CBT or Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, to my way of thinking, is yet another manifestation of corporate mumbo-jumbo. It even sounds like something that might have emerged from Abraham Maslow just prior to his telling his disciples that Irony was a perversion that would have to be criminalized before any of us had a chance to achieve happiness by Self-Actualizing, otherwise known as working yourself into an early grave so that you can have more stuff than anyone else when you die jogging.
And yes I can be a horrible person, bound for eternal damnation who loathes the academics who chose management studies as a discipline but the fact is the Buddha makes infinitely more sense to humanity than Maslow's Psychology. Either way my fondness for the words retard and nit-wit is actualized mightily by Maslow, behaviorists in general and cognitive behaviorists in particular.
What does Self-Actualization mean? If you cast your mind deep into the bowels of liberty as defined by post enlightenment thinking, go back to 1981, to expressions like Personal Growth, Self Esteem, you'll find a little ditty attached to visuals of girls and boys, some wearing glasses and looking very weedy, along with the lyrics: "Be all that you be, join the US Army."
Twenty years later, in 2001, The US Army wanted a change, something more in keeping with the servitude to a holism that produced Me, Me and Me to match the prevailing ethos of those sterile years. The new slogan was "Army of One." For fans of "Be all you can be," in 2023, that crap-ass, inconceivably absurd "Army of One" was disappeared and our self actualizing favorite "Be all that you can be" was returned to its rightful, possibly ironic, place in the recruiting office.
It must have been something they were eating in the 1950's, could have been sliced bread, that turned them bouncy. It was when this whole be all you can be, Chamber of Commerce in the now, gestalt therapy type vibe took on the glow of a personal responsibility with workshops, lecturers wearing tee shirts, revival meetings, homework and must read self help books. The point is I don't actually see authentic in a self-actualized individual. I don't see them as true to themselves and I'm not in the least impressed with the claim that these shin-guards who have climbed to the top of the actualization pyramid are less influenced by what others think. If anything they are more influenced.
No wonder Cognitive Behavioral Therapy took a death grip on the throat of Maslow's zoo keepers paradise of maladapted humanity. You can almost see the smile on the face of a Cognitive Therapist as he or she puts the principle tool of the Cognitive Therapy trade to work by identifying and then calmly and cooperatively reinterpreting a patient's cognitive distortions and reduces them to lightly carbonated decaffeinated fizzy drinks. "There's nothing under the bed sweetheart, a bacon and egg sandwich won't stop you from being all that you can be!"
