EH1 Therapies A-Z
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy
“Depression is the flaw in love. To be creatures who love, we must be creatures who can despair at what we lose, and depression is the mechanism of that despair.”
Aaron T. Beck
Aaron Beck developed cognitive behaviour therapy in the 1960’s. Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) is a type of psychotherapy that helps people learn how to identify and change the destructive or disturbing thought patterns that have a negative influence on their behaviour and emotions. CBT aims to help people manage their problems by changing how they think and behave. It is a structured therapy, usually aimed at a specific problem and is usually time limited. Cognitive therapy focuses on how thoughts can create feelings and moods, and how what you believe can keep problems going. Behavioural therapy helps you to overcome problems by changing your behaviour. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy focuses on changing the automatic negative thoughts that can contribute to and worsen our emotional difficulties. CBT is a structured and goal-oriented form of therapy. The approach is hands-on and practical, therapist and patient working collaboratively with the goal of modifying patterns of thinking and behaviour to bring about a beneficial change in the client’s mood and way of living their life. It is used to help a wide range of problems, and treatment protocols are used to treat problems the client is facing. More
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Couples/Relationship Counselling
“A human being is part of a whole, called by us the Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
Albert Einstein
Couples or relationship counselling is a talking therapy which allows people to identify negative behaviours which can be changed to improve their relationship. The aim of this type of therapy is to help people gain a better understanding of negative patterns within the relationship. Couples counselling can provide new tools, ideas and perspectives to help to get relationships back on track and to establish a warm and loving connection between partners. A couple’s counsellor can monitor progress, mediate conflict and provide objective feedback. More
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Existential Psychotherapy
“Life cannot be lived, nor can death be faced without anxiety. Anxiety is guide as well as enemy and can point the way to authentic existence. The task of the therapist is to reduce anxiety to comfortable levels and then to use this existing anxiety to increase a patient’s awareness and vitality.”
Irvin D. Yalom
“Existential Psychotherapy is a dynamic approach that focuses on concerns rooted in human existence. Each of us craves permanence, groundedness, community and pattern, and yet we must all face inevitable death, groundlessness, isolation, and meaninglessness. Existential Psychotherapy is based on a model which posits that anxiety and its maladaptive consequences are responses to these four ultimate concerns. These concerns, form the body of existential psychotherapy and compose the framework in which a therapist conceptualizes a client’s problem in order to develop a method of treatment”.
It is in the context of these concerns that an individual can be filled with a feeling of dread or existential angst. While existential angst may be part of being human, it can instigate psychological, physical and spiritual issues leading to long-term problems. Therapy can help clients focus on taking personal responsibility for life’s problems and decision making. More
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Human Givens
“It has become obvious that something is not right. But what? To answer these rather big questions, we need to go back to what it means to be human”.
Julia Welstead
The human givens approach comes from the understanding that, when essential emotional needs are met and our innate mental resources are used correctly, a human being will be emotionally and mentally healthy. Essential psychological needs include needs for autonomy, sense of control, security, connection, attention, achievement, status and meaning. Innate resources include our abilities to learn from experience, plan, judge, imagine, relate one thing to another, empathise, develop a moral sense, remember, etc. It is when emotional needs are not adequately met, or are met in unhealthy ways, or when innate resources are damaged for some reason, or are unintentionally misused, that undesirable mental states such as anxiety, anger, depression, addiction and psychosis develop. The Human Givens approach is a set of organising ideas that provides a framework for understanding the way that individuals and society work. At its core is the idea, that human beings, like all organic beings, come into this world with a set of needs. If those needs are met appropriately, we will be well. To meet our physical and emotional needs, nature has gifted us our very own internal ‘guidance programme’ which, together with our needs, makes up what we call the human givens. More
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Humanistic Psychotherapy
“I wince to think of how much time has been wasted by intelligent men and women arguing about whether psychotherapy cures and trying to fit psychotherapy into the mode of Western 19th century medicine. Our task is to be guide, friend and interpreter to persons on their journeys through their private hells and purgatories.”
