Cognitive Analytic Therapy Sydney
Are you struggling to understand your patterns of behaviour and your expectations of other people’s behaviour?
.png)
How can it help?
Cognitive Analytic Therapy (CAT) is an integrated, time-limited (16 – 24 sessions) therapy. The CAT model is collaborative and flexible and can be used as a relational framework and individual therapy. CAT explores:
Forming a trusting relationship with your therapist, which allows you to work together to explore the difficulties you are facing.
Identifying your current problems and how they affect your life and wellbeing.
Looking at the underlying causes of these problems in terms of your earlier life and relationships.
Understanding how you learned to survive sometimes intense and unmanageable feelings by relating to others and yourself in particular ways.
Identifying how these patterns may now be holding you back.
Discovering the choices and ways of doing things differently (‘exits’) that are available to you to make your life better for yourself and those close to you, and
Finding out how you can continue to move forward after the therapy has ended.
What to expect?
In individual therapy, CAT allows the therapist and you to work together to make sense of your thinking, feeling, behaving, and relating patterns to facilitate change. After the first session, you will complete a questionnaire or psychotherapy file asking you what problems or patterns you commonly experience. You may also be given homework tasks such as monitoring your mood or behaviour patterns.
Early therapy sessions will involve hearing your story and trying to understand if some of the problematic patterns you may have learnt in your childhood. The therapist does not need to know every detail, and the work will be paced according to what you feel able to manage. With your therapist, you will begin to piece together patterns that keep you feeling stuck in a negative cycle of emotions. Your therapist will write, with you, a letter describing your story and your patterns to help you choose what you want to focus on.
You will work together to develop diagrams or maps that clarify both problematic and healthy or helpful patterns. This will involve thinking about the relationship you have with:
Yourself
Your therapist, and
Other people in your life.
The remainder of therapy focuses on recognising and change the patterns that are causing problems.
On conclusion, you and your therapist will exchange a 'goodbye' letter. This will reflect on the therapy, how you feel about this ending, and looking to the future.
On conclusion, you and your therapist will exchange a 'goodbye' letter. This will reflect on the therapy, how you feel about this ending, and looking to the future.