Critical self-reflective overview of the Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) session
The purpose of this assignment is to facilitate learning through reflection.
It is a framework in which to situate your session and reflect upon on your performance. Regardless of how well we might have done, there is always room to improve and this is achieved through thinking about what went well; ‘strengths’, as well as what could have done better; ‘areas for development’.
Write up a description of the session following the guidelines on page 3.
Reflect upon the skills you demonstrated. These are a list of some of the things that you may want to consider (this list is not exhaustive):
How did you employ a client-centred approach? (Rogers, 1961)
How did you demonstrate ethical practice during the session? (See
BPS Website)
Did you use your basic counselling skills: paraphrasing and summarising?
Did you explain what CBT was?
Did you set a clear agenda with the client?
Did you help the client to set a SMART goal?
Did you demonstrate socratic questioning to explore the client’s issues?
In the ‘Observation’ phase did you identify a Negative Automatic Thought (NAT) that the client wanted to discuss the session?
Did you use the ABC model to do this?
Did you invite your client to rate their belief/conviction/likelihood regarding the NAT?
In the ‘Theorising’ stage did you explore whether the client has previously been in a similar situation? Did you explore the resources they used at that time?
Do you employ the ‘Evidence for and Against’ method?
In the ‘Synthesising’ Phase do you draw attention to your client’s resources from past examples to support the client to problem solve around the current NAT?
Did you discuss with the client what factors were associated with their issues?
Perhaps you set a Behavioural Experiment or Challenge their Cognitive Distortions or use Cognitive Restructuring?
Do you invite the client to re-rate the NAT?
Do you Summarise and bring the session to a closure?
Make sure that you use these to guide the content of your write-up rather than using them to structure what is required. This is provided below in more detail.
