Whilst consultations are essentially talking-therapy sessions, CBT goes beyond just talking and involves practical tasks, exercises and experiments to enhance understanding of the difficulty and to help bring about changes in feelings, beliefs, thinking and behaviour. It is an essential part of therapy that clients have an understanding of the process causing their difficulty, so that the tasks, exercises and experiments make sense within that context. For this reason therapist and client are, in essence, collaborators in a problem-solving process. Clients, in discussion with the therapist, decide which tasks and exercise they feel ready to undertake. There may be times when it is important to look at previous history but this is not usually an extensive part of the process. Treatment is more usually grounded in present experience, tends to be de-mystifying and usually has a problem orientated focus.