What are the differences between cognitive and behavioral therapy?

In the psychotherapies world, cognitive therapy, behavioral therapy and mixed of these two have an important position for both psychotherapists and patients to deal with patients’ problems in a short period. In psychology’s short history, it has changed the meaning of psychology as it was not just a science but also application forms have occurred as we have called psychotherapies. These forms have separated some categories like popular, effective, long-lasting or short-term and today we can see that cognitive, behavioral and CBT are more popular than others as they are effective forms of psychotherapy.

When we talk about these therapies separately, cognitive therapy is accepted as a short-term therapy to deal with the problems of a patient. In this therapy, patients’ beliefs, emotions cause for their symptoms. Therefore, the aim is finding these emotions and beliefs and changing them to eliminate these symptoms. Anxiety, depression, panic or fear-related disorders, eating and personality disorders might be solved by using this therapy.

Furthermore, behavioral therapy has a different perspective to solve the problems of patient. In this therapy, symptoms are caused by learned behaviors and exposed factors or conditioning from the environment, tabula rasa by behaviorists. Mostly, the goal is the changing current behaviors and habits of patient and these provoke the symptoms of the disorders. 

There are no big differences between cognitive and behavioral therapy and we can understand that these two therapies might use together getting effective results. We all know that CBT is the most preferred one to recover the disorders because we can not think that disorders or problems are caused by our thought or the behaviors which we have learned from external factors such as family or school settings.  Even the result can not explain the differences between these two therapies, there are no huge differences and as I’ve mentioned in the first paragraph, the mix of these methods might be more beneficial and helpful to see more positive results.