A CBT Counsellor in Kings Lynn

Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT counselling) accessible in King's Lynn, Norfolk from a registered and accredited counsellor and psychotherapist - serving Norfolk, Cambridgeshire, Lincolnshire, and further afield via telephone and Skype.

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

It can be helpful to think of CBT counselling 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.

And you can find a CBT Counsellor to work with you in Kings Lynn.

Another way of thinking of CBT counselling 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 counsellor 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 Counselling) 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 Therapy, though both came out of America. Albert Ellis developed Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT) in the 1960's and Aaron Beck developed Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) 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.

What is CBT?

Find a Cognitive Behaviour Therapist (CBT) in Kings Lynn.

In a paper prepared for a UKCP/BACP mapping psychotherapy exercise by Katy Grazebrook, Anne Garland and the Board of BABCP July 2005, the authors defined CBT below.

"Cognitive and/or behavioural psychotherapies (CBP) are psychological approaches based on scientific principles and which research has shown to be effective for a wide range of problems.

Clients and therapists work together, once a therapeutic alliance has been formed, to identify and understand problems in terms of the relationship between thoughts, feelings and behaviour. 

The approach usually focuses on difficulties in the here and now, and relies on the therapist and client developing a shared view of the individual's problem. 

This then leads to identification of personalised, usually time-limited therapy goals and strategies which are continually monitored and evaluated.

The treatments are inherently empowering in nature, the outcome being to focus on specific psychological and practical skills (e.g. in reflecting on and exploring the meaning attributed to events and situations and re-evaluation of those meanings) aimed at enabling the client to tackle their problems by harnessing their own resources. 

The acquisition and utilisation of such skills is seen as the main goal, and the active component in promoting change with an emphasis on putting what has been learned into practice between sessions ("homework"). 

Thus the overall aim is for the individual to attribute improvement in their problems to their own efforts, in collaboration with the psychotherapist."

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