Fundamentals of Cognitive-Behavior Therapy: From Both Sides of the Desk

Bill Borcherdt has written a clear and pragmatic text offering effective strategies to address the ever-so-common hurdles that all mental health professionals face with their clients. The text's two-part structure—section 1, entitled Asking Rational Questions and Getting Therapeutic Answers, and section 2, Rational Rebuttals—provides a helpful, applied how-to as well as what-to-do-when format.

The first section succeeds in guiding the reader in how to address clients' emotional pain while still stimulating their rational cognitive potential. The questions offered by the author inherently educate clients on the relationships that exist between thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, thus inadvertently modeling healthy cognitive functioning. In addition, the questions promote clients' hope and initiate adaptive behaviors to reduce affective stress.

Section 2 does an excellent job of exemplifying, explaining, and responding to clients' resistance, all from a uniquely cognitive perspective. Such comprehensive guidance not only gives the cognitive therapist theoretical permission to recognize resistance as part of the therapeutic process but also offers specific methods for confidently and effectively responding to it.

This text is an excellent reading source for graduate students in psychology and social work as well as psychiatric residents who have studied introductory cognitive therapy texts and are now ready for real-life, interpersonal descriptions of therapist-client exchanges.

Dr. Moran is clinical director of the Boston Road Mental Health Clinic in Worcester, Massachusetts, and assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester.