Coaching, Counselling and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (C.B.T.)

The UK Government has recently allocated significant funding and resource to train and develop CBT professionals to help people with low level mental health disorders. It has been the driving force behind the new IAPT initiative (improving access to psychological therapies) being implemented for local communities, to help people suffering from common mental health problems - anxiety and depression being the most prevalent. This form of talking therapy is different from counselling, which goes back to the past and helps a person to uncover the reasons why and any route cause of their difficulties.

Counsellors explore difficulties that the client is having, the distress they may be experiencing or their dissatisfaction with life. By listening attentively and patiently, the counsellor can begin to perceive the difficulties from the client’s point of view with the aim of helping the client to see things more clearly, possibly from a different perspective.

In a counselling session the client can explore various aspects of their life and their feelings, talking about them freely and openly in a way that is rarely possible with friends or family. Their bottled up feelings, such as anger anxiety, grief and embarrassment can become very intense and counselling offers an opportunity to explore them with the possibility of making them easier to understand.

As an alternative approach, CBT attempts to highlight maladaptive thoughts and behaviours and replace them with more effective and adaptive ones. The therapy is very problem focused and looks at the relationships between people’s cognitions, emotions, physiological responses and behaviour. Focusing on one of these areas can have a significant knock on effect on the other areas. CBT aims to make the client their own therapist, assuming that the client is the expert in their own problems and life experiences. CBT is a “here and now” approach which concentrates on helping the subject understand the realities of how they feel right now in various situations and to think about what they can do about this in future to improve their life experiences and mental well being.

It helps them to set and achieve short, medium and long term goals and develop skills and strategies of their own for the future if the problem arises again. To the extent that it focuses the subject on the here and now, on the options for future action and on the personal responsibility to do something different, it is a similar approach to coaching. What is different from coaching is that often the situation and the sort of problems and symptoms that a CBT client is faced with, tend to be more marked and unusual than the situations faced by most coaching subjects wrestling with the day to day, work related pressures encountered by people in reasonably successful employment.