What is CBT?
Cognitive Behaviour Therapy is a "Here and Now" approach to understanding and overcoming psychological problems.
How we think, feel and behave interact together to maintain emotional disturbance
Cognitive Behaviour Therapy endeavours to understand this interaction and enable us to make changes in how we think, feel and behave.
When anxious or depressed for example, cognition (thinking) tends to focus on excessive worry about things. In anxiety, the person may expect the worst to happen, or misinterpret anxiety symptoms for physical illness. In depression, the person may believe they are bad, or have done something wrong, although this is groundless.
The combination of anxious or depressed thinking with anxious or depressed feelings will lead people to alter their behaviour in an effort to feel better. This means a person is likely to avoid situations where they have felt uncomfortable before or where they predict they will feel uncomfortable again or a person may carry out repeated actions because those actions reduce anxiety. A person may experience an inability to carry out normal tasks because they feel so low.
The problems CBT can help.
How CBT works.
© Karen Pittman 2008