Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is based on the Cognitive Model: How you think about or perceive a situation will influence how you feel emotionally, how you react and behave. It is collaborative with you actively taking part in setting the session agenda, goals and action steps throughout therapy. But this work is done in a supportive, compassionate manner with the understanding that making changes is hard.
Solving Problems: CBT is present focused to solve current problems but it takes into account your core beliefs about you, others and the world. Core beliefs are formed earlier in life and influence how you perceive your current situation.
Educational: CBT will teach you skills you can use long after therapy ends. You learn to identify your thoughts which may be irrational, unbalanced and not helpful (we all have them!). Then you can examine how useful and valid these thoughts are. And, ultimately, you can respond to these thoughts with more balanced thoughts… which leads to less distress and different behaviors.
Effective: CBT is an evidence based approach with many studies showing the efficacy of CBT for depression, anxiety and weight loss.
Changing Behaviors: Taking action and trying new behaviors is essential to create change and improve moods. Sometimes you have to act your way into new ways of feeling. We will collaboratively set behavioral experiments so you can test your current thoughts or predictions. These will begin with small behavior change so you can see what happens if you do something differently. Exercise is one of the behaviors we will include in this process.