Inferential Behavior Therapy

Undergraduate / Graduate

Inferential Behavior Therapy (IBT) is a comprehensive treatment approach for individuals struggling with feeling that they do not matter or belong. Unlike traditional models that focus on psychiatric disorders, IBT understands psychological distress as an understandable response to invalidating, often dehumanizing environments. These types of environments can be found in families, communities, or cultures. Emotional dysregulation, therefore, is what we experience when we are only acknowledged conditionally or contingently. The chronic distress model (CD) describes the dynamic process that emerges in people's effort to cope with this lack of recognition. IBT engages participants in three main processes in an effort to extract them from this cycle (Consciousness Raising, Freedom From, Freedom To). The overall intention of IBT is to assist participants whose past has been a controlling variable of their present behavior to transition to organizing their behavior in terms of their future and what is important to them going forward. This course will introduce you to the basic assumptions that underly IBT and provide an overview of the chronic distress model and the three processes that organize both the group and individual sessions. We will use a combination of lectures, real-plays and in-class exercises to encourage experiential knowledge of the concepts being taught. Prerequisite: Must have taken at least one of 43800, 63700 or 40403.