Therapy Options: CBT, NLP or Counselling …
Sometimes life is difficult, and we know exactly why. For many people, though, the cause of their unease is not so clear. If you are looking for someone to give you some support with day to day life, to help you create space to find your own solutions or to help change your thinking so it’s more productive and resourceful, then maybe you’ve considered seeking help.If you are considering having some form of therapy it can sometimes be difficult to decide which therapy is best suited to meet your needs.
What is Counselling?
Counselling is referred to as a talking therapy and has been around for a very very long time. It gives people the opportunity to express feelings, explore difficulties or things they find distressing, with the counsellors role being to listen in order to understand, reflect, help you clarify the problem and enable you to see more choice or different ways of addressing the issue. Counselling can be good for people who would like space and time to verbalise their thoughts and feelings (to off load) and where people feel that they would benefit by being listened to – however this isn’t for everyone. The Counsellor does not offer any advice or solutions themselves that will enable the underlying issue to be sorted, rather they allow the individual to discover new options or perspectives as a result of talking the personal problem through.
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT)
The principle is to help people become more consciously aware of the pattern of their thinking – like NLP it acknowledges the link between thought, feelings and actions/behaviour, but the challenge for CBT is that most thought is unconscious and CBT does not work with the unconscious mind -CBT helps people build a conscious understanding of these connections. Most often, our thoughts ‘run away’ with us, and before we know it, the ‘behaviour’ or ‘pattern’ is running at full pelt – to try and work with the problem at this stage is very hard. CBT looks to discover the triggers and behaviours so that more useful strategies can be developed which is helpful on one level, but not as helpful as understanding the unconscious patterns and fixing these.
CBT requires the individual to talk honestly about the problems they are experiencing with their practitioner, whilst also exploring the linkages using the CBT framework (see image), whilst also trying to challenge their own thoughts, beliefs and attitudes.
CBT has some similarities with NLP in that it’s philosophy is that the content of our thoughts have a major influence on our emotions and behaviour. However CBT and NLP differ in the way they help their clients – CBT looks to help you make sense of the problems you may be experiencing in the moment by using the framework to consciously think of changes you can make, whereas NLP looks to change the underlying patterns/strategies so that the problems don’t reappear.
Neuro-Lingustic Programming (NLP)
Created in the 70’s (around the same time as CBT came to the for), NLP is all about making changes at the unconscious level – so the change in your thinking becomes automatic – you do not have to consciously think about it or remember to behave or think differently (it’s a lot faster at fixing the issue than CBT as well). Both counselling and CBT help the individual to gain a conscious understanding of the problem initially by talking through the detail with a practitioner – whereas NLP dosen’t always require the individual to share at length or work on problems openly in order to for it to be successful (which many individuals prefer). As long as the client shares enough, the Practitioner will be able to help the individual fix the problem (providing the individual follows the Practitioner’s instructions).
