Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) is a talking therapy which encourages you to consider:
- How you think about yourself, the world and other people.
- How what you do affects your thoughts and feelings.
Inevitably in life things don’t always go our way. Cognitive Behaviour Therapy focuses on the meaning we attach to events in our lives and not necessarily the event itself. These events might include relationship breakdowns or problems at work and what the outcome of this means for you. For many people it is easy to become trapped in a repetitive cycle of negative thoughts, where you always think about the worst outcome which in turn lowers your mood leaving you feeling helpless, exhausted and overwhelmed emotionally.
Cognitive behaviour Therapy can give insight into your thought processes by helping you to clarify individual thoughts by breaking them down, challenging their appropriateness and recognising and changing any tendency you may have to automatically think in a negative destructive way. CBT will show you different, more helpful ways of thinking which are more balanced, realistic and give you hope for the future.
CBT helps 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 you may be experiencing, instead of focusing on the causes of your distress or symptoms in the past. It looks for ways to improve your present state of mind.
CBT is not suitable for everyone. Individual Psychotherapy can be helpful for people who are unable to capture specific thoughts and experience a general unhappiness or dissatisfaction with life which they can’t pinpoint down to one specific event/thought. Individual Psychotherapy may also be effective for people who have tried CBT in the past and found that symptoms were only managed in the short term without making effective long term change.