ABSTRACT
Cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) teaches clients skills to manage their emotional distress. The content of the teaching varies from disorder to disorder. However, the teaching takes place via Socratic questioning, a form of indirect questioning leaving the client to draw their own conclusions. There is no direct challenge to a client’s core beliefs or values. Like a teacher the CBT practitioner not only requires technical knowledge of the subject matter, e.g. of the key type of client thinking involved in a particular disorder, but also has to be able to relate and communicate effectively. The spirit of CBT is one of what Beck has termed ‘collaborative empiricism’ (Beck et al. 1979: 79), i.e. rather than the therapist-client relationship being one of ‘sage’ to ‘pupil’, agreements are sought as to the testing out of possible ways forward. The skills required of a cognitive behaviour therapist have been summarised in the Cognitive Therapy Rating Scale (Young and Beck 1980). The session by session procedures (protocols) to be followed for the different disorders are outlined in Beck et al. (1979) for depression, and in Wells (1997) for panic disorder, social phobia, generalised anxiety disorder and obsessive compulsive disorder. Somewhat strangely, these tried and tested protocols are rarely taught on training courses or implemented by practitioners; this book is an aid to rectifying this omission.
