Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) is a type of psychotherapy which has become a crucial part of psychology. While it was originally formulated as a treatment for depression, it is now involved in the treatment of many different disorders. CBT teaches you coping skills and provides new resources for dealing with different problems.
Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) focuses on exploring relationships among a person’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviours. During CBT a therapist will actively work with a person to uncover unhealthy patterns of thought and how they may be causing self-destructive behaviours and beliefs. CBT teaches you coping skills and provides new resources for dealing with different problems. CBT utilises a wide range of proven techniques which can be self-learnt, learnt collaboratively with the guidance and support of a qualified therapist or used within clinical hypnotherapy by the hypnotherapist to assist the client to fully embed the changes they are seeking in their life’s.
Cognitive Behavioural Clinical Hypnotherapy (CBT with hypnosis) is a cutting edge therapy which offers powerful techniques to help with a wide range of emotional issues, addictions, habits, weight loss, low self-esteem, anger management, fears, phobias and physical ailments plus lots more.
Designed to manage your problems by changing the way you think and behave; cognitive behavioural hypnotherapy will equip you to deal with your problems in a positive way by integrating hypnosis with traditional cognitive behavioural therapy.
The National Health Service (NHS) of England, states that “CBT is based on the concept that your thoughts, feelings, physical sensations and actions are interconnected, and that negative thoughts and feelings can trap you in a vicious cycle. CBT aims to help you deal with overwhelming problems in a more positive way by breaking them down into smaller parts. You’re shown how to change these negative patterns to improve the way you feel. Unlike some other talking treatments, CBT deals with your current problems, rather than focusing on issues from your past. It looks for practical ways to improve your state of mind on a daily basis.
CBT as a structured type of psychotherapy that involves dealing with a client’s beliefs in order to change the way they think, behave and react to the things happening around them.
Cognitive behavioural therapy as we know it first came about when Aaron Beck, a psychoanalyst at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, attempted to find an empirical basis for the psychoanalysis treatments that were being used for depression at the time (Beck, 2011). While doing this, Beck could not find an empirical basis for psychoanalysis, but he did find out that cognition (and specifically negative thoughts) played a major role in depression.
This cognitive role was not reflected in contemporary psychoanalysis treatments at this time. Following this finding, Beck developed the then-called cognitive therapy:
“a structured, short-term, present-oriented psychotherapy for depression, directed toward solving current problems and modifying dysfunctional thinking and behaviour.”
The basic idea behind Cognitive Behavioural Therapy is that people with depression have a set of beliefs about themselves. These beliefs cause them to automatically have negative thoughts in response to adversity, and these thoughts cause them to retreat within and become further depressed.
Beck felt that this contradicted contemporary thinking about depression, as he felt that treatments for depression at the time focused too much on previous experiences rather than on current day-to-day beliefs and experiences. By realizing the importance of cognition and day-to-day thinking in depression and depressive symptoms, Beck revolutionized the treatment of depression.
Eventually, this shift in thinking also made its way to other disorders as Cognitive Behavioural Therapy started being used as a treatment for non-depression disorders.
Beck shared his findings with his colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania, and they found similar success in treating their patients with cognitive behavioural therapy (which was then just called cognitive therapy). This led Beck and his colleague John Rush to run a study comparing the efficacy of this new therapy to the drug imipramine, an antidepressant and found the two treatments to be similarly effective.
You have power over your mind, not outside events. Realise this, and you will find strength
