Psychotherapy

Individual psychotherapy sessions or client sessions are largely based on tools and principles of cognitive-behavioural therapy and are available in three languages (Croatian, English and Spanish). The process, exercises and techniques are adjusted to fit the individual client’s needs, while numerous other creative methods are applied to break free from a single rigid approach and provide our clients with as many different tools as possible and to find the ones that benefit them most.

Sessions are currently available online and in person in Zagreb in all three languages mentioned above.

What is counselling and/or psychotherapy?

Psychotherapy is a structured process which an individual/client seeks to undergo to address a problem, mental illness or lack of necessary coping strategies or skills in order to achieve personal growth, function better and improve their quality of life by developing and strengthening those necessary strategies and skills. During this process, the counsellor establishes a relationship with the client and offers emotional support in the creative and unique process of regaining one’s strengths and becoming aware of what they are, while providing guidance and instruction. This is what mental health education means – creating a collaborative and foremost human relationship that enables sharing the knowledge and skills concerning key tools for living in order to help clients to develop and learn to use and apply them on their own. Thus, by learning new skills and taking responsibility, clients learn over time to become their own therapist.

What is cognitive behavioural therapy?

Cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT) is one of the most popular and most researched approaches to psychotherapy. It is also one of the most effective therapies for treating depressive and anxiety disorder with results comparable to pharmacotherapy (i.e. antidepressants and anxiolytics), sometimes even surpassing it.

The term ‘cognitive-behavioural’ in CBT reflects its core idea:

1. Our thoughts, emotions and behaviour are interconnected in the shape of a triangle.
2. All parts of the triangle mutually affect each other (i.e. the connection goes both ways).
3. Changing one part of the triangle inevitably changes the remaining two parts.
4. This means that by changing the way we think (cognitive=thoughts) or act (behavioural=actions), we indirectly change how we feel. CBT techniques are precisely that can help us learn how to think and act differently.

PLEASE NOTE: Emotions are not by any means less important, but are less under our ‘direct influence’ (an emotion intrinsically is what it is and, contrary to the often popular belief, it is the first thing that is NOT under our control). CBT believes that an emotion is triggered not by an objective situation but our interpretation of it, so it is more important to teach people to change their perception of a situation rather than deal with the direct emotion (which can and usually is the result of distorted beliefs).

To make it easier to remember, I coined an expression summarising the main characteristics of cognitive-behavioural therapy: CBT=A LESSON IN SCIENCE.

L – Logical because CBT is based on common sense.

E – Educational or methodical because we use many psychoeducational interventions since research shows that improvement often comes even just from understanding and learning about your disorders.

S – (relatively) Short‑term because if CBT exercises whose effectiveness has been scientifically proven are performed, this may lead to a fairly quick improvement (of course, any permanent results stem from[1]  longer periods of exercise and, in more complex cases, a slower rate of improvement is expected – we are all different and everyone’s path is equally valuable!)

S – Structured and

O – Oriented towards a goal (the treatment includes setting client goals, steps to achieve them and ways to measure their achievement)

N – Nurturing because it’s a collaboration between my client and me or, from your perspective, between my ‘counsellor and me’.

Finally, why a lesson in science? It’s simple – all ‘lessons’ or CBT ‘tools’ have essentially passed strict scientific verification so, in a way, each one of them can really be viewed as a ‘small lesson in science’ that we use to help people improve their mental health.

CONCLUSION:

Cognitive-behavioural therapy is a relatively short‑term, goal oriented and structured treatment based psychoeducation (or ‘lessons in science’  ;) ) that is logical and is enabled through a collaborative relationship between the counsellor and the client.

An example of using CBT tools during therapy

One of the lessons that clients may learn (as a result of cognitive-behavioural therapy) is that their thoughts are not facts. This means that thoughts may be 100% correct and 0% correct or somewhere in between. Despite that, clients often view their thoughts as facts and consequently as absolute truths. Such strong, non‑critical and incorrect beliefs heavily affect their emotions and behaviours. We work with our clients to teach them how to healthily distance their thoughts in situations when these thoughts are hindering; we teach them to test whether their thoughts are indeed facts, as they believe them to be, or only assumptions, whether evidence exist that our thoughts are correct and what they are; we teach them to realise that somebody else might view exactly the same situation in a different way, etc.

As a conclusion, here is a fun depiction of the CBT triangle in English that I created for my clients to help them understand better the interplay between thoughts, emotions and behaviours:

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