Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) is a popular form of psychotherapy that's widely used by psychologists, counsellors and mental health clinicians. It has become the treatment of choice for many disorders. Depression, anxiety and problems with anger can all be treated, due to the sound empirical basis for its effectiveness.
This CBT Course begins with the history of the fields it belongs to: cognitive psychology and behavioural psychology.
From here, you will go on to familiarise yourself with psychological theories of emotions. You'll learn about how feelings are experienced on a physiological level. And then you'll see how the way we experience emotions is influenced by our thought processes and our behaviour.
Many CBT techniques work to target thoughts that influence our emotions. As a CBT counsellor, it is important to understand the process of change one undergoes. The Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) Course outlines the stages of change. It also examines the motivations behind making changes.
If your intention is to ultimately work as a counsellor, you will need to not only understand the techniques used, but what the job entails. You'll also need to become accustomed to the skills needed. This course outlines the personal and counselling-specific skills you'll need to embody the role. It goes over the counselling process itself, and the professional and ethical constraints you must adhere to. It also digs into how to look after your personal mental and emotional wellbeing.
To further deepen your understanding of counselling, you will explore the history of psychology. This will provide a greater understanding of human feelings, abilities and personalities. You'll study the following counselling approaches – developmental psychology, psychotherapy and humanism. Rounding out your knowledge of the theories behind counselling, you will be guided through the principles of CBT. In this way, you'll see how it can be used to challenge negative thought patterns and install new, positive behaviours.
The course takes you through the practical application of CBT in counselling. It starts off with how to plan a session with your client, and gives tips on how you set take-away tasks for clients to complete outside of session time.
From here, you’ll move onto some basic cognitive behaviour techniques. These include identifying and challenging automatic thoughts, altering cognitive distortions, thought stopping, and challenging core beliefs.
The symptoms of depression, anxiety, phobias, insomnia and anger management are detailed in full. You'll learn the specific advanced CBT intervention technique you can offer clients suffering from each of them too. The course also explains Dialectical Behaviour Therapy and Solution-focused Brief Therapy. These are two CBT variants. In each, the reasons behind the new approach are explained, along with how it differs from CBT and a brief overview of its structure.
The CBT Course concludes by leading you through two case studies. You can reflect on ideas as they arise and test your newly-acquired CBT knowledge.
In addition to written materials, the course includes the following 4 videos, presented by a CBT Therapist. These cover some of the practical aspects of working with clients:
- Introduction to CBT
- Client Considerations
- Client Consultation
- End of the Session
Upon completion of this course, students will have developed an understanding of the following:
- Various counselling approaches
- The process of change
- Professional considerations
- Core CBT concepts
- Basic cognitive behavioural techniques
- Advanced techniques for specific applications
- Variations of CBT
