From CBT to CFT: Therapy explained by the pros

Feeling stressed? You're not alone. RTÉ's new two-part series, Stressed, looks at the science of stress and how it's impacting negatively on Irish society.

Catch up on episode 1 of 2 on the RTÉ Player now. watch the second episode tonight on RTÉ One at 10.15pm.

During the show, we'll get the results of the 'How are You Ireland?' survey of mood and well-being - developed by the Science Foundation Ireland Insight Centre for Data Analytics in UCD.

Throughout the show, you may hear words like 'mindfulness' and 'anxiety' or terms such as 'CBT' and 'CFT'. To help break down all this jargon, we have Psychotherapist and Counsellor Siobhan Murray and Clinical Psychologist Dr Mallie Coyne.

What is CBT?

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"Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, also known as CBT, is talking therapy that looks at the relationship between your thoughts, your feelings and your behaviours and tries to find alternatives within those.

"In order for you to manage your feelings of distress, you need to look at what your thoughts are about the situation your encountering and also, what are the behaviours that you engage in that might make the situation wore," explained Dr Coyne.

Siobhan added: "CBT is definitely a therapy that has a lot of homework with it so you need your client to really want to be engaged with it. If the person is expecting to come, to do CBT and to have someone else to fix them - that's not going to work."

What is CFT?

"Compassion Focused Therapy is a newer type of therapy that many of us are using now. It's based on the idea of using compassion and self-compassion to help somebody to deal with their feelings and their everyday stresses.

"It uses ideas from evolutionary psychology, from social psychology, uses ideas from Cognitive Behavioural Therapy - it incorporates all those ideas and tries to help the person to increase their ability to soothe themselves in a situation, to look at the way that they speak to themselves about themselves, to work on that inner self-critic," explained Dr Coyne.

Letting go

Using passing scenery as a metaphor for both negative and positive thoughts, Siobhan explains how we all have the ability to let things go.

"I describe the thought processing as: 'if you're sitting on a train as you're on a journey and you're passing a field and - in getting somebody to take responsibility - as you pass the first field, there's sheep and you're very aware of the sheep in the field.

So, if you're focused on the sheep and the train keeps moving and that field goes by and the next field is cows and you're totally focused on the cows - you're not thinking about the sheep, you've let the thought go."

She continued: "They're just thoughts. As much as they come into our heads, we also have the ability to let them go out."

Episode 1 of Stressed aired on Wednesday, May 23rd - catch up on RTÉ Player.

Episode 2 of 2 will air on Thursday, May 24th at 10.15pm on RTÉ One.

From CBT to CFT: Therapy explained by the pros

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