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Phone: 07974 421733
What is Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT)?
It is a way of exploring how you think about yourself, other people and the world. We would work together to see how you think and what you do affects how you feel and to make changes so that you can feel better.
We would start with a situation or problem or difficulty.
From that we would see how the situation affects:t
Thoughts, the meanings and understandings you have about yourself and your difficulty. We would examine what you are telling yourself in response to it and work to alter the thoughts into more helpful ones.
Emotions, which can be affected by our thoughts but also our thoughts can be affected by our emotions and this can affect what we do and what we don’t do.
Behaviour or actions, can affect how we feel and how we think. If we’re feeling sad and we go out and listen to some cheerful music and have a dance, we can feel better afterwards. When we are depressed we can stop doing things that we used to enjoy and start to isolate ourselves. Changing our behaviour can change the way we think and feel.
Physical Feelings, or our bodily responses are affected by our thoughts, emotions and actions. If we are feeling stressed chemicals are released by the brain, which can alter our sleep pattern, affect our appetite or make us a little shaky.
Many of our problems are caused and maintained by our unhelpful beliefs and assumptions about ourselves, and others. These have been learned though our past experiences and interactions with significant others. At one time they may have helped us cope but now they are no longer helpful.
The therapist and client work together in the ‘here and now’ to bring about change and reframe unhelpful thoughts. We also agree actions that can be changed to help the person feel better. It also involves the client who has things to do outside therapy to help the change come about more quickly. We call this homework. The aim is to help you to help yourself so that you can be your own therapist, which helps maintaining a healthy outlook and more positive feelings.