Your not completely fictitious example is interesting.
I have these types of self-critical thoughts fairly often. Just reading your “validation” of the thought makes me feel oddly calm.
My prior for this sort of “novel therapy they works so much better than others” is that it probably doesn’t. Scott Alexander wrote a blog post about this back on the day in which he noted the effect sizes of new therapies almost always decline over time as they are studied by outside researchers rather than the inventors of the new form of therapy.
But perhaps I am wrong. Or perhaps the technique works much better for people who like that type of therapy. That’s certainly something we see evidence of in the therapy literature.
Thankfully I am not at a point in my life where I actively need therapy anymore, but if I do get back to that point I will give this a look.
A key feature of TEAM is that it’s not just about using other therapy techniques and that most therapy techniques can be plugged into the framework in the method section.
A huge problem of a lot of traditional therapy is that it focuses on techniques as if learning good techniques is all that’s required to be a good therapist when that’s not true as the research Scott references there shows.
While the approach to TEAM uses to build skillful therapists likely isn’t the only process that can work, a framework that does focus on skill development in therapists has advantages over frameworks of previous era’s that are just technique focused and that treat the therapist as exchangeable.
Regarding your prior, yes I agree with this, and I also think the effectiveness of TEAM decreases dramatically with an unskilled therapist. All of the recorded live sessions are with David Burns, which might be an indication that it takes extreme practice to fully master it. I have only ever used it for “self-therapy”, in order take the edge of some of my most self-critical thoughts as in the example. I think it works quite well for people who are looking for CBT-style therapy.
Your not completely fictitious example is interesting.
I have these types of self-critical thoughts fairly often. Just reading your “validation” of the thought makes me feel oddly calm.
My prior for this sort of “novel therapy they works so much better than others” is that it probably doesn’t. Scott Alexander wrote a blog post about this back on the day in which he noted the effect sizes of new therapies almost always decline over time as they are studied by outside researchers rather than the inventors of the new form of therapy.
But perhaps I am wrong. Or perhaps the technique works much better for people who like that type of therapy. That’s certainly something we see evidence of in the therapy literature.
Thankfully I am not at a point in my life where I actively need therapy anymore, but if I do get back to that point I will give this a look.
A key feature of TEAM is that it’s not just about using other therapy techniques and that most therapy techniques can be plugged into the framework in the method section.
A huge problem of a lot of traditional therapy is that it focuses on techniques as if learning good techniques is all that’s required to be a good therapist when that’s not true as the research Scott references there shows.
While the approach to TEAM uses to build skillful therapists likely isn’t the only process that can work, a framework that does focus on skill development in therapists has advantages over frameworks of previous era’s that are just technique focused and that treat the therapist as exchangeable.
Thanks for your comment!
Regarding your prior, yes I agree with this, and I also think the effectiveness of TEAM decreases dramatically with an unskilled therapist. All of the recorded live sessions are with David Burns, which might be an indication that it takes extreme practice to fully master it. I have only ever used it for “self-therapy”, in order take the edge of some of my most self-critical thoughts as in the example. I think it works quite well for people who are looking for CBT-style therapy.