationships.
○ Emotion Regulation: Teaching skills on how to manage negative or overwhelming
emotions. Includes teaching the understanding that negative emotions are a normal part of life.
● ‘Wise mind’ helps clients balance both reason and emotion in decision making.

Answer 11

DBT

Question 12

A short term, present focused therapy that helps clients identify and replace self-defeating rigid thought patterns, beliefs, and unhealthy behaviors that interfere with their life goals with healthier thoughts and behaviors that help them achieve their goals.
● Like other behavioral therapies, it can be used for a variety of presenting issues. It can be effective for clients experiencing depression, anxiety disorders, substance use issues, and more generally to achieve life goals.
● Looks at the underlying reasons people jump to conclusions rather than just focusing on the inaccuracy of the belief and labeling it as a cognitive distortion.
● Teaches unconditional self acceptance.
● Some tools used include: cognitive reframing, visualizations, self-help tools, and homework assignments.

Answer 12

rational emotive behavior therapy

Question 13

Involve exposing the client to the source of anxiety in a safe environment. Exposure to the object of their fears in a safe environment allows them to overcome their anxiety.
● Exposure therapies are used to treat a variety of anxiety disorders including phobias,
PTSD, social anxiety disorder, and generalized anxiety.
● Exposure can be an intervention strategy used within cognitive behavioral therapy to help individuals confront fears.
● Systematic Desensitization is used to treat phobias. It involves the client being exposed to progressively more anxiety provoking situations/material as they are taught relaxation skills to manage their anxiety.
● An evidence based treatment for PTSD (and is covered
further above in the Trauma Informed Therapy section of this quick study). It helps
clients approach trauma-related memories, feelings and situations over time.

Answer 13

exposure therapy

Question 14

A model for understanding how attachment to early caregivers affects our long term
functioning.
● How a caregiver responds to an infant/toddler’s cues shapes that child’s view of the
world.
● Used to assess the bond between mother and child by observing how the child responds when their caregiver leaves and returns to the room
Types of Attachment:
● Secure Attachment: The person has easy access to a wide range of feelings and
memories, both positive and negative. They have a balanced view of parents and have
worked through hurt and anger from the past. They have developed a strong sense of
self and empathy for others.
● Preoccupied/Anxious Attachment: The person is still overwhelmed with anger and hurt toward caregivers. They sometimes value intimacy to such an extent that they become overly dependent on the attachment figure both past and present. They often recall role reversal in childhood and have a hard time seeing their own responsibility in
relationships. They fear abandonment.
● Dismissive/Avoidant Attachment: The person dismisses the importance of love and connection – and the value of emotions in general. They often idealize caregivers, but actual memories don’t corroborate their idealization. They dislike looking inward and
often have shallow (or lack the ability for) self-reflection. They tend to be very independent, dismissive of their own emotions, and experience difficulty tolerating the
emotions of others.
● Fearful/Avoidant Attachment: The person usually has a history of trauma or loss. Similar
to dismissive/avoidant attachment, they dismiss the importance of love and connection, often out of fear/belief that they aren’t worthy of love. They have difficulty trusting others
and may feel uncomfortable with emotional closeness

Answer 14

attachment theory

Question 15

Change occurs through remodeling the family’s organization (structure).
● Joining is the first task. It involves blending in with the
family and adapting to the family’s affect, style, and language.
● Many family problems arise as a result of maladaptive boundaries and subsystems
within the family system. The therapist helps the family understand how the family
structure (relationships, alliances, and hierarchies) can be changed, the impact of rituals and rules, and how new patterns of interaction can be integrated into the family.
● Enmeshed Boundaries: Family members are overly dependent and too closely involved
and reactive to other family members. Enmeshed families experience higher incidence
of incest.
Disengaged Boundaries: Family members are disconnected and isolated from each other. Disengaged families have a greater prevalence of substance abuse.
● Can be good for families with conflict between in laws, parents, spouses, and/or siblings.
● Family Map: A tool the therapist uses to depict the relationship dynamics in the family including sub-systems, alliances, coalitions, and boundaries. The therapist uses this tool to conceptualize the case outside of the actual therapy session. It is not used or shared with the family

