What I like about CBT is that it’s a very practical form of therapy that engages the logical hemisphere of the brain and from my experience even the most sceptical of clients come to like this approach. CBT is predominantly a here and now therapy. This means it’s rooted in the present and looks ahead to the future, whilst acknowledging the contribution of the past. The main premise behind CBT is that by changing our responses to our thoughts and behaviours, we can ultimately change the way we feel about life and get ‘unstuck’.

 

During the course of therapy, through a functional analysis of your experiences, both the client and the therapist become ‘psychological detectives’ and begin to discover the various psychological processes that are maintaining the problem. We explore your thoughts, emotions, behaviours and bodily sensations to understand how they are connected and how they impact on your life. We look into coping strategies and evaluate their effectiveness. We then work together to find alternative ways of regulating your emotions through learning techniques to help you create a distance between you and your internal experiences, thus creating more internal space and bringing more safety into your nervous system. Other techniques include learning problem-solving skills, learning to increase tolerance for positive and negative affect, assertiveness skill, behavioural experiments and identifying your core values. All of this is approached through the lens of mindfulness and compassion towards the different parts of yourself. These skills are not difficult to learn and get much easier with practice. We also spend some time looking at the most helpful neuroscience behind our responses, so that clients can develop a sound foundation of knowledge about how psychological difficulties develop.

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CBT is not a static therapy and with new discoveries about the human mind, it has continued to evolve. In the last decade, there has been a shift of paradigm towards what is now called ‘the third wave’ of CBT. New approaches such as Compassion Focused Therapy (CFT), Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and Mindfulness CBT (MBCT), which all come under the umbrella of CBT, are increasingly being used by therapists in the private sector and in the NHS. I find these approaches to be particularly well suited to individuals experiencing more complex, severe or longstanding psychological problems. These approaches are trans-diagnostic in nature, meaning they can be applied to most problems and presentations. I have come to call this integrative way of working as CBT+.

CBT has been researched extensively, and has demonstrated effectiveness with a variety of emotional, psychological and psychiatric difficulties and it is the treatment of choice recommended by the National Institute of Clinical Excellence (NICE).