Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT)
CBT in Wolverhampton, the West Midlands and Staffordshire
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy - more commonly referred to as CBT- is a school of counselling that focuses on the way people think and act in order to help them overcome their emotional and behavioural problems.
Cognitive means mental processes like thinking. The word ‘cognitive’ refers to everything that goes on in the mind including dreams, memories, images, thoughts, and attention.
Behaviour refers to everything that you do. This includes what you say, how you try to solve problems, how you act, and avoidance. Behaviour refers to both action and inaction, for example biting your tongue instead of speaking your mind is still behaviour even though you are trying not to do something.
Therapy is a word used to describe a systematic approach to combating a problem, illness, or irregular condition.
A central concept in CBT is that you feel the way you think. Therefore, CBT works on the principle that you can live happily and productively if you’re thinking in healthy ways. This principle is a very simple way of summing up CBT.
Issues that people bring to CBT
- Anxiety
- Depression
- Panic
- Social phobia
- Health anxiety
- Eating disorders
- Obessive compulsive disorder
The above list is not exhaustive. Our team of professional CBT counsellors deal with many issues that are not listed.
How can CBT help?
CBT can help you to make sense of overwhelming problems by breaking them down into smaller parts. This makes it easier to see how they are connected and how they affect you. These parts are:
- A problem, event or difficult situation
- Thoughts
- Emotions
- Physical feelings
- Actions
Each of these areas can affect the others. How you think about a problem can affect how you feel physically and emotionally. It can also alter what you do about it. There are helpful and unhelpful ways of reacting to most situations, depending on how you think about them.
With your CBT counsellor, you break each problem down into its separate parts. To help this process, your counsellor may ask you to keep a diary. This will help you to identify your individual patterns of thoughts, emotions, bodily feelings and actions. Together you will look at your thoughts, feelings and behaviours to work out if they are unrealistic or unhelpful and how they affect each other, and you.
Your counsellor will then help you to work out how to change unhelpful thoughts and behaviours. After you have identified what you can change, your therapist will recommend "homework" - you practise these changes in your everyday life. Depending on the situation, you might start to:
- Question a self-critical or upsetting thought and replace it with a positive (and more realistic) one that you have developed in CBT
- Recognise that you are about to do something that will make you feel worse and, instead, do something more helpful.
At each meeting you discuss how you've got on since the last session. Your counsellor can help with suggestions if any of the tasks seem too hard or don't seem to be helping.They will not ask you to do things you don't want to do - you decide the pace of the treatment and what you will and won't try. The strength of CBT is that you can continue to practise and develop your skills even after the sessions have finished. This makes it less likely that your symptoms or problems will return.
Making an appointment for CBT
If you would like to arrange an appointment for CBT please telephone our Wolverhampton counselling practice on: 01902 827808. Alternatively fill out our online contact form
We are open Monday to Friday 8:30am to 8:00pm and Saturday 8:30am to 6:00pm.
Our clients come to us via two main routes: either they find us after searching on the web and cover the cost of CBT themselves; or an organisation contacts us and arranges and pays for CBT for one or more of their staff. We work with both individuals and organisations.
For more information about counselling please click: FAQ - Counselling.
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