Cognitive Behavioural Therapy is the most cost and time-effective way to improve a huge variety of symptoms. Decades of research have come up with highly specified, evidence-based interventions to treat the entire range of conditions - from anxiety, OCD, depression, trauma, up to very sever psychiatric disorders like bipolar disorder or psychosis. Most conditions improve quickly under CBT, but they might need augmenting medical treatment and long-term behavioural changes. 

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CBT always looks at both: How did a problematic way of behaving/feeling/thinking first manifest, i.e. how did this once make sense? And how is it still kept alive? Understanding the function of problematic symptoms in the past is essential to feel motivated and hopeful that they can change in the future and be replaced by new ways of reacting to triggers. In order to establish new reactions, old vicious cycles have to be identified (how one leads to the other...) and broken.

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For example, someone with social anxieties might feel increasingly uncomfortable going out, might handle threatening situations with alcohol, medication or illegal drugs and might slide more and more into depression. CBT would try to identify and break the vicious cycle as soon as possible – helping the patient to recognize how negative thoughts and avoiding behaviour work hand in hand and to establish ‘behavioural experiments’ in order to get into a new mind set through alternative, more helpful experiences.

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It’s quite an intuitive and pragmatic approach, and –best of all – it works.

CBT interventions are short-term and very focused on the presenting problems. I often use them in the beginning of a therapy to show my clients how to help themselves with their pressuring symptoms. And to understand, why even the most obscure symptom once made sense.

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CBT and EMDR work well together, especially when emotional and behavioural patterns go all the way back to the childhood. Difficult experiences can be processed to create more 'space' for new experiences.