Introduction
Behavioral therapy is an important part of so-called psychotherapy and is often used in psychology to help the patient with his or her mental illness. The decisive factor here is that not the psychologist or psychiatrist alone helps the patient, but that the patient is guided to help himself or herself. This is often referred to as “help for self-help”, as the patient is taught in several sessions with the therapist how to change his or her own behavior and thus help and heal himself or herself.
In general, behavior therapy assumes that every person is subject to conditioning. This means the following: If a patient has only heard often enough that every time the mother sees a spider, she panics and starts screaming, then the patient also thinks that the spider is something scary, although spiders per se need not be scary. The patient may even develop a spider phobia, i.e. a panicky fear of spiders, from the learned fear of spiders.
This can be treated with the help of behavioral therapy, in which the patient learns to deal with the fear and to overcome it by analyzing and evaluating his own behavior and then changing it if necessary. It is important that each patient develops his or her own strategy for dealing with a particular fear, for example. This is the most important basic feature of behavior therapy.
Behavioral therapy is therefore primarily about giving the patient various possibilities of how to get out of an unpleasant situation or an oppressive situation. Behavior therapy is generally suitable for many different patient groups. On the one hand, patients with anxiety disorders can benefit from behavior therapy, but other psychological disorders such as addiction, depression, burn-out or personality disorders can also be treated with the help of behavior therapy. Behavioral therapy often represents a solid basic treatment in addition to drug treatment, although additional group sessions or other forms of therapy may be necessary, depending on the patient and the need.
