Summit Counselling Services — Modality
Cognitive Behavioural TherapyYour thoughts shape how you feel. CBT helps you change the ones that aren't working.
CBT is one of the most extensively researched and widely used therapeutic approaches in the world — practical, structured, and with a strong evidence base across a wide range of concerns. Our registered psychologists use CBT to help clients understand and shift the thought patterns driving their distress.
What is CBT?
An evidence-based approach to changing how you think and feel.
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy is built on a straightforward but powerful premise: the way we interpret events — not the events themselves — determines how we feel and how we behave. When our interpretations are distorted, overly negative, or based on unhelpful patterns we've developed over time, they create unnecessary suffering. CBT works to identify those patterns and change them.
Unlike some therapeutic approaches that focus primarily on insight or the exploration of past experience, CBT is active and skills-focused. Sessions involve identifying specific thought patterns, examining the evidence for and against them, and developing more realistic and flexible ways of thinking. Clients typically leave sessions with concrete tools and practices to use between appointments.
CBT is one of the most extensively researched therapeutic approaches in psychology. Decades of clinical trials across dozens of conditions have consistently demonstrated its effectiveness — making it a first-line treatment recommendation for anxiety, depression, OCD, PTSD, and many other presentations.
That said, CBT is not a one-size-fits-all formula. A skilled CBT therapist adapts the approach to the person in front of them — their history, their learning style, and the specific nature of their concerns. The structured framework is a starting point, not a script.
"CBT doesn't tell you that your feelings are wrong. It helps you examine the thinking that's driving them — and decide whether that thinking is actually serving you."
What CBT explores and addresses
- Automatic negative thoughts — the fast, habitual interpretations that happen without conscious choice
- Cognitive distortions — patterns like catastrophizing, all-or-nothing thinking, mind reading, and personalization
- Core beliefs — the deeper assumptions about self, others, and the world that fuel surface-level thinking
- Avoidance and safety behaviours — the things we do to manage anxiety that often maintain it
- Behavioural patterns — how thoughts and feelings drive behaviour, and how behaviour reinforces thought
- Thought records and structured reflection — active tools for examining and shifting thinking in real time
- Between-session practice — building new patterns through intentional application outside the therapy room
The Core Model
The CBT triangle — thoughts, feelings, and behaviour
CBT is built on the relationship between three things. Change any one of them and the others shift too.
Thoughts
The interpretations, beliefs, and automatic assumptions we make about situations. CBT identifies which thoughts are distorted or unhelpful — and teaches skills for challenging and reframing them.
Feelings
The emotional and physical responses that follow our interpretations. Feelings are real and valid — but they are often driven by thoughts rather than by objective reality. CBT addresses the thinking that amplifies distress.
Behaviour
The actions we take — or avoid — in response to how we feel. Behaviour both reflects and reinforces thought and feeling patterns. CBT works with behaviour directly, particularly avoidance patterns that maintain anxiety and depression.
What CBT Helps With
CBT has a strong evidence base across a wide range of concerns
CBT is one of the broadest and most versatile therapeutic approaches available. These are some of the most common areas where it is used at Summit.
Anxiety Disorders
CBT is a first-line treatment for generalized anxiety, social anxiety, panic disorder, health anxiety, OCD, and specific phobias. It addresses both the thinking patterns that amplify anxiety and the avoidance behaviours that maintain it — including Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) for OCD.
Depression
CBT for depression targets the negative thought patterns — hopelessness, worthlessness, self-blame — that sustain low mood, alongside the behavioural withdrawal that deepens it. Behavioural Activation is a key CBT tool for depression, helping clients re-engage with life incrementally.
Trauma & PTSD
Trauma-focused CBT and Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT) are among the most evidence-based treatments for PTSD. They address the distorted beliefs trauma installs — about safety, self-worth, and the world — and the avoidance patterns that prevent natural recovery.
Self-Esteem & Self-Compassion
Negative core beliefs about the self — "I am not enough," "I am fundamentally flawed" — are central to many presentations. CBT helps identify where these beliefs came from, examine the evidence for and against them, and build more accurate and compassionate self-perceptions.
Stress & Burnout
The thinking patterns that drive chronic stress — perfectionism, overresponsibility, difficulty tolerating uncertainty — are highly amenable to CBT. Cognitive restructuring and behavioural strategies together help clients reduce stress and build more sustainable patterns.
Relationship Concerns
Cognitive patterns — negative attributions, assumptions about partners' intentions, all-or-nothing thinking in conflict — significantly affect relationship quality. CBT helps identify and shift the interpretations driving relational difficulty, alongside communication-focused work.
Why CBT Works
Practical tools you can use outside the therapy room.
One of CBT's defining strengths is that what you learn in sessions transfers to your life between them. The goal isn't to be in therapy indefinitely — it's to develop a set of skills and a way of thinking that you carry with you. Most CBT clients describe feeling like they have actual tools they didn't have before.
