Cognitive mechanisms in the avoidance of painful and dangerous thoughts: Elaborating the assimilation model

The emotional processing of problematic experiences is a central feature of psychotherapy. Stiles et al. (1990) propose an Assimilation model as a gen eric account of such processes. This paper focuses on two aspects of this m odel: the concepts of "warding off" and "unwanted thoughts" showing how a c ognitive science perspective can enrich our understanding of them. We focus on the ways in which cognitive processes (particularly different sorts of memory) mediate between experience and psychopathology. Two classes of prob lematic experiences that can be avoided or barred from full awareness to va rying degrees are distinguished. We refer to this distinction as the "pain paradigm," in which experiences are inaccessible to memory retrieval using verbal mnemonics, versus the "panic paradigm," in which experiences fail to be retrieved or reported because the person anticipates catastrophic conse quences. We discuss how understanding the cognitive origins of these phenom ena promises to allow researchers and therapists to generate new approaches to overcome blocks in therapy.