Behavior therapy

introduction

Behavioral therapy is an important part of so-called psychotherapy and is often used in psychology to help patients with their mental illness.
The decisive factor here is that it is not the psychologist or psychiatrist who alone helps the patient, but that the patient is instructed to help himself. This is also often referred to as “helping people to help themselves”, as the patient is taught in several sessions with the therapist how he can change his own behavior and thus help and heal himself.

In general, behavior therapy assumes that every person has one Conditioning subject. This means that if a patient has heard enough times that every time the mother sees a spider she panics and starts screaming, then the patient will also think that the spider is something scary, even though spiders are nothing per se Must be scary. The patient's learned fear of spiders can even develop into a Spider phobiadevelop a panic fear of spiders. This can using behavior therapy are treated in which the patient learns to deal with the fear and to cope with it by analyzing, evaluating and then changing his own behavior if necessary.
It is important that every patient has their own own strategy develops, for example, how to deal with a certain fear. This is the most important feature of behavior therapy. Behavioral therapy is primarily about opening up various options for the patient as to how he can get out of an uncomfortable or depressing situation.
Behavior therapy is common to a great many different patient groups suitable. For one, patients can use Anxiety disorders benefit from behavior therapy, as well as other mental disorders such as Dependency, depression, Burnout or Personality disorders can be treated with behavioral therapy. In addition to drug treatment, behavioral therapy often represents a solid basic treatment, although additional group sessions or other forms of therapy may be necessary depending on the patient and as required.

Behavioral Therapy Costs

The Behavioral Therapy Costs vary depending on the treating psychologist or psychiatrist; in addition, the cost of behavioral therapy depends on where the patient wants to do the behavioral therapy. Since behavior therapy is a recognized psychological therapy, the cost of behavior therapy is usually borne by the statutory health insurance accepted.
However, if a patient wants one Behavior therapy do, without that it has a medical indication, i.e. a recognized mental illness so the patient may bear the cost of behavior therapy pay yourself got to.
In general, however, in most cases the costs of behavior therapy are covered by the health insurance companies and the patient does not have to pay any supplements.

Behavioral therapy for anxiety disorders

Behavioral therapy is a recognized form of therapy in psychology and is often used by psychologists and psychotherapists to treat various mental disorders. Behavioral therapy has particularly good effects on anxiety disorders such as increased anxiety (phobia) of great heights or spiders, but also other forms of fear.

Read more on the topic: List of known anxiety disorders

In order to cure fear with the help of behavior therapy, it is a good idea to confront the patient with their fear. There are two different approaches to this. On the one hand, fear can be treated during behavior therapy in such a way that the patient overcomes his fear by gradually confronting the fear trigger and thereby learning to control it over time (systematic desensitization). This can be illustrated with an example. If a patient suffers from fear of heights, the fear can be overcome in behavior therapy by first climbing up small heights and learning to control his fear until he can climb higher and higher and again and again with the help of the aids learned from behavioral therapy who learns to control fear.
Another possibility is to expose the patient directly to the cause of fear. This could look like this for patients who suffer from fear of heights: The patient climbs directly onto tall buildings, such as the Eiffel Tower, and thus exposes himself to the maximum height and thus also the maximum fear and tries to control it. This type of behavior therapy is also called exposure therapy. This form of behavior therapy can be particularly helpful for some anxiety disorders.
However, it is important that the therapist works with the patient beforehand to work out different ways in which the patient can best control his fear in the fear-inducing situation and how he can cope with the situation. It is particularly important to learn different new approaches, whereby old, fear-inducing trains of thought should be interrupted as far as possible.
Other ways of behavior therapy for anxiety disorders are to reward the patient whenever he has faced the fear and had the situation under control. This form of behavior therapy for fear reduction is also called an operant method. Communication training or role-plays are also part of behavior therapy for anxiety disorders and can especially help patients who, for example, are afraid of speaking in front of other people. Thus, there are different approaches in behavior therapy to help a patient with anxiety disorders, whereby it is important that each patient individually selects the therapy option that seems best for him.

Behavioral therapy is also used to treat fear of loss. Read more on the subject below: Fear of loss

Nocturnal panic attacks can be very stressful for those affected.Find out all the important information about this at: Nocturnal panic attacks - what's behind them?

Behavioral therapy for claustrophobia

Behavioral therapy is a recognized psychological therapy that can help the patient to successfully treat various mental illnesses. As the name suggests, behavior therapy is primarily about changing the patient's behavior so that he can better cope with various difficult situations. Behavioral therapy is very suitable for claustrophobic patients.
Patients can use Claustrophobia use behavior therapy to help them endure difficult situations. In general, the patient should have the situation under control in tight spaces despite his claustrophobia and none Panic attacks or enormous Anxiety must endure. Behavioral therapy can help claustrophobic patients to change and control their behavior to such an extent that it is possible to enter a narrow space or, for example, a narrow MRI tube, without panic attacks occurring

A particularly suitable form of behavior therapy is the systematic desensitization Here, the patient must first help the therapist or psychologist face his fear mentally and then possible Develop conceptshow this fear can be suppressed in an acute situation. The next step would then be for the patient to go into increasingly smaller rooms and to apply the learned behavior to avoid claustrophobia so that a panic attack does not occur despite a narrow space. This principle of behavior therapy for claustrophobic patients often works very well, as the patients can be gradually desensitized and thus learn to control their claustrophobia.
If this form of behavior therapy does not work for the claustrophobic patient, there are other ways of relieving the patient of their fear. Among other things, the therapist can try to use a Role play or using cognitive training to take away the fear of tight spaces. Behavioral therapy for claustrophobic patients can therefore be used in a wide variety of ways and each patient should be addressed individually, as each patient can best cope with their fears in different ways.