This doesn't mean CBT is shallow or quick-fix. Deeply held beliefs and long-standing patterns take real work to shift. But the process is transparent — you understand why you're doing what you're doing, and you can see the connection between the work in session and the changes in your daily life.
CBT also integrates well with other approaches. Many of our therapists use CBT as part of a broader therapeutic approach — combining it with Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, EMDR, somatic techniques, or emotion-focused work depending on what the person needs.
What to Expect
What CBT sessions actually look like
CBT is more structured than some therapeutic approaches — here's what a typical course of treatment involves.
Assessment & Goal Setting
Early sessions focus on understanding your specific concerns, history, and goals. Your therapist will help you identify the key thought patterns and behavioural cycles that are maintaining your difficulties — building a shared map of what's happening and what needs to change.
Psychoeducation
CBT is collaborative and transparent. Your therapist will explain the model as it applies to your specific situation — helping you understand the relationship between your thoughts, feelings, and behaviours, and why the patterns that developed make sense even when they're causing problems now.
Skill Building
The core of CBT — developing practical tools for identifying and challenging unhelpful thoughts, reducing avoidance, and gradually building new patterns. Sessions are active and collaborative, with skills designed to be applied between appointments as well as in them.
Consolidation
As things improve, sessions shift toward consolidating gains, anticipating future challenges, and building a relapse prevention plan. The goal is to leave therapy with both symptom relief and the skills to maintain it — and to handle difficult periods independently when they arise.
CBT & Related Approaches
CBT has evolved into a family of related approaches
Over decades of research and clinical development, CBT has given rise to several specialized variations — each building on the core model for specific populations or presenting concerns.
Acceptance & Commitment Therapy (ACT)
Sometimes called "third-wave CBT," ACT shifts the focus from challenging thoughts to changing your relationship to them — reducing their power to drive behaviour without necessarily changing their content. Particularly effective when avoidance is deeply entrenched or when traditional CBT hasn't been sufficient.
Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT)
Developed from CBT for emotional dysregulation and borderline personality disorder, DBT integrates cognitive and behavioural strategies with mindfulness and acceptance skills. Particularly effective when emotional intensity is a central feature of the presenting concern.
Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT)
A CBT-based approach developed specifically for PTSD — focusing on the "stuck points," or distorted beliefs about safety, trust, power, esteem, and intimacy, that trauma installs. One of the most evidence-based treatments for PTSD currently available.
Exposure & Response Prevention (ERP)
The gold-standard CBT-based treatment for OCD — systematically and collaboratively reducing avoidance and compulsive responses to obsessive thoughts, allowing the anxiety to naturally decrease without the maintenance cycle of compulsions.
Trauma-Focused CBT (TF-CBT)
Adapted for children and adolescents who have experienced trauma, TF-CBT integrates cognitive and behavioural strategies with trauma processing in a developmentally appropriate framework — often involving parents or caregivers alongside the young person.
Mindfulness-Based CBT (MBCT)
Combines traditional CBT with mindfulness practices — particularly effective for recurrent depression and anxiety. MBCT builds the capacity to observe negative thought patterns without being swept away by them, interrupting the rumination cycles that drive relapse.
Book a Session
CBT therapists in Edmonton, St. Albert & Windermere
CBT is available in person at all three Summit locations, and virtually for clients anywhere in Alberta.
Wîhkwêntôwin ᐄᐧᐦᑫᐧᐣᑑᐃᐧᐣ (Oliver)
Grandin Plaza, 2nd Floor
Edmonton, AB
Common Questions
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy — your questions answered
Our Therapists
Summit therapists who use Cognitive Behavioural Therapy
The clinicians below use CBT as part of their practice. Many integrate it with other approaches — your therapist will discuss what combination makes the most sense for your specific situation.
Related Approaches
Other modalities we work with
The way you think can change. Let's work on it together.
Your first consultation is free — no commitment, no pressure. Just a conversation about where you are and whether CBT is the right fit for you.
We acknowledge that our practice is located in Treaty 6 territory, on the traditional lands of the Cree, Saulteaux, Niitsitapi (Blackfoot), Métis, and Nakota Sioux Peoples, including our Brewery District office in Wîhkwêntôwin ᐄᐧᐦᑫᐧᐣᑑᐃᐧᐣ (Oliver). We recognize that healing and reconciliation is a responsibility shared by all.
Summit Counselling Services is a counselling clinic located in St. Albert & Edmonton. We provide clinical services to children, adolescents, adults, seniors, couples, and families. We have a talented team of Edmonton psychologists, therapists and counsellors with a wide range of specializations and trainings at Summit Counselling Services who would be honoured to walk beside you on your journey. At Summit, we believe in therapy your way. Our goal is to customize your psychotherapy and counselling sessions to best suit your needs. We believe in the differences and unique perspectives each person brings to therapy and incorporate these into our work with you.