All About Cognitive Therapy and How it Helps to Solve Mental Health Problems

What is Cognitive Therapy?

Cognitive therapy is a type of psychological therapy that aims to help people understand and then manage their ‘cognition’ or thinking that may be causing, or exacerbating, a range of problems.

To all intents and purposes, cognitive therapy is understood by people to mean the same as cognitive behavioural therapy, or CBT, although from a technical point of view, there is less emphasis on making behavioural changes in order to modify thoughts in cognitive therapy sessions.

The central tenet of cognitive therapy is that it is primarily the way we ‘think’ about things that then creates emotional or behavioural responses.

In other words, our thinking creates feelings that may be either helpful or unhelpful to us.

This is often contrary to what people believe when they tend to attribute the way that they feel due to some ‘external event’ or that somebody else has ‘made’ them feel this way – this may ‘seem’ to be true, but in fact it is ourselves that create our emotional responses.

An over-reliance on emotional feedback is known as emotional reasoning which is known to be highly unreliable for gauging reality!

If we can learn to manage our thinking through cognitive therapy techniques, then we can learn how to control our emotions in a more ‘useful’ and meaningful way.

Cognitive Therapy Sessions

Sessions of cognitive therapy involve talking to the therapist about certain feelings and then exploring the thinking, or thoughts, that create those feelings. In doing so, we can help you to discover any thinking errors that you may be unwittingly utilising and then help you to change them.

Most cognitive therapy interventions can last from 10 to 20 sessions depending on the degree of difficulty you may be experiencing and all three of our therapists are fully conversant with this type of approach.

We have also developed our own programme of cognitive therapy called the Tranceformental CBT programme which uses an advanced understanding of the deep structural coherences that give rise to unhelpful cognition.

Types of Problems Helped with Cognitive Therapy

Cognitive therapy is useful for almost any psychological problem in which thoughts, beliefs and core values play a role in the creation of symptoms.

To see the range of problems that can be helped with cognitive therapies, please visit our mental health problems page.

Free Initial Consultations for Cognitive Therapy

We offer all prospective clients an initial consultation to discuss your mental health problems prior to commencing any cognitive therapy.

The consultation is free and lasts around 50 minutes.

During this consultation we will discuss the various types of psychological therapy that are available to you and make a considered recommendation based on your individual personal circumstances.

Initial consultations are also available as part of our online counselling service.

At Tranceform Psychology we emphasise the importance of the therapy relationship in helping people to bring about effective change, so its important to be able to ‘meet’ to discuss our change programmes BEFORE proceeding.

Our policy is to help people make a fully balanced & considered decision about undertaking mental health work with us, including both the financial and personal implications.