For this first impression post, I chose the first prompt regarding different kinds of psychotherapy. Our textbook discusses four different therapeutic approaches: psychodynamic, behavioral, cognitive, and humanistic. Each one has it’s benefits and downfalls, so I am going to rank them from best to worst approach and discuss each one.
1. Humanistic therapy teaches people to develop a stronger and healthier sense of self and become more in touch with their emotions. This approaches studies the whole person and what makes them unique. A perk to this approach is that because it values self-fulfillment and personal ideals, it is more focused on the entire individual and is more personalized. Going along with that, therapy sessions could be more effective because it is more personalized to the individual and clients can feel more comfortable sharing things with their therapist. A weakness of this that the personalization can be frustrating for the client because they are not being fit into a mold, thus possibly not getting a direct answer about their condition from their therapist.
2. Cognitive therapy teaches people new, more adaptive ways of thinking. It is based on the assumption that thoughts intervene between events an our emotional reactions. It looks at how people process information with their senses and how they respond to it. A good thing about this approach is that it can be combined with other approaches, such as behavior therapy. It also helps people learn about how their body responds to stimuli and helps us better understand our brains. It is important to try to understand what makes us react the way we do as well as how cognition affects behavior. A con to this approach is that it can cause generalizations about human behavior and overlook other factors of human behavior such as chemical imbalances, genetics, experiences, etc.
3. Behavior therapy applies learning principles to the elimination of unwanted behaviors. A benefit to this type of approach is that it can counteract negative patterns and habits, and create coping mechanisms for stress, increase participation in activities, goal setting, come up with self-help techniques, and increase in self-esteem, and improvements in performance. However, a downfall to this approach is that there aren’t many qualified behavioral therapists out there to do this kind of therapy.
4. Psychodynamic therapy is viewing individuals as responding to unconscious forces and childhood experiences, and seeks to enhance self-insight. Something very useful about this approach is that it helps you reflect back to your childhood and find a possible correlation between your past and your behaviors now. A weakness in this approach is that it does not consider biological components. Certain situations that require people to go to therapy could be related to genetics.
Jenna'sPSY105blog 
When looking at what you said in your blog post, I said almost the exact opposite order of what I found the best approach for me. I think this is a perfect example about what the chapter talked about and how we each are going to have different desires in therapy along with what works best for us and what doesn’t.
In humanistic therapy you found it beneficial for clients to become the more in touch with their feelings, beliefs, and emotions. As new learned, the humanistic approach focuses on empathy, congruence, and unconditional positive regard. After learning more in depth about this, I still find this theory to be last for me. Next, you had cognitive therapy which focuses on emotions rather than behavior which I find correlate. Emotions can cause behavior and the tactics it uses are REBT, thought journals, techniques to challenge thoughts, and restructuring the individuals thought patter. Since I find that emotions channel a behavior, I find this strategy more helpful and beneficial than behavioral therapy. Next, you had behavioral therapy next where you pointed out the purpose and benefit of replacing negative habits with positive ones. I also found this neat but I didn’t find it as useful. In the lesson we leaned how different behavioral therapy incorporates classical conditioning, operant conditions, modeling techniques and functional analysis of behavior into their sessions. Behavioral therapists focus on replacing the bad with the good. Although this therapy has good tactics, I personally don’t find this technique the most beneficial out of all of them.
Lastly, you had psychodynamic therapy as the least helpful, which I found the most helpful. I agree that it is a more traditional way of therapy and what it has adapted to now, is what I find useful. As we learned, psychodynamic therapy looks into unconscious though and events from the individuals childhood which may be impacting the person today. I find this similar to diagnosing an illness. When someone is in a bad mood because their head hurts, we look at why they have a headache, what caused it, and once we have those answers we can find the solution. In this example say the person didn’t eat all day and forgot, it can be a reasoning as to why the individual has a headache and a way to solve it. Another method could be giving medicine and getting rid of the headache but that doesn’t solve the underlying issue. That is what I feel these other therapy techniques do, they give the medicine and it eliminates the temporary pain but, it doesn’t get rid of the cause and root of the problems by looking at the reasoning for why something is happening. In conclusion, I still find the order I listed best suited for me but the order you have might be best for you and as we learned, it depends on the person and what therapy and goal you desire.
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