Behavioral therapy for fear of heights

At Fear of heights can Behavior therapy It can be very helpful to teach the patient not to panic, even in uncomfortable situations, but to control the situation.
There are different approaches to treating fear of heights with behavioral therapy. For one, the therapist can use Conversation and various mental (cognitive) exercises try to open up new possibilities and ways for the patient to reassess and manage a situation that appears threatening to him.
Even more suitable, however, is some form of behavior therapy that Fear of heights forces you to deal directly with theirs Fear to grapple. The therapist can either drive the patient directly to a very high tower and then help him to control the situation or he starts slowly and then increases the heights more and more. This form of behavior therapy is intended to help patients afraid of heights to adapt to the new situation and then to develop a good strategy themselves to cope with this threatening altitude.
Another way to treat fear of heights with behavior therapy is to have the patient rewarded for it every time they climb a height. This type of behavior therapy works particularly well with children. The type of therapy that best helps the vertigo patient differs from patient to patient, which is why different forms of therapy should be tried and the patient should not immediately lose heart if the attempt fails.

Behavioral therapy for arachnophobia

At a Spider phobia (Arachnophobia) Behavioral therapy can be very useful to relieve the patient of the excessive fear of the spiders. In general, this is not intended to ensure that a patient is no longer afraid of spiders at all, but rather the behavior therapy for arachnophobia is based on the patient learning not to panic in a situation in which he encounters a spider.
Using behavior therapy is Arachnophobia often to be treated very well, whereby the patient first tries to explain the fear logically with the help of a therapist and to think of ways in which the patient can behave in such situations so that he does not panic.
Often at the beginning of behavior therapy for arachnophobia, the patient is only shown a picture of a spider and the patient must try to control his fear without panic. Then you can work with small spiders and later with ever larger spiders and the patient must learn to stay in control in every situation and not to let panic overrun them. This form of behavior therapy for arachnophobia, but also for other disorders, is known as systematic desensitization.
In addition, you should keep repeating Conversations with the therapist take place and the patient should try to consciously search for situations independently, in which he might have been afraid beforehand and to get these under control with the help of the newly learned behavior. For example, in addition to behavioral therapy for a spider phobia, a Visit to the zoo or in one Reptile department help when the patient can look at the spiders behind glass and slowly gets used to the animals better and better.

Behavioral therapy for eating disorder

At a eating disorder can Behavior therapy This can be helpful because it is often difficult for patients to stop behavior that is harmful to them without the help of a therapist.
The main aim of behavior therapy for eating disorders is to make the patient understand that the patient's eating behavior is disturbed and that this can cause enormous harm to the patient. Furthermore, patients with an eating disorder often have the problem that they see it as a weakness when they start eating normally again and have lost all relation to their body and its shapes. It is therefore important in behavior therapy to make the patient aware of the eating disorder and to break the thought pattern that it is a weakness to eat something.
Patients with an eating disorder should use the Behavior therapy learn to accept your own body again and to break through the enormous discipline and to allow yourself and your body some food again. This can happen, for example, by making an agreement with the patient using so-called contingency contracts that they have to consume a certain number of calories per day or that they refer themselves to a clinic if they come below a certain weight got to. This form of behavior therapy for eating disorders is very helpful and can ensure that, based on the agreement made, the patient initially consumes a minimum amount of calories, perhaps with resistance, but in the long term more and more naturally and thus slowly comes out of the eating disorder.
Another option is to use Role playwhich can also represent a form of behavior therapy for eating disorders, to make it clear to the patient that not only he suffers from the disease, but that his entire social environment is also affected and that professional opportunities are very limited due to the diseases.
That too Relaxation training is a form of behavior therapy that can treat eating disorders very effectively, as the patients can use various muscle exercises to learn to perceive their own body better and to better grasp their own limits again, which is often very difficult, especially for patients with anorexia .
Also the Pleasure therapy (Euthyme therapy) is a form of behavior therapy for eating disorders and other disorders that can help the patient feel the pleasure of eating and the smells of food again. Cooking together can be particularly helpful here.
That too Self-verbalization training can be very helpful, whereby with this form of behavior therapy the patient learns to tell other people that he currently has an eating disorder and that, for example, it is uncomfortable to be asked about it and that it would help him more if the family did something together cooks. This form of behavior therapy for eating disorders is not only helpful for the patient, but can also help the entire family to better understand the patient and to behave appropriately.
Overall, behavior therapy for eating disorders is very good and helpful, whereby each patient should decide for himself which form of behavior therapy is best for him.