Tom Dowd's views on CT and Cultural Diversity

In an article in the February, 2003 edition of the Behavior Therapist Tom Dowd argues that Cognitive Therapy is largely a North American construction that may not translate well into radically different societies. He suggests that Cognitive Therapy takes cultural specifics and treats them as universals. (He also accuses Psychoanalysis and Behaviorism of doing the same thing)

Tom discusses several cognitive distortions and several of Jeff Young's "Early Maladaptive Schemas" to illustrate his point. For example, he seems to argue that CT labels "emotional reasoning" as a cognitive distortion because American culture is rationalistic. He notes that earlier in Western culture, and currently in some other cultures, Authority and/or Faith were seen as the source of truth and that some other cultures rely more on feelings or intuition than on abstract reasoning processes. He asks "Should we assume that people who rely on those epistomologies are and were simply wrong?"

In the end, Tom argues that no one can step outside the constraints of their own cultural assumptions and that all that we can do is to listen to people from other cultures talk about their experiences and their way of thinking.

Dowd, E. T. (2003). Cultural Differences in Cognitive Therapy. the Behavior Therapist, pp. 247-249.

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