Answer 15

structural family therapy

Question 16

Change occurs through action-oriented directives and paradoxical interventions given by the therapist. The therapist takes an active and directive role to facilitate change, particularly around
patterns of communication.
● The goals are to solve the presenting problem, eliminate symptoms, and to change
dysfunctional patterns of interaction.
● Interventions include:
○ Positioning: The therapist takes a more exaggerated and extreme view of the
problem and the family subsequently rebels. This helps them recognize the ways
in which they have agency over their situation and patterns of behavior.
○ Restraining: The therapist will discourage change or changing too quickly in an effort to elicit the desire to change from the client
○ Paradoxical Directives: Maneuvers that are in apparent contradiction to the goals
of therapy, yet are actually designed to achieve them. For example:
■ If a client is afraid of failure, the therapist may ask them to do something that they will surely fail at.
■ In parenting, if a child tantrums when asked to do a chore a parent may
give the paradoxical directive to go ahead and yell and scream to get it out of the way.

Answer 16

strategic family therapy

Question 17

Change occurs through understanding multigenerational dynamics.
Individuals cannot be understood in isolation from one another, but rather as a part of their family.
● Family members are driven to achieve a balance of internal and external differentiation
which causes anxiety, triangulation, and emotional cutoff.
● Change can occur through better understanding of multigenerational or current family dynamics and patterns.
● Genograms: a diagram that is created in session and includes family/relational patterns
and dynamics between different family members, as well as any physical, mental health, or substance abuse issues. It displays detailed data on relationships among individuals and goes beyond a traditional family tree, allowing the therapist and family to look at patterns and psychological factors that impact relationships.

Answer 17

Bowen Family Systems theory

Question 18

• Observes and analyzes all of the systems that contribute to a person’s behavior and wellbeing. Social workers focus on strengthening those systems, which can include
  improving and creating more supportive systems through connection to community resources.
• part of what makes social work unique and it can be used beyond family therapy; social work doesn’t look at a client’s problem(s) in isolation, but
  acknowledges that a client’s behaviors and presenting issues are the result of all of the
  factors/systems that work together in that client’s life.
• A person’s social environment, neighborhood, community, home environment, economic
  class, spiritual beliefs, etc. all impact how a person thinks and behaves.

Answer 18

systems theory

Question 19

• Change occurs through insight and understanding of early, unresolved issues.
• A belief that psychopathology develops especially from early childhood experiences.
  ● Understanding the influence of the past on current behavior.
  ● Explore client’s transference in session.
  ● Identify defense mechanisms.
  ● Non-directive, open-ended sessions that can be based on free association.
  ● Good for high functioning people capable of insight.
  ● Can be used for relationship problems for high functioning, introspective individuals.

Answer 19

psychodynamic therapy

Question 20

• The therapist believes the client is able to do what is necessary for growth, change, and self-actualization. The client determines the goals of therapy, with the therapist being non-directive. Change occurs by creating conditions for the client to grow through the therapeutic relationship with the presence of three essential components:
  congruence/genuineness, unconditional positive regard, and empathy.
  ● Non-Directive Therapy: Clients are allowed to lead the discussion.
  ● Congruence: The therapist’s genuineness with the client in thoughts, feelings, and
  beliefs. They share feelings honestly and do not hide behind a professional façade.
  ● Unconditional Positive Regard: Complete acceptance and nonjudgmental respect of the client and their feelings, which allows the client to feel less anxious about their perceived weaknesses and empowers them to take risks they may otherwise not feel comfortable taking.
  ● Empathy: The therapist accurately sensing the feelings and experience of the client, with the ability to communicate this understanding to the client.
  ● Self-Actualization: Innate tendency of all human beings to reach their fullest potential.
  ● Locus of Control: Through the therapeutic relationship, clients are able to take control of
  their lives rather than following the direction of others who were previously in control.