Rollo May 1991, The Cry for Myth
Humanistic Psychotherapy was developed in the mid-20th century during the humanistic movement. Abraham Maslow viewed psychology at that time as either too concerned with that which was “neurotic”, or that which was “mechanistic”. In addition to psychoanalytic theory and behaviourism, Maslow believed there was need for a third psychological theory which would emphasise human experience and meaning. Incorporating analytic, behavioural, and existential models of psychotherapy, Humanistic psychology would be concerned with higher human motives, self-development, knowledge, understanding and ethics. The Humanistic view is therefore one of many ways of looking at oneself, others and the world. It is based on inner experience and experiential encounter with others. More
Integrative Psychotherapy
The search (for more effective treatment) is predicated on the belief that commonalities are more important in accounting for therapy outcome than the unique factors that differentiate among them”.
John Norcross
Integrative therapy combines core ideas and techniques from different therapeutic schools of thought; psychodynamic, client-centred, behaviourist, cognitive, family therapy, gestalt, body-psychotherapies, object relations theories, psychoanalytic self-psychology, and transactional analysis, with the view that each of these approaches provide a partial explanation of human behaviour, and each can be enhanced when selectively integrated with other approaches or schools. The aim of an integrative psychotherapy is to facilitate wholeness so that the quality of the person’s being and functioning is maximized, with due regard for everyone’s own personal limits and external constraints. More
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Life/Business Coaching
Life coaching helps clients to set and achieve goals in many areas of life including business, health and wellbeing, career, relationships and work-life balance. It can help you to find what will make you happier or how to develop a new job or career path. A life coach uses insightful questioning to help clients identify the goals they want to achieve, recognise their current circumstances, consider all the options open to them and choose which actions they will take within a defined timeframe. Life coaching centres around the belief that everyone can achieve their goals through acknowledging and using their own resources. More
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Person Centred Therapy
“We think we listen, but very rarely do we listen with real understanding, true empathy. Yet listening, of this very special kind, is one of the most potent forces for change that I know”.
Carl Rogers
The person-centred approach was developed by Carl Rogers who believed the client was the expert in their own life. Person-centred therapy identifies that each person has the capacity and desire for personal growth and change. Rogers termed this natural human inclination “self-actualization”. He likened it to the way that other living organisms strive toward balance, order, and greater complexity. According to Rogers, “Individuals have within themselves vast resources for self-understanding and for altering their self-concepts, basic attitudes, and self-directed behaviour.” The person-centred therapist learns to recognize and trust the client’s human potential, providing them with empathy and unconditional positive regard to help facilitate change. The therapist follows the client’s lead whenever possible. They offer support, guidance, and structure so that the client can discover solutions within themselves. More
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Pluralistic Psychotherapy
“Good is not a general term corresponding to a single idea.”
Aristotle
Pluralistic psychotherapy is a collaborative approach that recognises that there are multiple valid perspectives on what is helpful for clients and that different therapeutic concepts and methods can be suitable and effective for different clients at different times.
Pluralistic practice emphasises the strengths and resources of clients and the communities and relationships that sustain them. Key principles of pluralistic practice include a commitment to a process of dialogue and shared decision-making through which the knowledge and life experience of both client and therapist can be combined, and respect for the creative possibilities associated with open-ness to differences between individuals and across cultural traditions. More
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Psychodynamic Psychotherapy
“We are what we are because we have been what we have been”.
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud developed a collection of theories which formed the basis of the psychodynamic approach to psychology. Psychoanalysis was the original psychodynamic theory. Psychodynamic psychotherapy focuses on unconscious processes as they appear in a person’s present behaviour. The goals of psychodynamic therapy are to gain self-awareness and understanding of the influence of the past on present behaviour. It maintains that our day-to-day is impacted by the existence of the unconscious and that unhelpful functioning in our current life can be traced back to early life events. A psychodynamic approach enables the client to examine unresolved conflicts and symptoms that arise from past dysfunctional relationships. More
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Psychosynthesis
“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom”.
Anaïs Nin
Psychosynthesis is a holistic modality that considers body, feelings, mind and spirit. It is described as a psychology of the Self stating that human experience includes matters of soul and spirit, alongside physical and emotional experiences, thoughts and mental processes. Psychosynthesis is a system of psychological therapy which originated in Freud’s discoveries about the unconscious mind. In 1911 the Italian psychoanalyst Roberto Assagioli added to this body of knowledge by observing that there is a ‘superconscious’ as well as a lower unconscious. Dr. Assagioli stressed the importance of the human ‘impulse towards wholeness’ and of the longing and striving for a more authentic and truer experience of Self. As that conscious connection to Self becomes more integrated, the relationship inevitably extends beyond the personal to a sense of connection and responsibility for the ‘greater whole’ and our contribution to something of meaning or our interconnectedness with all. More
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Somatic Therapy
“The body remembers what the mind forgets; it is through somatic experiencing that we can access, and release stored traumatic memories”.
