CBT / Psychological Therapy

  • What do you do in this treatment?

    Look at thoughts and beliefs that might be maintaining your difficulty. Keep a record and try out other ways of thinking and reacting

    What can it help to treat? 

    Many mental health problems (eg depression, anxiety)  

  • What do you do in this treatment?

    Change maintaining behaviours, like avoiding, checking or getting reassurance. Gradually face situations, thoughts or memories you’ve been avoiding.  

    What can it help to treat?

    Phobias, anxiety, OCD, PTSD  

  • What do you do in this treatment?

    Get more active and involved in life by doing things that give a sense of pleasure or achievement. Keep a diary and schedule in positive activities. 

    What can it help to treat?

    Depression, low mood

  • What do you do in this treatment?

    Pay attention to your thoughts and surroundings in the here and now without reacting to them.   

    What can it help to treat?

    Recurrent depression, stress, anxiety  

  • What do you do in this treatment?

    Be kinder and less critical of yourself and others, helping you to feel safer and more content.  

    What can it help to treat?

    Shame, anger, depression, low self-esteem, trauma

  • ACT, pronounced ‘act’

    What do you do in this treatment?

    Accept unpleasant thoughts and feelings rather than fight them, change them or being upset by them.   

    What can it help to treat?

    Physical illness, pain, anxiety, depression  

  • What do you do in this treatment?

    Learn skills to manage strong feelings and sudden mood changes to overcome relationship difficulties. 

    What can it help to treat?

    Emotionally unstable or borderline personality disorder, repeat self-harm   

  • What do you do in this treatment?

    Identify and change deep-rooted patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving (called 'schemas') that developed in childhood and continue to affect your life. Explore early experiences and learn to meet emotional needs in healthier ways.

    What can it help to treat?

    long-standing depression or anxiety, relationship problems, trauma, low self-esteem 

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, or CBT, is a form of talking therapy (or psychotherapy). It is one of the most widely researched and effective psychological therapies available today. At its heart is a straightforward idea: the way we think about our experiences shapes how we feel, and how we feel influences what we do. When we are struggling, we can fall into automatic cycles of unhelpful thoughts, difficult emotions, and avoidant or self-defeating behaviours which may perpetuate the problem. Although these ways of coping may have been very effective to help us in the past, sometimes they can hold us back from living the life we want, in the here and now. 

CBT works by helping you to notice these cycles, understand where they come from, and learn practical tools to break them. This might involve thinking with your therapist about the beliefs and assumptions that are driving your distress, testing them out in real life through behavioural experiments, or building new ways of responding to difficult situations. The approach is collaborative, which means your therapist will work with you to explore your experience together and help you make sense of it. 

At Harper Psychology, Alison has been delivering CBT in Edinburgh since the practice was founded. Over that time, our understanding of what helps people has developed considerably. As well as the core CBT model, our therapists draw on modern approaches, including Compassion-Focused Therapy (CFT), Schema Therapy, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT), and mindfulness, weaving these in where they are a good fit for the individual. This gives us flexibility without losing the effectiveness of the model. 

What does the evidence say?

CBT is recommended by both NICE (the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence) and SIGN (the Scottish Intercollegiate Guidelines Network) as a first-line treatment for depression, anxiety disorders, OCD, PTSD, and eating disorders. This means it has been rigorously tested across thousands of research trials and consistently found to produce meaningful, lasting change. 

Importantly, CBT is not just about symptom reduction in the short term. One of its distinctive features is that the skills you learn can continue to help you to cope after your sessions have ended.  

According to the Royal College of Psychiatrists, CBT works as well as antidepressants for treating many forms of depression. It may work slightly better than antidepressants in treating anxiety. CBT has longer lasting effects than medication, helping you to stay well in the future. 

If your mental health problem is severe, a course of CBT alongside medication may be more effective than medication on its own, or CBT on its own. 

Who can CBT help?