Answer 20

client/ person centered therapy

Question 21

• Brief, goal-directed therapy focused on a client’s strengths and resources.
• Focuses on what the client wants to achieve instead of focusing on the problem(s).
• Focuses on the client’s strengths and resources to create a more effective future.
• Uses the ‘Miracle Question’: The therapist asks the client to envision how the future will
  be when the problem no longer exists and what their life looks like then. Example: “Imagine that tomorrow morning you wake up and a miracle has
  happened. What would be different in your life that will tell you a miracle has
  happened and that your problem has been solved?”
• Beginning: Join with the client; Envision preferred future; Begin to identify the client’s strengths; Use solution-oriented language; Come up with achievable goals.
• Middle: Continue identifying strengths, resources and traits the client has already used to
  deal with problems in the past; Utilize solution-talk; Identify exceptions to problems;
  Utilize scaling questions to reflect on the nature of change the client has experienced;
  Feedback to the client that includes highlighting small changes and assigning tasks;
  Cheerleading change along the way.
• End: Assist the client in identifying things they can do to continue the changes they have
  made; Identify hurdles or perceived barriers that could get in the way of maintaining the changes they made.

Answer 21

solution- focused therapy

Question 22

• A short-term therapy that elicits change through supporting clients to take actions that address
  the problems in their lives.
  Focus of help is on client-defined problems and goals.
• The client’s problems, goals, and the nature and duration of service are explicitly stated
  and agreed upon by both the social worker and the client.
• Analysis of a problem leads to consideration of the kinds of actions needed to solve it,
  what might facilitate those actions, and obstacles standing in the way of
  implementation.
• Change is affected primarily through problem-solving actions or tasks the client and the social worker undertake outside of therapy. The social worker helps the client select
  tasks.
• The social worker facilitates task work through assisting the client in planning task
  implementation and establishing the motivation for carrying out the plan.
• The social worker helps the client rehearse and practice the task and analyze obstacles
  to its achievement.
• Reviews of the client’s accomplishments on each task allows the social worker to
  provide corrective feedback on the client’s actions and serve as the basis for developing
  new tasks.
• An effective intervention for clients with schizophrenia and for clients encountering
  challenges such as homelessness.

Answer 22

task centered/ problem solving therapy

Question 23

• Change occurs through increased awareness of the here-and-now experience.
  Focuses on the process: what is actually happening, as well as the content and what is
  being talked about.
• Emphasizes what is going on in the present moment within both the client and the
  therapist rather than what has happened in the past.
• Utilizes the empty chair technique to bring issues outside of therapy into the present moment. The client sits across from an empty chair and imagines that someone in their
  life is in the chair (or can even imagine a part of themselves sitting in the empty chair).
  The client then engages in dialogue between themselves and the person in the empty
  chair.

Answer 23

gestalt therapy

Question 24

• A respectful and non-blaming approach to both individual and community work. Like client-centered therapy, it views clients as the experts in their own lives.
• Change occurs by externalizing the problem(s) and creating a new narrative or story, which emphasizes the client’s competencies and strengths.
• Problems are viewed as separate entities from the client; the therapist externalizes the problem by separating it from the client.
• The therapist highlights unique outcomes that occur when the client focuses on a
  different storyline than the one holding the source of their presenting problem(s).
• Views a client’s life as full of undiscovered possibilities and helps the client uncover
  dreams and goals that define who they are outside of their problem(s).

Answer 24

narrative therapy

Question 25

• Change occurs through finding meaning in life and helping the client gain a sense of purpose.
• Founded upon the belief that it is the striving to find personal meaning in one’s life that is
  the primary, most powerful motivating and driving force.

Answer 25

logotherapy

Question 26

• Change through recognizing disempowering social forces, and empowering clients.
• Helps them recognize disempowering forces/influences to ultimately empower them.
• The therapist recognizes that with every symptom there is a strength, and also shows
  the client that they are their own rescuer and equal to the therapist.
• Can be used in the treatment of eating disorders

Answer 26

feminist therapy