At Talking Therapies UK, we are passionate about equipping professionals with the knowledge, confidence, and compassion to support mental health across diverse settings. With decades of combined experience in clinical practice, public health leadership, and service transformation, our training programmes are rooted in evidence-based approaches and real-world application.
We specialise in delivering high-impact, trauma-informed mental health training tailored to the needs of health, education, social care, and voluntary sector teams. From safeguarding and suicide prevention to emotional resilience and therapeutic communication, our courses are designed to empower practitioners at every level—whether you’re frontline staff, a strategic commissioner, or part of a multi-agency partnership.
Our facilitators bring many years clinical expertise , and a deep understanding of the social determinants of mental health. We prioritise co-production, reflective practice, and inclusive learning environments that foster curiosity, empathy, and professional growth.
Whether you’re looking to upskill your workforce, embed mental health into your organisational culture, or meet statutory training requirements, we offer flexible delivery formats including in-person workshops, webinars, and bespoke consultancy.
Together, we can build psychologically safe, responsive systems that promote wellbeing, reduce inequalities, and improve outcomes for individuals, families, and communities. Let’s shape the future of mental health—one conversation, one training, one transformation at a time..
The cognitive model from first principles: how thoughts, feelings, body and behaviour interact, and how change becomes possible.
If you are training in the psychological professions, working in an allied role, or preparing for a therapy career, cognitive behavioural therapy is the modality you will meet everywhere: it carries the largest evidence base in psychological treatment and shapes how services across the UK think about distress. This course gives you a complete first grounding in it, taught properly from first principles and assuming no prior knowledge.
Across three structured modules and fifteen full written lessons you will learn where CBT came from and the claim at its heart: that it is the meaning we make of events, not the events themselves, that drives emotional response. You will work with Beck's negative cognitive triad, Padesky and Mooney's five-part model, and the maintenance cycles, avoidance, safety behaviours and rumination among them, that keep distress running long after its cause has passed. You will then learn the working toolkit: how a CBT session is structured, why guided discovery outperforms argument, and how thought records and behavioural experiments actually produce change.
Every lesson pairs its teaching with key points and a written practice task, and a built-in study tutor is available whenever you want to test your understanding. Six hours of CPD, around six months of access, a final assessment, and a personalised certificate on passing.
▶ See inside the digital classroom1 minute 36 seconds · how a course is laid out, how each lesson is taught, and how the tutor helps
Before you start
This is a Foundation course in the CBT pathway. It assumes nothing: it is written for someone meeting the approach for the first time. What it adds is the working model, its vocabulary and its evidence base, so that the Practitioner course can assume them; it revisits the foundations only as far as it needs to before building on them, so it does not repeat the course below.
When you have completed it, CBT in Practice is the next step in the pathway.
The CBT pathway. The standard route through cognitive behavioural therapy: the cognitive model and its methods at Foundation, the disorder-specific models and the craft of formulation-driven treatment at Practitioner, and complexity, comorbidity and process at Advanced.
9 study hours9 CPD hours certified6 months of accessAI tutor in every lessonCertificate on completion (pass mark 70%)
What you will be able to do
✓Explain the cognitive model and how thoughts, emotions, physical sensations and behaviours maintain one another
✓Map a presenting difficulty onto the five areas model and identify its maintenance cycle
✓Recognise negative automatic thoughts and the common thinking habits that distort them
✓Describe how safety behaviours and avoidance keep unhelpful beliefs untested
✓Use a thought record to examine evidence and construct a balanced alternative thought
✓Explain how graded behavioural work, including activation and exposure, produces change
What you will study
Module 1: The cognitive model
Where CBT came from, what it claims, and the five-part model that organises every CBT formulation.
Origins and the central claimBeck’s negative cognitive triad (self, world, future) is one of CBT’s founding ideas
The five-part model and maintenance cyclesThe five parts: situation, thoughts, emotion, body, behaviour
Automatic Thoughts and Core Beliefs: The Layers of the MindAutomatic thoughts are specific, fleeting, and situation-dependent cognitions that occur in response to triggers.
The Cognitive Triad and Emotional-Behavioural ResponsesThe cognitive triad consists of a negative view of the self, a negative view of the world, and a negative view of the future, serving as a pervasive filter for interpreting reality.
Situational Triggers and Intermediate Beliefs: Bridging the Gap between Automatic Thoughts and Core BeliefsIntermediate beliefs act as conditional rules or assumptions that bridge the gap between automatic thoughts and core beliefs, shaping how individuals interpret and respond to situations.
Module 2: The basic toolkit
The session structure and the two workhorse methods: thought records and behavioural experiments.
Thought records and behavioural experimentsThought records slow the automatic and build balanced alternatives
Homework setting, review and troubleshooting in CBT sessionsHomework extends guided discovery into the client’s everyday life and functions as a behavioural experiment.
Outcome monitoring and routine use of standardised measures in CBTRoutine outcome monitoring with validated scales such as the PHQ‑9 and GAD‑7 gives early warning when a client is not improving, and feedback helps most for clients who are off track.
Identifying and Modifying Core Beliefs: Bridging Automatic Thoughts and BehaviourCore beliefs are the deepest, most global propositions that give emotional meaning to automatic thoughts and intermediate beliefs.
Module 3: Beneath the thought, and the limits of the model
The assumptions and core beliefs that sit under the automatic thought, the particular cognitive logic of anxiety and the safety behaviours that keep it alive, and an honest account of what this approach does not cover.
Assumptions and core beliefs: the downward arrowAutomatic thoughts are the surface output of conditional assumptions and, beneath those, unconditional core beliefs
Anxiety, safety behaviours and exposureIn anxiety the feared catastrophe has not happened, and the behaviour that prevents it also prevents the person learning it was never coming
What CBT does not do: scope, evidence and referralThe evidence is strongest for depression, the anxiety disorders, OCD, trauma-focused PTSD and the eating disorders, and thins considerably outside them
Images, memories and what the thought record missesA substantial proportion of clients report images rather than sentences, and the images carry more affect than the words do
Rumination and worry: when the content is not the problemRumination looks back and worry looks forward, and both are maintained by beliefs about the thinking rather than about its content
What's included
3 modules and 15 lessons
An 8-question final assessment, with a 70% pass mark
A certificate for 9 CPD hours when you pass it
An extended clinical case study with discussion questions
A glossary of key terms
Private notes, a reflection for each module, and a CPD log you can print or save as a PDF
📖 Written lessons with key points and practice tasks◆ Visual teaching diagrams🎥 Video where it helps🎧 Listen-to-this-lesson narration👩⚕️ A full clinical case study🧠 AI tutor in every lesson📄 Full course workbook (PDF) on completion📕 The course book (PDF) while you study, with your name in it
Speak the language: by the end you will use Automatic thought · Core belief · Conditional rule · Cognitive distortion · Safety behaviour · Behavioural experiment · Guided discovery · Socratic questioning · Collaborative empiricism · Formulation and more, precisely.
The evidence base this course draws on
Westbrook, D., Kennerley, H. and Kirk, J. (2011) An Introduction to Cognitive Behaviour Therapy: Skills and Applications. 2nd edn. London: SAGE. view source ↗
Greenberger, D. and Padesky, C. A. (2016) Mind Over Mood: Change How You Fe
