ABSTRACT

Achieving one's goals is not the same process as maintaining gains them. Some clients might believe that once therapy terminated their therapeutic gains 'magically' stay intact without any further comments from them, that they deserve a prolonged rest after all their hard work in therapy, or that therapy was a discrete, crisis-driven episode that they now can thankfully put behind them. Clients can quickly fall back into old self-defeating patterns of thinking and behaving by taking their 'eye off the ball' it is not practising consistently their hard-won cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) skills. CBT skills are not only used for overcoming present and future problems but also in the service ambition and realizing important life goals. For example, a client who entered therapy to tackle a bout of depression and worry decided, on recovery, that he wanted to fulfil his longstanding want to self-employed. He developed an action plan to help him make this goal.