Cognitive Behaviour Therapy

Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (or CBT) is a psychological therapy that helps you understand the link between your thoughts, feelings and actions.

Many of us experience unhelpful thoughts sometimes (e.g. “I’m not good enough”, “I don’t think that person likes me”) and sometimes these thoughts can leave us with difficult feelings.

When we feel low, anxious or angry we tend to change our behaviour, e.g.we might see less of our friends or avoid certain situations. Over time this can become a problem.

CBT aims to help you recognise and challenge negative or unhelpful thoughts. This often leads to feeling more positive, optimistic and less anxious, which in turn makes it easier to start wanting to do more enjoyable activities.

Cognitive Behaviour Therapy Tests Thought Patterns

CBT is sometimes described as a ‘talking’ therapy, but it often involves more than talking. With your psychologist’s help, you can develop experiments to ‘test’ your thoughts and practice strategies.

This can be an important part of treatment and it is always done at a pace that you are comfortable with. An important advantage of CBT is that treatment tends to be short and effective. You will quickly understand the problem and find a way of tackling the issue. This strategy can then be implemented throughout the rest of your life.

Weekly sessions of about 50 minutes have proved to be effective, especially if the ‘homework’ is completed. Most therapists personalise the treatment so that it suits your specific needs.

We are sometimes more disturbed by our beliefs and thoughts around an event that happened previously, sometimes years ago, never mind last week. CBT offers exercises to clarify those thoughts and beliefs, then explore and re-evaluate those thoughts.

This helps you to develop constructive coping strategies and thus better manage your thought processes and consequently change the way you feel.

There is lots of research evidence showing that CBT can be effective in treating problems in adults, adolescents and children, including in areas such as anxiety, depression, eating disorders, anger, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, PTSD, chronic pain, personality disorders, relationship problems, substance abuse and many other areas of concern.

Book an Appointment

To find out more please call our friendly admin team who will be happy to answer your questions and assist you to make a booking.

We treat patients from all over Perth at our clinic in Dianella. To make an appointment simply give us a call or fill out the contact form on our contact page with your details and we’ll call you to confirm.

You may want to ask us a question, request an appointment or find out more about the registered, counselling or clinical psychologists you can see at our clinic. Choose the right option for you below: