For a good fit, therapy should be an open line of communication. Hopefully this guide provided you with the basics of therapeutic approaches, and you know enough about the types of therapy and psychotherapy to make informed decisions.
Remember, therapy can be work, but it really helps, and therapists want to help you. Doing this research is the first step to a better understanding of yourself and better mental health. If you or someone you know is seeking mental health care, you can reach out to our Care Coordination team at support twochairs. If you or someone you know is experiencing an emergency or crisis and needs immediate help, call or go to the nearest emergency room. Additional resources can be found here.
Email support twochairs. Additional crisis resources can be found here. Before we begin This is a 45 min, virtual matching appointment for individual therapy. Not ready to sign up? Learn more. For Partners. What Kind of Therapy is Best for Me?
What exactly is therapy and why do some people need it? This is patently untrue. Therapy is for anyone looking for outside feedback and support.
In this age of tech addiction and growing levels of societal loneliness , therapy will only become a more integral part of our everyday lives. You need to have a mental health problem to go to therapy.
A good therapist can help you navigate life changes like moving, changing jobs, becoming a parent, improving your habits, and more. Therapy is for the weak. Confronting your feelings and working through challenging thoughts is difficult work.
Going to therapy takes courage and should be lauded as a sign of personal strength. Cognitive behavioral therapy CBT borrows a little from this concept: By changing your thoughts, you can also change your emotions and behaviors for a more satisfying life. In the CBT world, your current thoughts, emotions and behaviors interact with each other. Many people with depression, suicidal ideation or self-harm , substance use disorders and eating disorders also find CBT helpful.
If things feel out of control and super intense — your emotions, relationships, even sometimes your behaviors — dialectical behavior therapy DBT is designed with exactly that in mind. This form of therapy focuses on four main areas to help you master your well-being, including mindfulness, distress tolerance, emotion regulation and interpersonal relationships. DBT was created to treat borderline personality disorder BPD and those who struggle with persistent suicidal thoughts or self-harm.
There are a couple ways you can do DBT. The traditional, full program includes individual sessions with a DBT therapist, a weekly group skills class and phone coaching between sessions. This can get expensive, so you can also look for a therapist with training to incorporate DBT skills into your regular sessions or participate in just a group skills class.
In whatever context you try DBT, be prepared to work. The premise of psychodynamic therapy is very much based in exploring how the current issues you are dealing with and who you are today originated from your early experiences.
By talking through the free associations that come to mind from your past, present, future and dreams, you work with a therapist to find meaning and understanding from your history.
These therapists especially focus on their relationship with you, and, traditionally, they use their reactions to you and relationship with you as another tool to help you understand yourself. Relationship is key in psychodynamic formats. If you still want to work with a psychodynamic therapist in these instances, be sure to ask if they also have training in skills designed to keep you safe during higher-risk times in your life. Psychodynamic therapy is great for people who like to think deeply about their experiences and are happy to remain in therapy for a few months, even a year or so.
It offers a very in depth way of working and can really help those who want to explore their relationship to themselves and others in depth. Today, almost all therapies are person-centered, in the sense that they place the individual accessing therapy at the core of the therapeutic goals and methods. However, person-centered therapy, as conceived by Carl Rogers, goes beyond these general principles, being entirely non-directive.
In the s, this was an entirely new way of working, and remains unusual to this day. According to person-centered therapy, every individual has the solutions to their own problem. In short, you are the expert of your own life.
The role of the therapist, then, is to enable the client to trust their ability to make decisions and reach understandings about difficult situations. Person-centered therapists offer unconditional positive regard as the cornerstone of their approach: they believe that everyone is inherently good, and regardless of what you disclose, they will meet you with acceptance and compassion. Like psychodynamic psychotherapy, person-centered therapy sessions offer a space to talk about whatever you choose.
The difference is that a person-centered therapist will not offer interpretations of your difficulties, and may disclose some of their own experiences if they feel it to be helpful. In its purest form, person-centered therapy is not time-limited: the number of sessions offered will be tailored to the individual need of the client.
In reality, however, there may be time constraints if you are accessing a particularly busy service. To put the client completely at the centre of sessions, they are almost always offered on a one-to-one, face-to-face basis. The pros of this approach is perhaps the quality of the relationship you will have with the therapist or counsellor.
However, for some, the lack of direction the therapist offers you and the fact that you are in control of the sessions, can be frustrating. If you are looking for someone to tell you the answers, this might not be the right type of therapy for you. Mindfulness has risen in popularity over recent years, with advocates such as Ruby Wax and Oprah Winfrey. However, it stems from a very ancient Eastern tradition of meditation. In essence, mindfulness training is about developing awareness of internal experiences, and learning to greet them with curiosity and kindness.
Often, we respond to situations automatically. Mindfulness asks us to consider whether our automatic response is helpful in each unique situation in which it occurs. In this way, it is possible to challenge well-established habits, and cultivate more helpful ones.
By re-training our attention we can decide when it is an appropriate time to engage with feelings of anger, worry or sorrow, and when those feelings are unhelpful: it is all about taking back control. Mindfulness is about developing a new attitude to thinking, and it can be challenging to begin with. It takes time and patience to train our brains to think about things differently, which is why most mindfulness therapists will ask you to practice meditating in-between sessions; ideally 30 minutes per day.
Your therapist will help you to understand how to go about this, but if you feel that you will be unable to commit to your own practice regularly then you may wish to consider an alternative therapeutic approach.
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