CBT
What Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) and other therapies offer is a chance to look at how we could live our lives in a different way, to identify where the problems are and to make changes such that we do not keep coming back to where we started.
Cognitive Behaviour Therapy is the therapy of choice for many emotional problems we face today. It is a therapy which concentrates on what is happening in your life now and looks to understand how the way that you are behaving and thinking is influencing the way that you feel.
It is therefore goal orientated, looking to provide effective and long term solutions to the emotional difficulties that you face. It has been shown to be highly effective in helping with a variety of issues such as depression, anxiety, phobias, trauma (PTSD), and obsessions & compulsions (OCD).
Your psychologist will help you identify the connections between what you do, how you think and how you feel and give you effective strategies to help you make positive changes in your life. Depending on the nature of your difficulties, these could include ways of lifting your mood or managing your stress levels better.
The basic premise of CBT is that what happens to you in life is not the whole story. How you respond to the events and the situations in your life is as, if not more, important. Where we most often cannot prevent things happening to us, we can always choose our responses to what happens.
For example, if two people are made redundant, one might view this as the last straw. They could see it as taking away their identity, of devaluing who they are. They might get angry at the company for the years that they put in and think “For what? Now they’ve sacked me. Why did I bother?” They might ruminate about suing the company and could be reluctant to get another job because it would only mean working for someone else that would take advantage of them.
The other might consider the current economic climate and recognise that the company had sound reasons for making the decision they did. While they feel upset at what happened and somewhat uncertain about the future, they decide to have a few weeks ‘thinking time’ to consider what they might do next. The number of years they worked for the company means that they have a good redundancy package and one of the options they might consider is to start their own business. It’s something they have always wanted to do but the long hours they worked just sort of got in the way of the plans. This could be the opportunity they were waiting for.
It is not however just about the dramatic life events; it is about how we respond to things on a daily basis, emotionally or in the way that we behave or the way that we think. Our responses can lead to drops in mood or increases in anxiety and we can get into cycles where the only way out we can see is to go on medication or change job, relationship or however else we cope, until it all calms down again. Often however the problem comes back, a little like how weight comes back on once we finish the diet.
Stop making the same mistakes and going round in circles, contact Erko Psychology now to book an appointment or discuss your specific requirements.