I am proud to provide a professional, friendly, and common-sense approach to CBT. Tailored to make therapy work for you and your needs, my approach is aimed to help you to get the best from yourself with practical ways to make beneficial changes.

CBT will help you to make sense of difficulties by breaking them down into smaller parts. This makes it easier to see how they are connected and how they affect you. It works by identifying and understanding the vicious cycles that keep difficult or unhelpful feelings going.

We will explore the way your beliefs, thoughts and actions influence how you feel. Working together to consider how you can become more aware of these patterns and ‘experiment’ with changing the way you respond, to manage and tolerate the distress you experience.

Here’s an example:

You wake up on a Monday morning for work and think 'I can’t go in today’, you imagine your boss being critical, you feel stressed, exhausted, and overwhelmed. You phone work, pull the cover over your head and spend the rest of the day in bed.

 In the short term you feel relief but what the real cost of this?

You spend the day beating yourself up about phoning in sick and staying in bed, feeling angry at your boss whom you have little power to change. Consequently, you feel more irritable and snap at those around leaving you to feel even worse about yourself.

Tuesday morning comes and the process may well repeat itself and the dread of what awaits you at work builds……

In this example we can’t change the behaviour of the Boss, but we can change your response to them, your behaviour in response to those overwhelmed feelings and support you to manage some of the thoughts that perpetuate these difficult feelings.

What to expect from my first appointment? 

A friendly face, who won’t judge you or be surprised by the things you might share. This appointment is an opportunity for us to really think about what has motivated you to come, define together what the focus of our work will be. Once we understand these things more then we can consider how CBT can help as well as being transparent about its limitations.

Sometimes, I may feel that a different approach with an alternative therapist might be better to address your difficulties. I see supporting you to make an informed choice to be an integral part of my role.

My aim is for you to leave feeling you have a better understanding of why you came and what is maintaining your ‘problem’, to understand how CBT works in practice, and how CBT can help and what a CBT treatment plan for your difficultly might look like.

Appointments are generally an hour long and ideally weekly particularly at the beginning as this helps us to get to know each other and build some momentum to the therapy. However, I am flexible and recognise that money, time, work and family commitments can be a challenge. Ideals aren’t always realistic and an important part of my first appointment with everyone is thinking about these practicalities.

Therapy appointments are only half of the picture, CBT will ask a lot of you, it is true ‘you will get out what you put in’. There is valuable focus on ‘taskwork’ between sessions its aim is you finishing therapy as your own therapist. Feeling confident that you can identify and make the changes you need when you are flying solo and that only comes through commitment and practice.

'CBT or Cognitive Behavioural Therapy is a talking therapy. CBT can help you to make sense of overwhelming problems by breaking them down into smaller parts. This makes it easier to see how they are connected and how they affect you.'