Cognitive Behaviour Therapy

What is CBT?

It is a form of counselling that involves working out with your counsellor:

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.

CBT has been found to be helpful in:

Anxiety
Depression
Panic
Social anxiety and social phobia
Bulimia
Obsessiveness and compulsions
Post trauma issues

How does CBT work?

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.

Nottingham Cognitive behaviour therapy These parts are:

a Problem
Event
or Difficult situation

From this can follow consequences, such as:

Thoughts
Emotions
Physical feelings / sensations
Actions

Each of these areas can affect the others, and creates the viscous cycle.

Conditioned Responses

We are able to condition certain behaviours, and to stop others.
We can engage in conditioning and reinforcement of established patterns (viscous cycles).
Sometimes we get stuck in patterns that are unhelpful or problematic because we have some patterns that are rigid.

Appraising a Situation

How you think about a problem can affect how you feel physically and emotionally.
It can also alter what you do about it.
Appriasing a situation is something that we address in CBT - it concerns what you think about a situation and what information you use to think about it.

The Human Brain in CBT work

Since our human brains have undergone an evolution, some priorities are now less important (like being alert for beasts, for example).
Still, our brain does have biases, and comes up with rules to follow, and we call this a ‘cognitive filter’ causing ‘conditional assumptions .

e.g. If I go out I will be attacked (A rule, followed by an assumption).

If we take this as the truth, then we may not go out at all, and this is, of course, going to be a problem for most people, since we need to go to work, or to the shops, etc.

How does CBT apply?

In CBT we would gently confront the assumption by asking questions.

The answers that you give provides us with the material needed to test out the Assumptions.

Not all assumptions will be false, but we will find that some are not logical, and some are distorted. Concluding something else, and updating your beliefs, enable you to alter thoughts, feelings, physiology and ultimately behaviours when faced with those situations, events or problems again in the future.

What to expect in a CBT session.

With CBT the approach is collaborative between client and therapist.

Together you discover a ‘conceptualisation’ of what is the matter. This is to explain and understand how it all fits together.

Then, along with the therapist, find ways of undoing the pattern and becoming symptom or problem-free.

You may be asked about some details of your problem - including what you think, feel and do in the situations.
You would be asked to rate your symptoms on a scale.
You will find out what caused what
You will find out underlying thoughts/beliefs/ assumptions regarding the situations that you want help with.
You will identify what helps.