Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT)

What is CBT?

What does a typical session look like?

CBT is a collaborative, evidence based therapy that helps you understand how our thoughts, emotions, physical sensations, and behaviours interact with one another. CBT helps make sense of patterns, understand their development and learn effective coping strategies to create change.

What does a typical session look like?

CBT sessions are structured and collaborative although every session is tailored to your individual needs.

Sessions might involve explore a recent difficulty, understanding patterns that may be keeping you stuck, learning new practical strategies and thinking about how you can apply what we've discussed outside of sessions.

How CBT can help

CBT can be helpful when you find yourself caught in patterns that are difficult to break. Whether that's overthinking, avoiding things that feel uncomfortable, constantly doubt yourself or feeling overwhelmed by difficult emotions.

Areas I particularly work with

Perfectionism & self criticism: When nothing ever feels quite good enough, mistakes feel difficult to tolerate, or your sense of worth becomes tied to how well you perform.

People pleasing & putting yourself last: When you find yourself saying yes when you want to say no, worrying about disappointing others, or feeling responsible for how other people feel.

Stress & burnout: When you've spent so long coping, pushing through or holding everything together that you're beginning to feel emotionally and physically exhausted.

Anxiety & overthinking: When your mind rarely switches off. Worrying about what could go wrong, replaying things, doubting yourself or feeling unable to properly relax.

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.

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.

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