What is Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT)?

CBT is based on the concept that your thoughts, feelings, physical sensations, and behaviours are all interconnected, and that a number of these thoughts, feelings, and behaviours can trap you in vicious and troublesome cycles.  Primarily CBT can help you manage your problems by empowering you to take charge of the way you think and behave towards certain experiences and difficulties.

CBT aims to help you deal with overwhelming difficulties in a more helpful way by breaking them down into smaller and more manageable parts.  You’re shown how to change certain troublesome patterns to improve the way you feel.

Why choose CBT?

CBT can be more than or as effective as medication in treating some mental and physical health problems.  CBT is also highly structured in nature and this means it can be provided in a relatively short period of time compared with other talking therapies and can also provide better therapeutic results in general.

CBT teaches you useful and practical strategies that can be used in everyday life even after the treatment has finished.

CBT is an evidence-based therapy, so all psychological interventions are tried and tested and their previous successes are well documented.  It is known to operate well for all cultures and ethnicities as it is about common, universal, human behaviours and thought patterns, and is focused solely on the personal goals of the client.

What issues can be helped or treated by CBT?

There are many areas where CBT is the most effective form of therapeutic treatment and these areas include:

Why have I been recommended CBT when I have physical health issues?

Chronic diseases, pain and fatigue conditions can be associated with high levels of uncertainty surrounding the duration of the condition, how long until recovery, if recovery is possible, how the symptoms behave, and how they are triggered.

Sufferers unfortunately have to change their behaviour as part of a new lifestyle of self-care and may feel that they no longer enjoy life as freely as before.  Some people also have to endure debilitating and demanding forms of treatments or management strategies and have undergone very traumatic journeys to diagnosis.  These are just some of the factors that make adjustment to chronic medical conditions psychologically and emotionally demanding.

It is generally accepted that because of the psychological and emotional demand that is put on people living with a chronic medical condition, that around a quarter of sufferers also have clinically significant anxiety and depression.  In some cases, there are also forms of anxiety and depression that can themselves be associated with physical morbidity.

Sometimes our natural human coping strategies for chronic medical health issues are not always the most helpful for us in the long term for condition management or recovery.  This is specifically true in chronic pain and fatigue management as our natural human instincts drive us to either avoid pain all together or to push through it to our detriment and there are similar patterns with fatigue.  CBT can challenge these specific behaviours and ensure the most helpful evidenced based interventions for management are engaged to help us reduce or manage our symptoms in the most effective manner possible.  An example of this would be incremental and graded fatigue rehabilitation strategies alongside CBT interventions for chronic pain or fatigue management or vestibular rehabilitation alongside CBT for chronic dizziness.

CBT can also help separate out what symptoms are primary and what symptoms are a secondary response to either deconditioning from the condition or symptoms that have a emotional basis.  CBT interventions for chronic health issues should be evidence based and have well known positive therapeutic outcomes.

What training should my CBT therapist have?

A well-qualified CBT therapist should either have completed a post graduate diploma in CBT (not general counselling) at level 7 or be a practising clinical psychologist.  The CBT therapist should belong to a professional governing body and have many years of therapy hours amassed in both the NHS and private sector.