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Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) aims to help you manage your problems by making changes to how you think and act.

CBT is an empowering self help approach. It’s a way of talking about how you think about yourself, the world and other people around you. It highlights the relationship between thoughts, feelings and how you behave. It is a practical and focuses on establishing personal goals and sets about helping you achieve them.

The essence of CBT is that it’s not necessarily events themselves that upset us, but the meaning and interpretation we give to those events. By becoming aware of your thinking patterns, changing how you think and what you do and breaking cycles of thinking, feelings and behaviour, you can learn how to make positive changes to your situation. While CBT acknowledges that past events can impact upon how you feel and think, it tends to focus on the here and now.

By first examining and becoming aware of current patterns which may be proving unhelpful, you and the therapist can examine other possibilities – thus leading to a more positive experience of life.

Using up-to-date and powerful change tools you will learn effective strategies with which to approach your own life’s challenges and learn practical ways you can improve your state of mind on a daily basis.

CBT can also help you evaluate your thought patterns and find out whether they are realistic or unhelpful. It can also help you to gradually approach things you might usually avoid.

CBT will introduce you to a set of principles that you can apply to your life when you need to, and will stand you in good stead throughout life. It has been found to be helpful for many problems and is thought to be one of the most effective treatments for anxiety and depression and as such is recommended by GP’s, often as an alternative to medication.

Number of sessions: CBT usually involves weekly sessions. The number of sessions required varies greatly depending on your problems and objectives, with treatment usually lasting somewhere from 6  to 16 sessions dependent upon circumstances.. For effective progress ‘homework’ tasks between sessions are usually agreed.

Whatever the length of treatment the  collaborative relationship is central, whereby the therapist and client are equal partners working together on the issues, while simultaneously encouraging independence on the part of the client.

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom”     

Victor E. Frankl