What is Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT)?
CBT is a recommended evidence-based psychological therapy to help people overcome a whole range of difficulties. It is often offered as a short-term therapy on the NHS to help people learn to manage their symptoms of anxiety and/or depression.
The cognitive part refers to the role our thoughts play in guiding how we feel and behave.
When we think negatively we are more likely to experience unpleasant emotions, in turn we will change our behaviour to try and cope with these thoughts and feelings.
The way we think, feel and behave interacts in such a way that we can easily become stuck in a negative unhelpful cycle that keeps problems going or even makes them worse.
CBT can be used to teach you specific ways to practice challenging your unhelpful thoughts so you can change the way you think about things, stop over-thinking and rationalise instead of catastrophise about situations.
It can also show you how certain behaviours you’ve adopted to try and stop anxiety (such as unhelpful people-pleasing habits or avoidance), are unhelpful and making anxiety, overwhelm/burn-out and low self-esteem worse.
By becoming aware of this and being supported in changing those unhelpful behaviours, you will start adopting more helpful ways of behaving with the ultimate aim of breaking free from the negative cycle in which you keep finding yourself stuck.
Whilst standardised CBT tends to focus more on the 'here and now' of difficulties, I implement trauma-informed CBT to increase your understanding and awareness of factors that cause your people-pleasing and/or anxiety and low self-esteem so you can understand why you are a people-pleaser and how to stop people-pleasing.
I also teach you its’ researched evidence-based techniques to help you manage and cope with the difficulties for example; how to set healthy boundaries, how to say no to people when you don’t want to do something they’ve asked, how to be assertive, ways to manage thoughts and feelings when you feel anxious and guilty and many more…