CBT Therapy in the Netherlands — Cognitive Behavioural Therapy in English

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy is the most extensively researched psychological treatment available. At ExpatPsychologie we offer CBT in English and Polish — online and in person in Amersfoort, in the Utrecht province.

What Is CBT

CBT is built on a simple observation: your thoughts, feelings, and behaviour are tightly connected. How you interpret a situation shapes how you feel about it, and how you feel shapes what you do next.

In anxiety and depression, those interpretations tend to be systematically skewed — overestimating threat, underestimating your ability to cope, drawing catastrophic conclusions from ambiguous signals. CBT teaches you to recognise these patterns and test them, not through forced positive thinking but by checking whether the thought actually matches reality.

The second half of the work is behavioural: gradually approaching the situations you have been avoiding. Avoidance sustains anxiety. Exposure dismantles it.

What CBT Treats

CBT has the strongest evidence base of any psychological intervention for:

• Anxiety disorders — generalised anxiety, panic disorder, social anxiety, specific phobias
• Depression — particularly mild to moderate presentations
• OCD — using Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP)
• Insomnia — CBT-I outperforms sleep medication over the long term
• Burnout and work stress — addressing perfectionism, difficulty setting limits, over-responsibility
• Health anxiety — persistent worry about illness
• Low self-esteem and entrenched negative beliefs about the self

How CBT Works in Practice

CBT is structured and goal-oriented. It is not open-ended therapy where you spend years discussing your childhood.

Session 1 — intake. We map your situation, symptoms, history, and what you want to change. Together we set concrete goals and estimate how many sessions the work is likely to take.

Sessions 2–4 — formulation. We build a shared understanding of what maintains the problem: which automatic thoughts arise, which behaviours reinforce them, which situations trigger the cycle.

Ongoing sessions — the work itself. Cognitive techniques (thought records, belief testing, behavioural experiments) and graded exposure, selected for your specific presentation.

Review every 10 sessions. We check progress against the goals we set and decide together where to go next.

Between sessions you complete short exercises. This is not optional — research consistently shows that clients who do the between-session work achieve better and more durable outcomes.

How Long Does CBT Take

A typical course runs 8–20 sessions, depending on the presentation:

• Specific phobia: often 6–10 sessions
• Anxiety disorders: 12–16 sessions
• Moderate depression: 12–20 sessions
• OCD: 16–20 sessions

Many clients notice clear improvement within the first 6–8 sessions.

CBT for Expats in the Netherlands

CBT depends on your ability to describe thoughts, emotions, and situations precisely. In a second language that precision degrades — and a significant part of the method's effectiveness goes with it.

That is why we work in English and Polish rather than Dutch. If English is the language you think and feel in, there is no reason to translate your inner life before we can work with it.

We also understand the context: performance pressure in international teams, running your entire professional life in a second language, the absence of a local support network, raising children between two cultures. These are real maintaining factors for anxiety and burnout, and they belong in the formulation.

Credentials

CBT is delivered by a psychologist currently completing an EABCT-accredited postgraduate training in cognitive behavioural therapy, registered with NIP, NVPA, and RBCZ.

Practical Information

Book a Free Consultation

A fifteen-minute call is enough to establish whether CBT fits what you are dealing with, and whether we are a good match to work together. No obligation.

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