A critique of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT)

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), is a type of psychotherapy in which the therapist helps the client to idientify their distorted thoughts, evaluate how these thoughts impact on the individual's life, and then helps the individual make changes to their behaviours by challenging their thought patterns.  This is a laudable goal and is a method of psychotherapy that has proven success and for this reason, medical insurance is likely to cover it as part of a medical plan.  Being a skeptic myself, I believe that medical insurances would cover this kind of therapy because it is usually completed in about ten sessions.  People's behaviours change, and they seem to cope better with their lives.  This stands in opposition to other forms of psychotherapy which take much longer.  For example, integrative psychotherapy might involve years of therapy, as might psychodynamic psychotherapy and many of the more traditional forms of therapy.  This isn't good news for health insurers, because it does not satisfy their needs for quick, medical types of treatments for problems such as depression, anxiety, phobias and various types of neuroses.  It kind of fits into a neat model of healing in which a specific cause has a specific effect on the individual; and if this cause can be identified and rooted out, then a cure can be found.  This presupposes a very mechanistic understanding of the human mind.  Don't get me wrong, I am not against CBT at all.  In fact, it has helped me a great deal at times. But I am nearly certain that it is actually the positive relationship between the therapist and the client that actually promotes healing; or at least allows the client to actually take the content of the therapy half-way seriously.
What I find fascinating about psychotherapy in general is that there are hundreds of flavours of it, and when they do efficacy studies on these hundreds of therapies, they all seem to work, regardless of the model of intervention.  It is astounding that they all seem to have a positive impact on the individual who attends for them.  Yet each therapy will inevitably doggedly insists that its own particular theory  or brand of approach is the causative agent in the healing process.  But if you look at what is common to all these verbal psychotherapies, you will see that it is in fact a relationship with a sanctioned healer.  In order to heal, people need a positive relationship with someone.  And in my opinion, that means the following:
(a) someone who will give the individual their full attention
(b) someone who provide the client with positive social signals (such as listening)
(c) someone who will validate the client's experience of suffering, the client's thoughts, the client's feelings
(d) someone who expresses belief in the client's goodness

and does all of these things in a manner which is believable to the client.   This is strengthened if the therapist has a high social ranking, such as a title like Dr. or Prof.

Although I do believe that working with irrational thoughts with a client may be useful, the therapist/clinician is invariably telling the client: "there is something wrong in your thinking; you need to think in this correct, rational way."  I don't think this is really possible unless underlying relational issues are tackled.  If the therapist is stern, non-emotional and acts as a teacher, giving these rational thoughts to the client, they will not be taken up.  If the therapist has the qualities I have mentioned above, then the client might pay attention to the method and get better, regardless of the new thought patterns.