What is Cognitive Behavioural Therapy?
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy or CBT is a talking therapy which focuses on your thoughts, feelings, and behaviours. CBT is the recommended treatment approach for many mental health conditions including anxiety disorders, depression, and obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). It can also help with a wide range of emotional and physical health conditions such as emotional eating, pain management and tinnitus.
CBT enables you to recognise unhelpful thinking patterns which can impact on your behaviour and affect your day to day life. It helps by looking at how you think about situations and how this can affect how you feel, behave and the impact this can have on you physically. If you interpret a situation negatively this may lead you to have negative thoughts and feelings from this experience. Those bad feelings then might lead you to behave in a certain way. This then may become part of a continuous cycle.
CBT provides a therapeutic approach which incorporates tools to enable you to challenge negative thinking patterns and make sense of your experiences. Through gaining a better understanding of the thoughts, feelings and behaviours which are causing you difficulties. This can enable and empower you to make changes. You and your therapist will work in collaboration. Your work may focus on what is happening in your life right now, you may also think about how your past experiences impact on your current view of the world. Your therapist with provide you with mental health information and tools for you to work on within your session and also outwith your session. The aim of CBT is to help you Connect, Challenge and Change your Thoughts.