Cognitive behavioural therapy is a psycho-social intervention that aims to improve mental health. CBT focuses on challenging and changing unhelpful cognitive distortions and behaviours, improving emotional regulation, and the development of personal coping strategies that target solving current problems.
Originally CBT was designed to treat depression, but its uses have been expanded to include treatment of a number of other mental health conditions including anxiety. CBT includes a number of cognitive or behaviour psychotherapies that treat defined psychopathologies using evidence-based techniques and strategies.
CBT is a “problem-focused” and “action-oriented” form of therapy, meaning it is used to treat specific problems related to a diagnosed mental disorder. The therapist’s role is to assist the client in finding and practising effective strategies to address identified goals and decrease symptoms of the disorder. CBT is based on the belief that thought distortions and maladaptive behaviours play a role in the development and maintenance of psychological disorders and that symptoms and associated distress can be reduced by teaching new information processing skills and coping mechanisms.
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy is brief and time-limited. Over the course of our one-to-one sessions you will learn how to become your own therapist. You will be given the tools to help you become your own person. To take charge of your life. To understand why you, and only you, have brought yourself to this place at this point in time. To accept that everyone is responsible for their own behaviour.
In CBT the person and therapist explores the way that the person’s thoughts, emotions and behaviours are connected and how they affect one another. With assistance, support and guidance from their therapist the client will learn to intervene at different points in this cycle and change thought patterns and behaviours which have been problematic for the person. This includes:
