Questons about therapy/CBT

[chepstowchips]

I'm in a nightmare cycle of menopause/insomnia/painkillers/caffeine pills/anxiety/work and CBT has been suggested to me.

On thing that puts me off is an experience of a friend who was charged £60 a session and spent 7 weeks 'exploring the issues' before they got to anything that remotely helped. I feel like my life is 200mph and I haven't got time for that! Would it be unrealistic to hope for a few ideas after session 1?

I'm already on HRT but have lost faith in my GP for anything more after repeated fobbing-off.

Can anyone please tell me their positive stories, especially about how CBT has helped with menopause/insomnia?

www.iesohealth.com/en-gb. Maybe try this first? We can self refer to free CBT locally too. Have you searched free CBT or CBT NHS in your area?

Thanks - I'll have a look at that.

Try googling "distress tolerance techniques" as there's quite a lot freely available online to get you started.

It can often take a good number of sessions to reach a point of exploring "solutions" to a client's difficulties because therapists tend to be trained to follow a structure that broadly consists of:

1. Assessment (exploring the issues, taking a relevant history of the problem, goal setting for what client wants to achieve)
2. Formulation (pulling together information gained in assessment and working jointly with client to make sense of it using a therapy framework - working out what keeps the problem going and what might help break the cycle etc), and;
3. intervention (putting treatment into practice to help client achieve their therapy goals).

Before you get to step 3, steps 1 & 2
can take anywhere from 4-8 sessions depending on the nature of the problem, how much or little a client talks, and the type of therapy offered. For example in the type of therapy I am trained to offer (Cognitive Analytic Therapy or CAT), it's typical to have 16 sessions overall with about 5-6 of those being focussed on assessment and formulation. Therefore you wouldn't have got to the point of exploring solutions necessarily at that point (although you might). CBT is a different therapy model to CAT but the broad structure as per the above points should be similar. Therefore, don't expect to be at the point of exploring solutions at a very early stage, if that makes sense. Some therapists may work this way - but I'd say it's more typical for the process of finding the solutions to take some time.

Good luck with it, I hope you find the help you need.