TEAM CBT

TEAM CBT is a therapeutic framework (not a new school of therapy). It provides a structured approach to the traditional CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy) used by most psychologists.

TEAM (standing for Testing, Empathy, Agenda Setting, and Methods) was created by Dr David Burns. Dr Burns has conducted thousands of therapy sessions and has developed the evidence-based framework over the past 30 years. Read more about the components of the approach below, and get connected with some of the invaluable self-help resources listed and linked below. Feel free to reach out to us for advice about what might be the best resource for your situation.

TESTING

Upon the commencement of therapy, your TEAM certified therapist will ask you to provide some information to show exactly how your difficulties are impacting your life. You’ll also be asked to rate your mood at the beginning and end of every therapy session, using the Brief Mood Survey. Also, to ensure that therapy is tracking in the right direction for you, at the end of every session you’ll be asked to evaluate the quality of the therapy itself. Therapists are human and they make errors and the Evaluation of Therapy Session (ETS) provides us the opportunity to identify (and ideally, repair!) these errors at the earliest opportunity. Hopefully this will avoid therapy dropout, disappointment, and ‘off-task’ therapy. Consider this like Quality Assurance for your therapy.

EMPATHY

It’s crucial to your therapeutic success that you feel heard, empathised with, and cared about. So before jumping in with tools, suggestions, or ‘cheerleading’ we’ll want to spend time understanding how difficult things have been for you. And we’ll need to show you that we ‘get’ you and understand the depth of the challenges you’ve been facing. Without a high level of therapeutic empathy you’ll feel like your therapist is jumping in too quickly.

AGENDA SETTING

Have you ever wondered why, despite your best intentions and efforts, you keep on doing things in ways you don’t want to things? Like staying up later than you should, procrastinating that task, drinking that extra drink, eating that super tasty thing…? Well, for very good reason, it turns out. We all have a level of internal ‘resistance’ - really good, powerful, and valid reasons for hanging onto something even if we feel unhappy or even ashamed about it. Your resistance is actually a good thing! It’s likely protecting you or helping you to protect others, in subtle yet very important ways. Like helping you squeeze more out of the day, helping you focus on more fun and interesting things, protecting you from disappointment, helping you relax, or allowing you to enjoy yourself. These benefits are often hidden behind our desire to change and we get distracted by our ‘internal critic’ who simply beats us up and makes us feel guilty for not changing. Together, we’ll want to uncover the hidden benefits before we can decide if change is truly the right path. If change isn’t the right path, methods are likely to fail or not be powerful enough to sustain.

METHODS

Now that the seeds have been planted, it’s time to watch the garden grow. There are over 50 different methods in CBT and since no two people are the same, your therapist will work with you to find what works. That means we both need to be prepared to - FAIL! Because the faster we fail, the quicker we get to the result that works for you.

| “Do the thing we fear, and death of fear is certain”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Want to know more about TEAM CBT? You can dramatically speed up your progress in therapy by reading and hearing more about TEAM, and by reading any one of David Burns’s self-help books. There’s also a podcast on all things TEAM CBT, titled “Feeling Good” after Dr Burns’s first book. Look for any of these books in your local or online book store. Watch the brief YouTube video below for an outline of TEAM by Angela Poch, a TEAM certified clinician at the Feeling Good Institute in the US.