FOR THE PUBLIC
Welcome to RICBTC
RICBTC is a home for practitioners who enjoy working in a cognitive behavioural way with their patients and clients. We are building an open, welcoming community where people can exchange ideas, learn from one another and explore the breadth of integrative cognitive behavioural therapy and coaching.
You may bring a particular interest in behaviour, cognition, emotion, the body, relationships or personal development. You may have followed a different training route from others in the community. What brings us together is an interest in understanding people, discovering what helps and enabling meaningful change in their lives.
We want this to be a flexible professional home, encouraging broad discussion and thoughtful integration, supported by clear standards of competence and practice.
The whole person in context
Our understanding of cognitive behavioural work begins with the whole person. Thoughts, emotions, actions and bodily responses continually influence one another, within relationships and the circumstances of everyday life.
One inspiration for this breadth is the clinical psychologist Tom Borkovec, whose extensive research into worry and generalised anxiety helped deepen our understanding of the connections between thinking, emotion, bodily responses and interpersonal experience. His work brought these dimensions together within a strongly empirical tradition. In an interview at the 2012 EABCT congress, he playfully suggested:
“Eventually CBT will be called cognitive, behavioral, [affective], imaginal, interpersonal, attentional, physiological therapy.”
His expanded name makes a serious point. Our work can involve feelings, imagination, relationships, attention and the body, as well as thoughts and actions. The familiar name “cognitive behavioural” does not immediately convey everything this tradition can encompass. For Borkovec, that openness remained grounded in investigating how people function and what helps them change. Watch the interview
Integration also concerns how people live: becoming more at ease with themselves, bringing their actions into closer alignment with their values, and developing greater connection with others. Learning in a session needs opportunities to become experience and action in the world.
Evidence, enquiry and collaboration
This breadth belongs within a tradition rooted in empirical psychology. We encourage practitioners to stay engaged with psychological research and relevant developments in neuroscience, to question familiar explanations and to update their understanding. We also welcome learning from psychotherapy more widely, including principles of change shared across different approaches.
The therapeutic relationship is central to that work. Listening carefully, building trust, agreeing meaningful goals and nurturing realistic hope provide a foundation for collaboration. People need to experience themselves as active participants whose knowledge and preferences matter.
Our outlook is pragmatic: what helps this person, with these challenges, in these circumstances? Models can be useful tools without being complete explanations. We remain interested both in whether an approach helps and in understanding how change occurs.
Openness requires discipline. Integrative practice involves gathering information, developing a coherent understanding with the client, choosing methods for a reason and reviewing their effects. It cannot rest solely on a practitioner’s preference for a particular technique.
From treatment to enablement
We propose that this approach is better captured by ACE—Assess, Conceptualise, Enable—than by the sequence Assess, Conceptualise, Treat. Assessment explores difficulties, strengths, circumstances and aspirations. Conceptualisation develops a shared, revisable understanding. Enablement turns that understanding into a purposeful way forward.
Replacing Treat with Enable expresses a deliberate shift away from a medical treatment model centred on diagnosing and treating a condition, towards an approach centred on the person’s agency and developing capabilities. Relief from distress remains important. Alongside it, we want to strengthen the person’s capacity to understand, choose and act.
Clients participate throughout, progressively learning to recognise patterns, make sense of their experience and find helpful responses—to soothe, cope, communicate, make decisions and move forward. Becoming increasingly able to be their own therapist and coach is part of the process.
Therapy, coaching and what matters
Therapy and coaching can work alongside one another, including within the same session. Addressing suffering and supporting development often belong together. Values, purpose and meaning help clarify what progress is for; spiritual and philosophical questions also deserve room where they matter to the person.
An open and evolving tradition
We encourage thinking across diagnostic boundaries. Interacting-systems perspectives, network models and process-based approaches offer promising ways to explore how difficulties persist and where change may become possible. They are invitations to enquiry within a broad community, rather than requirements to adopt one theoretical position.
RICBTC welcomes practitioners who want to contribute to that conversation: bringing curiosity, experience and a commitment to helping people cope and thrive. Together, we can sustain a cognitive behavioural tradition that is scientifically grounded, responsive to new knowledge and open to the richness of human life.