Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) teaches skills to help individuals live and behave in ways consistent with personal values while developing psychological flexibility. This approach helps individuals recognise ways in which their attempts to suppress, manage, and control emotional experiences create challenges. By recognising and addressing these challenges, individuals can become better able to make room for value-based actions that support well-being.
Attachment-based therapy is a brief, process-oriented form of psychological counseling. The client-therapist relationship is based on developing or rebuilding trust and centers on expressing emotions. An attachment-based approach to therapy looks at the connection between an infant’s early attachment experiences with primary caregivers, usually with parents, and the infant’s ability to develop normally and ultimately form healthy emotional and physical relationships as an adult. Attachment-based therapy aims to build or rebuild a trusting, supportive relationship that will help prevent or treat anxiety or depression.
Client Centred Therapy also known as Person Centred Therapy was developed by humanist psychologist Carl Rogers during the 1940s and 1950s. In this approach the therapist strives to create the conditions needed for their clients to change. This involves a therapeutic environment that is conformable, non-judgmental, and empathetic.
Therapists can help clients grow psychologically via self-direction, become more self-aware, and change their behaviour. In this type of environment, a client feels safe and free from judgment.
Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) is an effective treatment approach for a range of mental and emotional health issues including anxiety and depression. CBT aims to help a person identify and challenge unhelpful thoughts and to learn practical self-help strategies. This approach supports clients to identify the relationship between thoughts, feelings, actions and underlying core beliefs. It often involves integrating mindfulness components (known as Mindfulness based CBT) based on the current research findings which highlight the value of learning to change the way you relate to thoughts, feelings and sensations.
Dialectical Behaviour Therapy was founded by Marsha Linehan (who suffered from Borderline Personality Disorder herself), and is used to predominantly treat Borderline Personality Disorder. This therapy is highly useful for other psychological disorders such as substance dependence, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and eating disorders to name a few. At DBT’s core is focus on skills training in four main areas: mindfulness, distress tolerance, emotional regulation and interpersonal effectiveness.
Emotion-focused therapy (EFT) promotes the notion that emotional change is necessary for permanent or enduring change in clients’ growth and well-being. EFT draws on knowledge about the positive effect of emotional expression and identifies the adaptive potential of emotions as critical in creating meaningful psychological change. Often this involves utilising strategies to help clients accept, express, regulate, make sense of, and transform emotions.
Gottman Relationship Therapy is particularly helpful for couples who are struggling with their relationship. It is also a great approach for pre marriage counselling. Gottman relationship therapy involves your psychologist meeting with you and your partner individually and then both of you completing an extensive online questionnaire about your relationship.
Interpersonal psychotherapy (IPT) is a time-limited, focused, evidence-based approach to treat mood disorders. The main goal of IPT is to improve the quality of a client’s interpersonal relationships and social functioning to help reduce their distress. IPT provides strategies to resolve problems within four key areas.
First, it addresses interpersonal deficits, including social isolation or involvement in unfulfilling relationships. Second, it can help patients manage unresolved grief—if the onset of distress is linked to the death of a loved one, either recent or past. Third, IPT can help with difficult life transitions like retirement, divorce, or moving to another city. Fourth, IPT is recommended for dealing with interpersonal disputes that emerge from conflicting expectations between partners, family members, close friends, or coworkers. https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/therapy-types/interpersonal-psychotherapy
Mindfulness is the idea of learning how to be fully present and engaged in the moment, aware of your thoughts and feelings without distraction or judgment. It is the conscious awareness of our present moment. This includes openness and non-judgment about the experience. It is often coupled with other types of therapy, such as Cognitive-based Therapy (CBT), Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), or Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT).
Mindfulness therapy is not concerned with relaxation, though that might be a result of certain practices. The focus is on increasing our awareness of the thoughts, feelings, and actions that hinder our progress. When we are better able to do that, we can engage with those aspects of ourselves, learn to tweak our language, and choose how to respond.
Narrative therapy is a collaborative approach to helping in which the client and therapist work together to unpack the client’s life story. This is based on the idea that our lives are shaped by stories and understanding how those stories have been interpreted is crucial to improve well-being and facilitating growth. Often, this approach involves the therapist identifying multiple “truths” rather than just the one truth as it has been interpreted.
Positive psychology is the study of what contributes to a flourishing or optimal life experience for people. Rather than focusing on what is missing from clients’ lives, this approach is about appreciating and acknowledging all the positive aspects of your life. Often this involves integrating gratitude, optimism and mindfulness practices and habits which can support you to adjust the way you think, feel, and behave to flourish and grow daily.
Process oriented psychology, also known as process work, is a holistic psychotherapeutic approach that suggests unconscious material can be experienced physically, interpersonally, or environmentally. This method helps people in treatment develop personal awareness and identify with repressed thoughts, emotions, and experiences that may negatively affect their everyday life. While process work is often used to help individuals manage intrapersonal conflicts in a healthy way, its principles may also be used to promote leadership skills or resolve social conflicts between small and large groups of people.
Schema Therapy is particularly helpful for clients who have had life long struggles with a particular issue such as depression or patterns of relating to situations or people in ways that are not working well for you and interfering with living your happiest life. Schema therapy identifies and seeks to modify core patterns or behaviours that we tend to repeatedly use throughout our lives.
Solution-Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT) is a short-term goal-focused evidence-based therapeutic approach, which incorporates positive psychology principles and practices, and which helps clients change by constructing solutions rather than focusing on problems. In the most basic sense, SFBT is a hope friendly, positive emotion eliciting, future-oriented vehicle for formulating, motivating, achieving, and sustaining desired behavioural change.
Strength-based therapy is a type of positive psychotherapy and counselling that focuses more on your internal strengths and resourcefulness, and less on weaknesses, failures, and shortcomings. This focus sets up a positive mindset that helps you build on you best qualities, find your strengths, improve resilience and change worldview to one that is more positive. A positive attitude, in turn, can help your expectations of yourself and others become more reasonable.
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