d symptoms, providing a rationale for each used. Understanding and participation in therapy is encouraged as is the reinforcement of learning new paradigms. The patient acts as an active co-investigator providing the data to be examined, thoughts and images that occur in different situations. Both therapist and patient decide on therapeutic goals. The therapist provides skills and designs behavioral experiments to serve as corrective experiences. In severe cases, the therapist may act more directive to help the patient organize thoughts. The patient assumes the responsibility for observing and monitoring thoughts and images, for completing homework assignments, and for providing feedback regarding treatment (Freedman, Simon, Beutler, & Arkowitz, 1989).
Cognitive therapy is described as collaborative empiricism. The therapist works with the client to help him recognize cognitions, test the validity of the thoughts, beliefs, and assumptions that are considered important, and to make desired changes in cognition and behavior. The process of guided discovery rather than direct confrontation, facilitates the process, maximizes the client's involvement, and minimizes the client's feeling that the therapist is attempting to impose ideas on the client. Guided discovery provides the client with a method to understand and solve his own problems, which can be used to deal with future problems (Freeman, Pretzer, Fleming, & Simon, 1990).
The therapist acts as a consultant providing ideas for experimentation, helping to sort through experiences, and offering problem solving solutions. As a diagnostician, he gathers data and integrates the data to determine what is best for the current situation. As an educator, he participates to influence the client to think for himself, maximize personal strengths, and acquire cognitive skills and behavior control. The therapeutic process combines cognition change procedures with behavioral cont...