South Wales CBT – Cognitive Behavioural Therapy

CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) is a highly effective therapy approach for working to improve and treat a range of mental health disorders including anxiety, depression, and low self-esteem. There are other therapies such as counselling, but CBT is evidence based treatment that gives you strategies to work on and focuses primarily on the here and now.

CBT works on 4 components:

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy involves working with your therapist to identify how these 4 components are making a negative vicious cycle when depressed or anxious and how you can learn to break that cycle by working on improving those 4 components. CBT helps improve unhelpful thinking patterns that we may have when we are depressed or anxious, as well as unhelpful behaviours we may develop such as avoidance, withdrawing, or safety behaviours in certain situations that help us cope. It also works on calming the body to improve those physical symptoms. ​CBT focuses on worksheets and giving you techniques and tools to practice in your own time that you can then transfer and apply to different areas of your life, with the idea of turning you into your own therapist.

• CBT is a treatment that helps people learn life skills to help them improve their mood and/or anxiety levels. Although in CBT, past experiences are touched upon, the focus is very much on the here and now and how clients can make changes to improve the current problem.

• CBT is very structured, and goal orientated so the sessions are based around teaching you the skills you need to practise to work towards your treatment goals.

• CBT is more of a “doing therapy,” and involves “homework” or “skills practice,” which is set together and with the aim of helping you to master the skills on your own. By doing this, you can eventually become your own therapist and can self-manage your symptoms going forward.

• Counselling is a type of psychotherapy that involves talking to a professional who has been trained in helping people work through negative feelings and/or experiences.

• Counselling is a great opportunity to talk things through, get things off your chest and have someone to listen to you and validate your feelings and experiences.

• Counselling can also help you make develop insights which may lead to you making more helpful choices and thus improving how you feel.

• Counselling can be highly effective for helping with problems such as relationship difficulties, changing jobs, a bereavement or loss of some kind and negative past experiences.

• Counselling tends to have less structured sessions so you can discuss whatever is on your mind in that moment, whether that be a current problem or something that you have experienced in the past.

NICE guidelines (in the links below) set out the different evidence-based treatments that are available for different diagnoses. According to the research, there is more evidence that CBT is the most effective treatment for depression and anxiety, which is why it is the current treatment of choice. However, which one is best really depends on the individual circumstances and treatment goals.

NICE Guidelines – Depression in adults: Treatment and Management
NICE Guidelines – Generalised Anxiety Disorder and Panic Disorder in Adults: Management

CBT can also work with low self-esteem, anger, bereavement, and stress/work related stress. These treatments can include assertiveness training, problem solving, relaxation and grounding, goal setting and organisation, time management and a better balance of activity.