Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, or CBT, is a distinctive, focused way of helping people change their lives. CBT is structured, and is also often relatively short-term.

It can be helpful to think of CBT in the following way. People are like digital recorders on legs. We go through life recording messages and then playing them back to ourselves. Sometimes those messages are true and helpful. At other times they are not true or helpful. Perhaps they may have been true at a former time in our lives, but they are no longer so. The CBT therapist works with the client to firstly identify what messages the client is listening to, and then to help the client find alternative true messages to influence his or her feelings and behaviour.

Another way of thinking of CBT is to understand the people are also triangles on legs. We have three important aspects of our lives. We think, we feel, and we act. What we think influences and helps maintain how we feel. And what we think and feel influences what we do. It is important to recognise that problem thinking and problem behaviour help maintain our problem feelings. The CBT therapist works with the client to help him or her identify and change any problem thinking and behaviour. As this happens over a period of weeks, the client begins to notice that the problem feelings begin to change too.

In Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) the counsellor will collaboratively work with the client to (amongst other things):

• help the client identify problem behaviour patterns
• help the client identify problem underlying thinking
• help the client develop new, more realistic, helpful beliefs
• help the client plan and execute specific behaviour change
• help the client recognise changes in mood

There are actually two slightly different kinds of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, though both came out of America. Albert Ellis developed Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy in the 1960's and Aaron Beck developed Cognitive Behaviour Therapy in the 1970's. However, both REBT and CBT employ the same general premise: in contrast to the Psychodynamic Psychotherapy emphasis on insight into unconscious motivation, the Cognitive Behavioral Therapies emphasize the ability of people to make changes in their lives without necessarily having to understand why the change occurs. Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) focuses on specific problem creating thoughts, while Rational-Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT) aims at changing the general irrational beliefs in a person's life.