Behavioral & Cognitive Comparisons

Comparing CBT, DBT, ACT, ERP and the rest of the behavioral and cognitive family.

The behavioral and cognitive lineage is the largest on this site and the least internally unified. Its first generation changed behavior directly and treated thought as beside the point; its second made distorted cognition the target; its third stopped disputing thoughts at all and went after a person’s relationship to them. Comparisons inside this family are therefore rarely about which technique wins. They are about which of those three bets a protocol is making, and whether the presenting problem rewards that bet.

The practical questions these pages answer are narrow and worth being precise about: does this approach ask the client to test a belief or to hold it more lightly; is exposure central, adjunctive or absent; is the protocol a fixed number of sessions with a manual, or an open framework; and does the evidence base rest on trials in the population actually sitting in front of you. Where two approaches share a mechanism and differ only in packaging, these pages say so.

85 comparisons · 66 within the same tradition · 19 across traditions