Cognitive Behavioural Therapy
I implement effective psychotherapy methods to help instill self-understanding among patients and encourage them to adopt new attitudes and feelings towards life situations. It is essential to keep in mind that therapy is not a magic pill or a quick fix: therapy is a healing process that necessitates participation and investment from the Client and Therapist alike. But in the end, by making small changes to self-defeating behaviour and coping with feelings of sadness, fear, and pain it can help you to create beneficial results.
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Here are some frequent mental health issues and how CBT can be helpful.
1
Anxiety, Social Anxiety, Generalised Anxiety Disorder
CBT encourages you to look at ways in which your current behaviours such as avoidance and reassurance seeking may be keeping you in an unhelpful loop of anxiety. CBT helps you to understand where anxiety is holding you back, whether that's through your thoughts, behaviours and the physical sensations of anxiety and gives you helpful tools and coping strategies for you to implement outside of sessions to help ease and/or reduce your anxiety. It can also be helpful for social anxiety as through exposure and response you can slowly build your confidence until you are able to approach situations with less anxiety.
2
Depression and low mood
Depression and low mood often affects our motivation and can create a self-critical voice that often holds us back. CBT encourages you to notice these thoughts and behaviours which may be keeping you in a negative cycle, gives you techniques to interrupt them, and helps you learn new coping strategies to empower you to change. It can help you see where these self-limiting beliefs or thoughts are holding you back or keeping you in a cycle of shame/doubt/guilt.
3
Low self-esteem, lack of confidence
When growing up and on our journey through life and what we witness, we may pick up negative core beliefs about ourselves which ultimately hold us back from achieving our true potential. An example of a negative core belief may be "I'm not good enough" which may lead to a rule or assumption that "I need to please others in order to be good enough", which then leads to negative automatic thoughts of "my friend hasn't replied to me, I must have upset them". CBT helps you to unravel your core beliefs and gives you tools that you can use to rationalise your negative thoughts that may be holding you back.
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Stress, anger management
Sometimes life gets stressful. Self-care goes out the window and suddenly little things are tipping you over the edge, and you find yourself often feeling irritable or agitated. CBT can help you to understand your current patterns and triggers for stress and gives you the tools to use outside of sessions to rationalise these thoughts or to be able to see your patterns of behaviour. CBT can also encourage you to seek out helpful coping strategies to lower your stress levels, which means you're less likely to keep 'boiling over' after every small inconvenience.
Let's Work Together
Perhaps you're down or anxious - maybe you're unsure about the future of a relationship, or just feel that you aren't living the life you were meant to lead. Whatever your needs may be, I am here to offer support. Therapy is a process of growth and self-discovery, and in my sessions I promote the adoption of new attitudes and reactions, to empower Clients to make choices in their life. The first step to change is learning about yourself, and then implementing strategies or techniques outside of sessions to create helpful boundaries, behaviours and perceptions.
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Not based in Merseyside? I now offer video CBT sessions via Zoom/Facetime.
Enquire today to arrange a free 15 minute consultation at a time/day convenient for you.