Cognitive behavior therapy has proven to be a helpful approach in interventions related to drug and alcohol abuse, mental illness, panic attacks, insomnia, clinical depression, and many personal problems.
However, when psychologist Stanton E. Samenow and psychiatrist Samuel Yochelson put the spotlight on treatment for lawbreakers with their three-volume 1976 study The Criminal Personality, CBT for offenders was born. They created a language that was learned from some of our nation’s most serious and violent. They discovered that criminals are really thinking and how we can talk to offenders in their own language. Parents and professionals must dialogue with their child in a way that begins and sustains the change process. Now we fully understand the depth of misery and pain the criminal mind can plan and execute. The errors in thinking are at the core of that behavior.
Cay Shea-Hellervik and her staff adapted Samenow and Yochelson’s powerful language to establish a multi-faced, successful treatment program for youth criminals among the many components of the program:
- Residents in the program were required to record their behavior and thoughts daily in a notebook, and that was the beginning of their understanding and our learning their particular behavior and thinking;
- They were assessed and assigned specific essays and behavior changes they had to document and accomplish; some of these were court ordered.
- These youth needed to resolve issues with their families.
“Through Yochelson and Samenow’s discoveries, my staff and I developed a way of working with juvenile offenders that was thoughtful and unique, and led to a powerful change process for the juvenile offenders and their families, “Shea-Hellervik wrote.
CBT as a Cure for Criminal Thinking
Psychologists Stanton E. Samenow and Samuel Yochelson put the spotlight on cognitive behavioral therapy as a treatment for lawbreakers with their groundbreaking 1976 study The Criminal Personality
A key takeaway: Criminals think differently from other people.
Anyone might have an illegal thought on occasion, but they don’t act on it. But Samenow and Yochelson concluded that criminals develop much deeper and stronger entrenched habits of bad thinking – mental errors – that reinforce each other and fuel ongoing, anti-social behavior.
Samenow and Yochelson found 52 errors in thinking among the inmates they studied at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington D.C. These included lack of empathy, false notions that they were victims, excessive anger, unwillingness to criticize themselves, irrational fear, failure to learn from the past and many more.
These patterns of thinking were at the root of criminal behavior – not a person’s background or economic status.
Reform only becomes possible, they concluded, when criminals look critically at themselves and replace their errors in thinking with more realistic thinking.
To truly change, offenders must recognize errors in their thinking, “become fed up” and “learn new ways of thinking,” Samenow wrote in
the Journal of Psychiatry & Law in 2001
Adapting CBT for Juvenile Offenders
Cay Shea-Hellervik adapted Samenow’s insights to her work with teenage residents at a Minneapolis correctional facility, reporting her success in the 2014 book, “It’s Not Your Fault: A Workbook for Parents of Offenders” Dr. Samenow himself said although his work was done with adults, he encouraged this approach with youth – “the sooner the better.”
Her program targeted 17 errors in thinking, along with 16 defensive tactics, such as criticizing others in order to build themselves up.
“Through Yochelson and Samenow’s discoveries, my staff and I developed a way of working with juvenile offenders that was thoughtful and unique, and led to a powerful change process for the juvenile offenders and their families,” Shea-Hellervik wrote.
Importantly, their language gave parents a way back to their child’s heart and mind. “They rejoiced in once again becoming the adults and parents in the life of their child. They could connect and speak on the same wavelength that they had built and created with their child.”
“By the end of six months, many youth would be saying, ‘I can’t even believe I did this,’ as they reflected on their past behavior”, the author recalls.
More recently, researchers at the University of Chicago Crime Lab reported that cognitive behavioral therapy reduced arrests for violent crime and also improved graduation rates for at-risk male adolescents, both in Chicago and in Liberia
Despite these successes, many areas call out for further research.
How can cognitive behavioral therapy be used more effectively for at-risk young people? What aspects work best? How should it be adapted to different situations? Researchers have not really settled on one definition of the term.
The Shea-Hellervik Global Foundation seeks to expand the base of knowledge on these matters through its activities.