Cognitive counsellors say faulty thinking is a source of emotional dismay and unproductive behavior. Different events occur in each person’s life; some are positive and accomplishing while many may be negative and traumatizing. Positive ones do not damage thinking in any way however negative ones like loss, disappointment and failure to achieve valued goals can have lasting impressions. Cognitive therapists believe that people who are able to think effectively about their experiences are able to put negative events in perspective but those who do not reason with them tend to perseverate on negative happenings and allow them to disrupt happiness and effectiveness for the future.

Cognitive therapy is structured and demands a level of intelligence in the client to accept, introspect and mitigate personal change. Therapy tests the assumptions and identifies how unquestioned thoughts may be distorted, unrealistic and unhelpful. These are challenged and opposed. Once those thoughts have been confronted, the individual’s feelings about the subject matter of those thoughts are more easily subject to change. Beck identified several patterns of erroneous thinking some of which can be described below:

CT works where we see that mood has been wrongly wired and we need techniques to ‘repair’ this faulty wiring. If an individual fails in a job interview, he or she may believe: ‘I am no good for this job, I will never be hired!’ This triggers faulty reorganization of thinking, alters emotions and subsequent behavior in all situations. It reinforces the belief in the person that he or she is ‘useless’ and can do nothing right in life (although it was triggered by a one-time failure in an interview). Further on adaptive responses become unlikely. This reinforces the original belief of being ‘useless’. Thus a ‘self fulfilling prophecy’ or negative cascade begins. The mood needs to be ‘repaired’ by cognitive restructuring.

Cognitive restructuring is a mechanism for facilitating change. The first step is to have the person describe the stressful situation in his or her life and to identify the faulty thinking that underlies the undesirable feelings. The counsellor identifies the automatic negative thoughts and silent assumptions to identify fallacies in perception, inaccuracies in information and redundancy of the self-defeating behavior. The individual’s goal of becoming more effective in managing troublesome aspects of his or her life becomes clearer. The individuals goes back into their world and behave differently, by implementing newly discovered thinking or by experimenting with finding new information about their beliefs relating to themselves or others. Scientific problem solving, with the client as an active participant, leads to changes in a relatively short time and assures long term wellness. Man has the highest cognitive functional ability. Yet man is the one animal who uses this for one’s own peril. Cognitive restructuring is the path to peaceful living.