What Will You Learn?

The comprehensive Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) Diploma Course will teach you a wide range of CBT techniques to help you to identify and change any of your own thoughts and behaviours that may be limiting your progress in life and aid you in helping others to do the same.

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) is a popular form of psychotherapy that is now widely used by psychologists, counsellors and mental health clinicians. It has become the treatment of choice for many disorders, such as depression, anxiety and problems with anger, due to the sound empirical basis for its effectiveness.

The Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) Diploma Course begins by introducing you to the subject and history of the wider fields from which it belongs: cognitive psychology and behavioural psychology.

From here you will go on to familiarise yourself with psychological theories of emotions, how feelings are experienced on a physiological level, and 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 and, as a CBT counsellor, it is important to understand the process of change one undergoes. The Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) Diploma Course outlines the stages of change and the motivations behind making changes.

If your intention is to ultimately work as a counsellor, you will need to not just to understand the techniques used but what the job entails and the skills needed. This course outlines the personal and counselling-specific skills you will need to embody the role, the counselling process itself, and the professional and ethical constraints you must adhere to, as well as looking at how to look after your personal mental and emotional wellbeing.

To further deepen your understanding of counselling, you will explore the history of psychology, which will provide a greater understanding of human feelings, abilities and personalities, and 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 and 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. Starting off with how to plan a session with your client and some 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: identifying and challenging automatic thoughts, altering cognitive distortions, thought stopping, and challenging core beliefs.

The symptoms of the following issues are detailed in full, along with the specific advanced CBT intervention technique you can offer clients suffering from each of them: depression, anxiety, phobias, insomnia, anger management. The course also explains two CBT variants: Dialectical Behaviour Therapy and Solution-focused Brief Therapy. 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 Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) Diploma Course concludes by leading you through two case studies, where 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, which 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