What is Cognitive Behavioural Therapy?

• CBT has been consistently proven to work in assisting individuals to achieve their potential and reach their goals.
• CBT challenges debilitating beliefs, enhances motivation, self worth and problem solving abilities.
• CBT is consistently goal orientated and aims to promote new thoughts and behaviours to the point where they become internalised as new helpful habits.
• CBT meets the demands of the highly intellectual client as well as being able to cater to the needs of those less academically inclined.
• CBT importantly enables the client to achieve independence from their coach by teaching them to ‘coach themselves’.

How Effective is CBT?

CBT is one of the most effective treatments for conditions where anxiety or depression is the main problem. It is the most effective psychological treatment for moderate and severe depression and it is as effective as anti-depressants for many types of depression. CBT isn't for everyone, another type of talking treatment may work better for you. CBT may be slightly better than anti-depressants in helping anxiety. For severe depression, CBT should be used with anti-depressant medication. When you are very low, you may find it hard to change the way you think until the anti-depressants have started to make you feel better. Tranquillisers should not be used as a long term treatment for anxiety; CBT is a better option.

CBT is Gold Standard and Best Practice and is currently the recommended treatment of choice for many psychological conditions, according to the National Instittute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE).

Single Session Therapy (SST) and What's involved?

SST is a mode of service delivery at point of need rather than availability providing immediate help to clients.

What can be achieved with SST?

Using SST your Therapist can:

• help you get unstucked
• help you take a few steps forward which may help you to travel the rest of your journey without professional assistance
• help you see that you have inner resources to achieve your goals
• help you select a possible solution to your problem
• give you the experiene of the solution, if possible
• help you develop an action plan

One AT A Time Therapy (OAAT) and What's involved?

OAAT involves when therapy takes place one contact or session at a time, and one contact may be all the time that is needed. While additional sessions may be available if needed, sessions will not be booked in blocks, and the client will be encouraged to go away to reflect upon and apply what he/she has learnt in the session before booking another session.

Advantages of SST & OAAT Therapy

• SST/OAAT is 5, 10, or More Sessions 'Distilled' into One
• SST/OAAT is the same as Crisis Intervention
• SST/OAAT is simpler than Longer-Term Therapy because it is brief and focused
• SST/OAAT is for everyone
• SST/OAAT is only suitable for Clients facing simple problems

How We Will Work 

We offer 12, 6, 4 Bespoke Treatment Plans, Single session and One At A Time Therapy. Your treatment will depend on the severity of your presenting problem/s or need. Should further treatment be required following your course of treatment, additional sessions could be agreed with you and added.

If we decided to work together, we will work to break down your problems into their separate parts – such as your thoughts, physical feelings and actions.

We will analyse the areas to work out if they're unrealistic or unhelpful and to determine the effect they have on each other and on you. Your Therapist will be able to help you work out how to change unhelpful thoughts and behaviours.

After working out what you can change, your Therapist will ask you to practise these changes (as homework or action plan) in your daily life and you'll discuss your progress during the next session.

The treatment you receive will teach you to apply the skills you've learnt during sessions to your daily life.

This should help you manage your problems and stop them having a negative impact on your life – even after your course of treatment finishes.

CBT for Children and Adolescents

We offer CBT Treatment to children and adolescents. Children as young as 6 or 7 may benefit from cognitive behavioural therapy. Your child must have the ability to understand concepts such as self-talk and self-instruction. This may be more likely in older children.

Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) can help improve a child’s moods, anxiety and behavior by examining confused or distorted/irrational patterns of thinking. CBT therapists teach children that thoughts cause feelings and moods which can influence behaviour. During CBT, a child learns to identify harmful thought patterns. 

The Therapist then helps the child replace this thinking with thoughts that result in more appropriate feelings and behaviours.

For example, a child with depression has often developed automatic negative responses to life events. The child may call a friend to play and the child (named Sam) might say “I can’t play right now.” The child with adaptive thought patterns will say to himself “Sam can’t play right now. He must be busy. Maybe I should call a different friend and call him tomorrow.” The child with negative patterns of thinking and tendency toward depression may think “Sammy can’t play right now. He doesn’t like me anymore. No one likes me. I don’t have any friends.” Same life event, very different response. One goal of cognitive therapy is to help the child understand that he is interpreting the same life event in a very negative way due to assumptions and beliefs that may not be true and that he is also generalizing the event to his whole life. The therapist will try to help the child recognize when he/she is doing this and redirect his/her thinking to a more adaptive approach.

The Revised Children's Anxiety and Depression Scales (RCADS)

The Revised Children’s Anxiety and Depression Scale (RCADS; Chorpita, Yim, Moffitt, Umemoto & Francis, 2000) is a 47-item self report measure which is commonly used to assess the frequency of anxiety and depression symptoms in children aged 8-18 years. This tool could help clinicians track outcomes over time and between adults and children. Please click on the below link to complete the RCADS (Child + Caregiver) Forms to begin a preliminary assessment for presentation of anxiety/depression.  

COMPLETE (RCADS)

What are the Benefits of CBT for Children and Adolescents?

The benefits of CBT are similar to the benefits of behavior therapy and may include:

• Receiving emotional support
• Resolving conflicts with others
• Understanding how feelings impact thoughts and actions
• Reversing negative patterns of thinking, addressing bad habits
• Appropriately dealing with stress and frustration
• Participating positively in a variety of activities
• Setting goals to replace negative patterns of behavior with positive ones
• New ways of learning and self-help techniques are reinforced
• Increase in self-esteem
• Improved performance at school, at home and in social situations

Cognitive behavioural therapy can be used to treat anxiety and depression and to prevent relapse of anxiety or depression in children who have been treated with medications.

Drawbacks of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy

One of the main drawbacks of CBT is that it depends on the child’s willingness to learn new skills and practice them for it to be effective. This can be a treatment barrier when CBT is being used to address an issue that the child is not necessarily interested in resolving, or one that may requires too much effort to overcome. Parents, too, must be willing to encourage the child to practice new skills and use positive reinforcement for cooperation and successful outcomes. This may be difficult to do in the context of a larger therapy program or just as part of the daily family routine. For some conditions, CBT has also been found to be more effective when medication is added than when practiced alone.

REBT Approach

Albert Ellis created REBT as a philosophy of living – its foundation is the belief that it is not the events in our lives that cause our emotions, rather it is our beliefs that cause us to experience emotions such as anger, depression, and anxiety. It is a mode to consider and change our irrational beliefs and perceptions and has shown to have a favourable effect on reducing emotional pain.

REBT’s ABC Theory: The Diagnostic Step

Based on Ellis’ theory that individuals tend to blame outward events on their negative emotions instead of their interpretation of the events, the ABC Model was proposed as:

A – Activating Event: an event that happens in the environment (past, present, internal, external, real, imaginary)

B – Beliefs: the belief or perception you have about the event that happened

C - Consequence: the emotional, physiological or behavioural response to your belief

This model was developed to educate others of how beliefs are the cause of emotional, physiological and behavioural responses, and not that events cause our emotional reactions.