Motivational things

I’ve spent the day at Christine Padesky’s conference in London. An expert in her field, Aaron Becks Californian-based prodigy pretty much wrote the book on CBT.

Listening to her today reminded me of what always fails to surprise me about CBT; the almost complete denial of past events and how they may be contributing to someone’s symptoms. CBT will work with what it calls core beliefs in longer term therapy, however as CBT is generally offered short term (especially in the NHS) the majority of the work is based on intervening at the level of the presenting symptoms, such as lack of activity, negative thoughts, etc.

I have written about the efficacy of CBT elsewhere. It is sufficient to say that there is no one size fits all approach to distress and a lot of people have greatly benefited from a practical skills based approach to therapy.

Attempting to answer…