what is the difference between cognitive behavioral therapy and brainwashing? i have yet to understand the difference.
CBT is a form of brainwashing IMO.
Brainwashing is not necessarily a bad thing.
yeah they are certainly related …“brainwashing” connotes (to me, anyway) some kind of negative purpose in doing whatever manipulating of thoughts you’re doing. you can “brainwash” someone into quitting smoking. or into thinking that mcdonald’s is a decent place to eat.
i don’t think “brainwashing” is a very good term.
my point in the comparison isn’t whether its a “bad thing,” rather i would like to say that CBT doesn’t work the same way brainwashing doesn’t.
I think cognitive behavioral therapy is learning. But since during this learning there is only response to a certain fixed stimuli all the time, therefore, it becomes a kind of brain-washing because there is no higher thinking involved but only response.
Hey! I saw a movie long time back on this kind of therapy. It was soooooooooooo touching. There was this guy who trained chimpanzees to behave in a certain manner and the objective was to determine how humans would respond in a similar situation or to teach them how to.
The trainer loved the chimpanzees so much and he was like driven to becoming half mad because of the unnecessary therapy the chimps went through. Eventually he recognizes that teaching the chimps and recording their response and it’s relation to humans were two different things. He devised a plan and succeded in showing to the overseers or whoever who come to examine the effect of the therapy that, humans under the same situation would NOT respond likewise no matter how brainwashed they’d been but they would let panic be their guide. It’s only the chimps who responded like the management taught them to respond.
And so he convinced the highest authority that that kind of therapy was totally unnecessary and a waste of time and money too. I don’t remember the movie fully but I know at the end there was struggle and stuff but he saved the life of those chimps from abuse and walked away with all of them and freed them in the jungle. It was such a beautiful movie.
Usually its how much money they get out of you while they do it.
Along with DarkMagus, I dislike the term “brainwashing”. Well, maybe not the term exactly, but the manner in which this tool is used is frustrating ( along with plenty of other misused words; we need logistic semantics ). How about Brain-tainting or Thought-skewing?
Some people really need to scrub their grimy neural passages if they’ve been engaged in negative behavioral/habitual patterns. I recently attended a rehabilitation facility for the sake of keeping myself out of jail ( non-violent crimes, my friends, underage consumption, posession of cannabis paraphenalia ).
There were things to take away from the experience right along with things to leave behind. I was living with abusers of everything, including heroin and crack-cocaine, along with all the inbetweens. The 28-days I spent there allowed me a ‘time-out’ from the rush of reality. It let me separate from the people who most influenced me and clouded my own individual thinking. We watched movies, played basketball, ate every meal together, talked about spirituality, played dominoes, played risk, etc… There were big problems with the whole scenario though. For one, much of the data they had was too old to be taken seriously considering the leaps science has made cumulatively in the past years. The counsellors would push this material as if it were written in stone. The material was also run on a cycle so that people that stay for over 2 weeks would find themselves overlapping into territory that had already been explored. The security of the place was comforting and relaxing, but the education needs much improvement ( and yeah, they don’t have much money to start with… ).
Anyways, to make a long story short, I took the practical and left the unfounded. If you realize this while they are attempting the behavioral therapy, you probably don’t need it. If you don’t realize it, maybe you do need it. Certainly, many of the patients whom I lived with, for the 28-day stretch, needed the wash. They needed a power-wash. Evident, considering how many of them were on their 7th or 8th try, losing jobs, facing jail time, losing their kids, etc… ( all things that they confessed, with unabated honesty, that they wanted more than anything in the world ).
Its all about the kind of soap you’re using.