Therapies

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy

This therapy explores the way your environment, thinking style and views/beliefs (cognitions), emotions, behaviour and bodily responses interact and contribute to your difficulties. Sometimes the way we see ourselves and others, may be unhelpful and can trigger intense unpleasant emotions and give rise to damaging coping behaviour. Therapy enables you to evaluate and challenge your cognitions and explore alternative non-destructive coping behaviours. It is a structured approach and you and your therapist agree goals for treatment and try things out between sessions.

CBT has been shown to work for a range of emotional and behavioural difficulties such as depression, panic attacks, anxiety, addiction, obsessive compulsive disorder and some eating disorders.

Psychodynamic Therapy

The aim of psychodynamic therapy is to facilitate a full understanding of unresolved issues and how these are connected to feelings and attitudes of current and past relationships and experiences. Past patterns which may be unhelpful can repeat themselves; unconscious issues can affect our lives negatively. Therapy focuses on these unconscious issues, the facilitation of expressing feelings and making sense of them.

Humanistic psychotherapy

The aim of humanistic psychotherapy is to help the client approach a stronger and healthier sense of self, also called self-actualization. The person is viewed in a constant process of becoming and psychotherapy is a process of allowing and fostering that becoming. It encourages people to explore their feelings and take responsibility for their thoughts and action (in a non-judging and non-blaming manner).

Schema Therapy

This is a systematic and integrative therapy that stems from CBT and is aimed at the treatment of lifelong or recurrent problems. It focusses on exploring the development of and changing unhelpful schemas. Schemas are durable patterns regarding the way you relate to yourself and others, which were formed during childhood and elaborated throughout one's lifetime. They are considered to be maladaptive to a certain degree and consist of memories, thoughts, emotions, bodily sensations and give rise to intense emotions and damaging coping behaviours.