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Change for the Better was the original, self-help Cognitive Analytic Therapy book. It has proved a durable text that has withstood the test of time and also vagaries of various changes of publisher (the first and second editions were published by Cassell in and ). It provides patients and quite a few therapists with an introduction to the basic principles of CAT in a readable and logically presented format. Unlike many self-help books, it manages the difficult task of making some quite complicated ideas easily accessible without becoming patronizing or unduly trite.
The book starts with a section on ‘Change’, which tries to guide the reader towards an understanding of the main ways in which life can go wrong and the sort of things that they might expect to change as a result of working through the book. It then moves into a more meaty section in which the early key concept of cognitive analytic therapy, that of ‘Traps’, ‘Snags’ and ‘Dilemmas’ is outlined. ‘Traps’, ‘Snags’ and ‘Dilemmas’ are self-repeating, repetitively deployed maladaptive sequences of thinking, feeling and acting. Ostensibly these sequences are attempting to satisfy an aim but, in fact, for various reasons they only reinforce themselves and preclude more helpful ways of going about things. It was an insight of early CAT therapy that these repetitive patterns were not usually deployed because the patient wished to fail repeatedly, nor were they deployed because of some unconscious psychodynamically driven aim but, instead, were repeatedly deployed because there was no check built into them to see whether the outcomes had been satisfactory. Cognitive analytic therapy was committed to the idea that sustained joint attention between therapist and patient could help the patient become aware of the way in which their patterns were not helping them and, then, begin to make changes using what Vygotsky and other Russian psychologists of that era called ‘Higher Functions’. Thus, a bottom-up understanding of