Peter Levine
Somatic therapy, also referred to as somatic experiencing therapy, is a type of therapy that is centred around the connection between the mind and body. Somatic therapy explores how the body expresses deeply painful experiences. In the 1970s, Dr. Peter Levine developed somatic experiencing, which partly came from Jungian therapy. The idea was that when humans experience trauma, they can get stuck in the “freeze” mode of the fight, flight, or freeze response. Remaining “frozen” causes the negative energy to stay in the body, which can lead to physical and psychological problems. Applying mind-body healing to help with trauma recovery, somatic therapies suggest that our body holds and expresses experiences and emotions. Traumatic events or unresolved emotional issues can become ‘trapped’ inside.” Somatic therapy uses both psychotherapy and physical therapies. In addition to talk therapy, somatic therapy practitioners may use mind-body exercises and other physical techniques to help release tension that negatively affects physical and emotional wellbeing. More
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Transactional Analysis
“The achievement of autonomy is manifested by the discovery or recovery of three capacities: awareness, spontaneity and intimacy.”
Eric Berne
Transactional Analysis (TA) was developed by Eric Berne during the 1950s. Transactions refer to the communication exchanges between people. Berne recognized that the human personality is made up of three “ego states,” or systems of thought, feeling, and behaviour; Parent, Adult and Child ego states. TA is a comprehensive and versatile system of psychotherapy recognised world-wide for its success in facilitating personal change. TA is a theory of personality, communication, and child development which provides a model to help us understand how people interact and develop patterns of behaviour and relationships. It helps us to understand how people form habitual patterns and can be used in the treatment of a wide range of problems. One of the benefits of TA is that the concepts can be understood and used on many levels from simple pointers to complex analysis. The core beliefs of TA are that respect, and empathy are a core feature of relationships, people are OK, everyone has the capacity to think, people can make changes, they can decide their own destiny, and these decisions can be changed. These beliefs are reflected in the therapeutic relationship when client and therapist work together, each taking responsibility for achieving agreed goals. The aim of TA is personal growth and change. More
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Transpersonal Psychotherapy
“We fear to know the fearsome and unsavoury aspects of ourselves, but we fear even more to know the godlike in ourselves”.
Abraham Maslow.
Transpersonal psychotherapy is a branch of psychology that integrates the spiritual and transcendent aspects of human experience. The term transpersonal means “beyond” or “through” the personal, and refers to the experiences, processes and events that transcend the usual sense of identity. This process of deepening the experience of connection is associated with the highest human qualities, such as creativity, compassion, selflessness, and wisdom. Beginning with the founding of the Association for Transpersonal Psychology in 1971, transpersonal psychotherapy is relatively new as a formal discipline. Despite this it draws upon ancient knowledge that comes from multiple traditions. Transpersonal psychotherapists attempt to integrate timeless wisdom with modern Western psychology and translate spiritual principles into scientifically grounded, contemporary language. More
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Zero Balancing
“We have come to understand that energy is consciousness, that vibration holds information, and that energy is a basic building block of our bodies.”
Fritz Smith
Zero Balancing is a powerful body-mind therapy that teaches skilled touch to bring balance to body structure and energy. The practitioner uses finger pressure and gentle traction on areas of tension in the bones, joints and soft tissue to create fulcrums, or points of balance, around which the body can relax and reorganize. By addressing the deepest and densest tissues of the body along with soft tissue and energy fields, Zero Balancing helps to clear chronic tension and blocks in the body’s energy flow. Zero Balancing has been shown to reduce stress, amplify vitality and promote better postural alignment. Zero Balancing is a gentle yet powerful system of touch which provides a unique insight into the relationship between energy, qi (also known as chi) as a force in the body, and structural anatomy. It is particularly effective when for example we become overwhelmed by stress which in turn can lead to a decline in our vitality and our ability to adapt to change. Contemporary life is increasingly lived at an ever-faster pace. Staying in touch with natural rhythms is an essential reality check, valuable in maintaining balance, which is health. More
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