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About Cognitive Behavioural Therapy
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What is Cognitive Behavioural Therapy?

It is a way of talking about:

How you think about yourself, the world and other people
How what you do affects your thoughts and feelings.

CBT can help you to change how you think ("Cognitive") and what you do ("Behaviour)".

These changes can help you to feel better. Unlike some of the other talking treatments, it focuses on the "here and now" problems and difficulties. Instead of focussing on the causes of your distress or symptoms in the past, it looks for ways to improve your state of mind now.

It has been found to be helpful in:

Anxiety
Depression
Panic
Agoraphobia and other phobias
Social phobia
Bulimia
Obsessive compulsive disorder
Post traumatic stress disorder
Schizophrenia

How does it works?

CBT can help you to make sense of overwhelming problems by breaking them down into smaller parts. This makes it easier to see how they are connected and how they affect you. These parts are: A Situation - a problem, event or difficult situation
From this can follow:

Thoughts
Emotions
Physical feelings
Actions

Each of these areas can affect the others. How you think about a problem can affect how you feel physically and emotionally. It can also alter what you do about it.

What does CBT involve?

The Sessions

CBT can be done individually or with a group of people. It can also be done from a self-help book or computer programme. If you have individual therapy:

You will usually meet with a therapist for between 5 and 20, weekly, or fortnightly, sessions. Each session will last between 30 and 60 minutes.
In the first 2-4 sessions, the therapist will check that you can use this sort of treatment and you will check that you feel comfortable with it.
The therapist will also ask you questions about your past life and background. Although CBT concentrates on the here and now, at times you may need to talk about the past to understand how it is affecting you now.
You decide what you want to deal with in the short, medium and long term.
You and the therapist will usually start by agreeing on what to discuss that day.

The Work

With the therapist, you break each problem down into its separate parts, as in the example above. To help this process, your therapist may ask you to keep a diary. This will help you to identify your individual patterns of thoughts, emotions, bodily feelings and actions.
Together you will look at your thoughts, feelings and behaviours to work out:
- if they are unrealistic or unhelpful
- how they affect each other, and you.
The therapist will then help you to work out how to change unhelpful thoughts and behaviours.
It's easy to talk about doing something, much harder to actually do it. So, after you have identified what you can change, your therapist will recommend "homework" - you practice these changes in your everyday life.
At each meeting you discuss how you've got on since the last session. Your therapist can help with suggestions if any of the tasks seem too hard or don't seem to be helping.
They will not ask you to do things you don't want to do - you decide the pace of the treatment and what you will and won't try.

The strength of CBT is that you can continue to practice and develop your skills even after the sessions have finished. This makes it less likely that your symptoms or problems will return.

Finding a Practitioner/Centre

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About Cognitive Behavioural Therapy» This page has been viewed 898 times