Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) is a talking therapy. It can help people who are experiencing a wide range of mental health difficulties. What people think can affect how they feel and how they behave. This is the basis of CBT.

It is a short to medium term therapy that focuses on the present rather than the past. CBT is based on the premise that emotional distress is caused by the way we think, and that changing our way of thinking alleviates worry, anxiety and emotional distress.

In CBT, the way a person thinks underpins feelings and behavior. The therapist helps the patient to examine their self-beliefs, perceptions and thinking patterns, and identify how these impact on their emotional wellbeing, and actions. Homework between sessions is a key part of CBT, which may consist of journal and diary keeping, as well experiments to test out new ways of thinking and responding.

Within our CBT sessions you will learn to make sense of problems by breaking them down into smaller areas. This will let you see how they are connected and how they can affect you.

The cognitive component in the cognitive-behavioural psychotherapies refers to how people think about and create meaning about situations, symptoms and events in their lives and develop beliefs about themselves, others and the world. Cognitive therapy uses techniques to help people become more aware of how they reason, and the kinds of automatic thought that spring to mind and give meaning to things.

Cognitive interventions use a style of questioning to probe for peoples' meanings and use this to stimulate alternative viewpoints or ideas. This is called 'guided discovery', and involves exploring and reflecting on the style of reasoning and thinking, and possibilities to think differently and more helpfully. On the basis of these alternatives people carry out behavioural experiments to test out the accuracy of these alternatives, and thus adopt new ways of perceiving and acting. Overall the intention is to move away from more extreme and unhelpful ways of seeing things to more helpful and balanced conclusions.

Importantly the cognitive and behavioural psychotherapies aim to directly target distressing symptoms, reduce distress, re-evaluate thinking and promote helpful behavioural responses by offering problem-focussed skills-based treatment interventions.