Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT)

What is CBT?

What does a typical session look like?

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) is a collaborative, evidence-based therapy that helps us understand how our thoughts, emotions, physical sensations, and behaviors interact with one another. Through various CBT techniques, we can identify and break free from patterns that keep us feeling stuck. CBT helps us make sense of these patterns, understand their development, and learn effective mental health strategies to create lasting change. Rather than simply treating symptoms, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy aims to empower you with the knowledge, confidence, and skills to become your own therapist over time.

What does a typical session look like?

CBT sessions, which utilize effective Cognitive Behavioural Therapy techniques, are structured and collaborative, helping us make the best use of our time together. Although every session is tailored to your individual needs, a typical session may include:

- Reviewing how you've been since our last appointment

- Agreeing on a shared agenda

- Exploring a current difficulty

- Learning practical CBT strategies

- Planning home practice between sessions

- Reflecting on the session and planning next steps

Home practice is an important part of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, as it provides an opportunity to apply the mental health strategies we've explored in therapy to everyday life. We'll always agree on this together, and it will be tailored to your goals and circumstances.

Why choose CBT?

What does a typical session look like?

Why choose CBT?

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, or CBT, is one of the most well-researched psychological therapies available and is recommended by the NHS for many common mental health difficulties. This approach focuses on helping you understand the patterns that may be keeping you stuck while providing effective CBT techniques and mental health strategies that you can apply in your everyday life.

CBT isn't about simply thinking positively; rather, it aids you in developing a more balanced understanding of yourself, your experiences, and the challenges you face.

Evidence-based support, tailored to you

CBT can help with anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, phobias, , eating disorders, insomnia, ADHD, OCD, PTSD and relationship issues, amongst many others. Tap a condition below to see how CBT can help.

ADHD

Living with ADHD can sometimes feel as though your mind is constantly racing from one thought to the next. It can be overwhelming, frustrating and, at times, exhausting. Learning how ADHD affects the brain can be an important step towards understanding yourself with greater compassion rather than self-criticism. Develop practical strategies to support attention, motivation, emotional regulation and everyday organisation in a way that feels realistic and achievable.

Anger

Helps recognise the triggers and internal cues of anger, identify and challenge unhelpful thoughts, and build healthier ways to manage strong emotions and express needs.

Anxiety

Helping break through the cycles of worry. response to worry and intolerance of uncertainty.

Other areas of anxiety such as health anxiety, understanding the cycles between our thoughts and our bodily sensations, learning to reduce catastrophising thoughts and finding a balance to response from a symptom. Using behavioural experiments to gain confidence when managing worries.

Depression

Focuses on identifying and challenging unhelpful thoughts, breaking patterns of avoidance or withdrawal, and increasing activities that bring a sense of pleasure, achievement or connection.

Eating disorders

Focuses on the relationship between thoughts, emotions and eating behaviours, while addressing perfectionism, body image and the rules that drive disordered eating patterns.

Phobias

Using graded exposure to feared phobia. Using cognitive restructuring to help reduce brains threat response to specific feared objects or situations

PTSD

Supports safe processing of traumatic memories and reduces symptoms like flashbacks and hypervigilance by addressing unhelpful beliefs and using structured techniques like trauma narratives or imagery rescripting.

Social Anxiety

Working through fears of judgement, embarrassment & preoccupation of self through thought challenging, focusing on self critical thinking and behavioural change in feared social situations.

Low self esteem

Working through core beliefs, rules and assumptions, through thought challenging & behavioural change

Sleeping difficulties

Combines practical strategies like sleep hygiene and stimulus control with cognitive work to tackle worry, rumination and unhelpful beliefs about sleep.

OCD

Targets obsessive thoughts and compulsive behaviours through exposure and response prevention (ERP) and by challenging the beliefs that maintain the cycle of anxiety and rituals. Alongside the meaning attached to the intrusive thinking and learning alternative mechanisms.

The Process

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Phase 1

Before we embark on your journey, I will conduct an initial assessment to explore how suitable Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and its CBT techniques are for addressing the mental health strategies that will help you with what you're struggling with.

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Phase 2

Phase 1

Next, we’ll map out the problems you want to focus on, examining the current cycles you may be experiencing, their maintenance, and the impact they have. We’ll also incorporate effective CBT techniques and mental health strategies before setting some concrete goals through Cognitive Behavioural Therapy.

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Phase 3

From then on, sessions will occur weekly or fortnightly, where we'll implement various CBT techniques aimed at enhancing mental health strategies. Each session will begin with setting an agenda, followed by a reflection on our progress with Cognitive Behavioural Therapy.

Phase 4

Phase 3

At the end of each session, you’ll leave with a home task designed to reinforce the CBT techniques we discuss. Together, we’ll develop and agree on these tasks as part of our Cognitive Behavioural Therapy approach, as action plans are a key feature of this process. We’ll then review these mental health strategies at our next session.

We can learn to control our thoughts, emotions, and behaviours so they no longer control us