Cognitive Behavioural Therapy or CBT is a psychotherapy treatment that provides a practical approach to solving a problem. The main goal of CBT is to try to change how the way a person feels about the situation.
It’s used to alleviate a wide range of issues that a person is going through. Some of the issues that CBT addresses are sleeping issues, social relationship issues, alcohol or drug issues, depression, anxiety, and more.
This therapy usually lasts in 5 to 10 months. Commonly, a client would attend a session every week for an hour. During these sessions, the client and the therapists help each other understand what the client is going through at the moment and what possible steps should the client be taking to help with his or her current predicament. CBT also recommends a set of principles that he or she can live by for a lifetime.
CBT is a combination of psychotherapy and behavioural therapy. Psychotherapy focuses on our thinking patterns, while behavioural therapy is all about the relationship of our problems, thoughts, and behaviour. Therapists customize their process and content of psychotherapy and behavioural therapy for each client.
It was founded 40 years ago by Aaron Beck. It is mainly used to treat depression, however, as the therapy and human experiences evolved, CBT has since been used for other conditions such as panic disorders, post-traumatic stress disorders, generalized anxiety, insomnia, social phobias, childhood depression, anger, marital conflict, substance abuse, schizophrenia, bipolar disorders, borderline personality disorders, dental phobias, eating disorders, and more.
What Should I Expect from Counselling for CBT?
Below are the clear processes that a client would typically undergo in the CBT sessions:
Problem identification;
Goal/s establishment;
Empathic communication;
Feedback;
Reality checks;
Homeworks;
Thought tools maintenance;
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy differs from any psychotherapies because each session has a default flow, unlike some therapies that a person can freely dabble on how he or she feels. In the initial sessions of CBT, the client will lay down all the specific problems that he or she has. Both therapist and client will set goals on what they hope to accomplish in the future.
There isn’t any right or wrong problem or worry about telling your therapist about. It could be anything from difficulty in concentrating, unhappy life, unhappy marriage, unhappy work environment, relationship problems, and more.
The problems and the goals set by the therapist and the client will be the foundation on what the sessions will be all about in the future meet-ups. The weekly sessions will tackle each problem little by little until everything is covered. The next meet-ups would also try to wrap up the conclusions that happened in the last session.
CBT sessions have homework that therapist would typically let patients do away from the sessions. The therapist and the client would discuss the progress of the client in each homework during meet-ups. The homework are ongoing exercises and will go on until the last session or depending on the therapist’s recommendation.