Therapy takes place on a weekly, fortnightly or less frequent basis as necessary.
At the outset we will discuss how many appointments are likely to be needed to address your presenting issues.
Sessions are 50 minutes to one hour long.
When we first meet I will ask you questions about your current problems and the impact they are having on your life. Here we can discuss whether cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) or counselling, possibly integrating elements of CBT, mindfulness, acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) and other approaches, would suit you best.
I will also ask you about your goals for therapy and what you would like me to help you with. A key part of therapy is for you and your therapist to develop a shared understanding of your problems. This shared understanding is then used to form a treatment plan to help you alleviate your distress and achieve your goals.
If we decide that CBT would suit you best, we would focus on the links between situations, thoughts, emotions and behaviours. In CBT the likely areas we would work on are:
- to help recognise and modify unhelpful thinking patterns and beliefs
- to recognise and change unhelpful behavioural patterns
- to help you understand and deal with strong emotions
CBT is a very collaborative process and requires you to work hard to overcome your issues. Similar to physiotherapy, where you may be given exercises between appointments to help progress, in CBT there is an expectation that you will take away new ideas and learning from your sessions and put these into practice before your next session.
If we decide that counselling would be more helpful for you, you will have space to make sense of your problems in your own way, while ideally identifying links with present and past experiences.
Please find some useful resources here.
Don’t worry if it is still not completely clear, when we first meet you will have the chance to ask any questions or voice any concerns you may have, and discuss the best way forward.