CBT was originally developed for depression and anxiety, and the evidence for these presentations remains exceptionally strong. Over the decades, the approach has been adapted and refined for a wide range of difficulties. At Harper, our therapists regularly work with clients experiencing: 

  • Depression and low mood 

  • Anxiety: Generalised anxiety, worry, panic and phobias, including agoraphobia (fear of being in situations where you can’t escape or get help), social anxiety and health anxiety  

  • Perfectionism  

  • Anger 

  • OCD (Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder) 

  • PTSD and trauma 

  • Phobias 

  • Eating disorders 

  • Low self-esteem 

  • Stress and burnout 

  • Sleep difficulties 

  • Stress 

  • Chronic pain (in conjunction with Pain Reprocessing approaches) 

CBT can be equally effective for adults, young people, and adolescents, and we work across the age range. If you are unsure whether CBT is the right approach for your situation, we are always happy to have an initial conversation to help you think it through. 

How we deliver CBT at Harper Psychology

We offer CBT both in person at our Edinburgh clinics and online via teams call, so you can choose the format that works best for you. Sessions are generally 50 minutes long. 

The number of sessions varies depending on the individual and the nature of the difficulty. Some clients benefit from a shorter, focused course of around 8 to 12 sessions; others, particularly those working through more complex or longstanding difficulties, may find that more session may be more appropriate. This is something we discuss openly with you from the outset and review as we go. We never push anyone to finish before they feel ready, progress is led by you. 

What makes our approach distinctive is the flexibility we bring to the approach. CBT has a clear structure and strong evidence base, and we hold to that, but we also know that no two clients are the same. Where one person might find thought-challenging techniques transformative, another might benefit most from compassion-focused work or mindfulness practice. Our therapists are trained across these approaches and will work with you to find what fits. 

We also know that many people come to us having tried CBT before and feeling that it did not work for them. This is more common than you might think, and it is rarely the whole story. A short course of online CBT, or an approach that felt rigid, is a very different experience from the kind of personalised therapy we offer at Harper. If previous CBT has left you feeling sceptical, we would encourage you not to write off the approach entirely. We often see, clients who started here unconvinced have found that a more flexible, collaborative, and thoughtfully paced course of therapy produces results that earlier experiences did not.  

Our CBT therapists

CBT at Harper is delivered by all of our therapists, each with formal training in the approach. They are all either accredited by the relevant professional body or are working towards accreditation. For more information, visit the about us section of the website.  

What to expect in your first session

Your first few sessions of CBT session at Harper will be the assessment. This is an opportunity for your therapist to get to know you and gain a full picture of what has brought you to therapy, the therapist will ask about your history, family, wider social context and what you have already tried as well as the symptoms.  

From the very first session, your therapist will begin to work with you collaboratively, starting to build what we call a formulation, which is a shared understanding of why things have developed as they have, and how your thoughts, feelings, and behaviours connect. We will also introduce you to the CBT model and explain how it maps onto your own experience. 

Many clients tell us that even after a first session, things start to feel slightly more manageable, not because the problems have changed, but because they begin to make more sense. 

Fees

Our fees are listed in the Fees and How to Pay section of our website. We believe in being transparent about cost, and if you have any questions before booking, please do not hesitate to get in touch. 

Contact Us

  • “I was sceptical about the benefits of CBT to be honest, having tried it in the past and not getting much use out of it. But Ashleigh has been great, listening to my story and teaching me tools and techniques.”

  • “I think the most significant positive change has been one of self-understanding. By gaining an awareness of what I feel and why I feel it, I have gained a deeper understanding of myself and my reactions. This has fostered greater empathy for myself, and helped me become more mindful of the decisions I make in my daily life. The skills developed by doing CBT allow me to stop anxious/unhelpful thoughts before they get out of control, and help me to speak to myself more kindly during moments of stress.”

  • “Therapy with Karyn has been very helpful. What I like the most about her approach is that she really listens and personalizes her approach based on your needs. Every session is different and at the same time, there is a sense of progression towards a long-term goal. I would not hesitate to recommend to family or friends.”

  • “Working with Emma after working with other people I feel Emma is understanding and is “human” in response. Therapy isn’t a quick fix and isn’t sold as this, my understanding of that also helps as therapy is a long road to a desired outcome.”

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