Therapeutic orientations
What does it mean that a therapist specializes in CBT? Learn more about each orientation and how that impacts your therapy experience.
Mindfulness
Background
Mindfulness is a form of therapy that utilizes meditation and breathing exercises to help people gain control over their emotions in stressful situations to avoid negative downward spirals.
Useful for dealing with
Depression, generalized anxiety disorder, and addiction.
What to expect
Mindfulness can be performed in one-on-one or group sessions. Your therapist will often use session time to discuss mindfulness strategies, giving you insight into your own cognition and negative mental habits, as well as lead mindfulness exercises such as guided meditation and breathing.
The strategies taught in mindfulness-based therapies can be used every day to enhance your mood, restructure negative thought patterns, as well as help to prevent thoughts from spiraling downwards, which commonly leads to depressive episodes or heightened cases of anxiety.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
Background
CBT is a form of psychotherapy ("talk therapy") that focuses primarily on identifying and reshaping negative or unrealistic thoughts and beliefs.
Useful for dealing with
Depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and many others.
What to expect
Your therapist will work with you to identify stressful or troubling situations in your life and help you become more aware of your current reactions, feelings, and beliefs about them. Once you are more in tune with your thoughts, your therapist will guide you through identifying those that may be excessively negative or inaccurate to reality and will work with you to develop strategies for reshaping those thoughts.
Reshaping your thoughts may be harder than it seems, though, depending on how hard-wired your reactions are. As such it's important to consistently see your therapist as you're starting out. Likewise, it's common for CBT to involve "homework" to be completed in your own time to reinforce lessons from your previous session.
Psychodynamic
Background
Psychodynamic Therapy is a form of "talk therapy" that aims to examine and improve a person's relationship with the world around them by looking deeper at their thoughts, reactions, and aspirations.
Useful for dealing with
Depression, difficulty in forming or maintaining personal relationships, addiction, social anxiety, body image issues.
What to expect
In sessions, your therapist will prompt you to speak openly on any topic you'd like, such as your current issues or future dreams. By talking through these various topics, you may begin to feel a reduction in negative emotions, and through the support of your therapist, you may feel a boost to self-esteem and the quality of your interpersonal relationships.
In these discussions, your therapist will assist you in identifying, accepting, and overcoming negative emotions while highlighting positive aspects that may come to light. Over time you will gain the skills to analyze and overcome issues independently by adapting your thoughts and behaviors using the tools learned during sessions.
Humanistic
Background
Humanistic Therapy (sometimes referred to as "humanism") is a therapeutic approach which highlights the importance of understanding each person as a whole human with unique experiences, as opposed to an archetype or trying to place them within a category. Humanistic therapy utilizes a gestalt approach to generate insights and wisdom, focusing on feelings of the present as opposed to digging through the past.
Useful for dealing with
Depression, anxiety, panic disorders, personality disorders, addiction, and relationship issues (love and family). Also beneficial for people searching to "purpose" or who feel a sense of "incompleteness".
What to expect
A humanistic therapist will focus on your positive traits and behaviors and try to better understand how you perceives your own behaviors, actions, and thoughts. By maintaining a focus on positive traits and behaviors, the therapist will help you to reinforce your internalized self-image to highlight the good and set you up to harness your own personal intuitions to achieve fulfillment and personal growth.
Somatic
Background
Somatic Therapy is a method that combines psychotherapy ("talk therapy") and active therapy to help you uncover and process negative thoughts and reactions you may feel from old memories or experiences. The underlying principle of Somatic Therapy is that the mind and body are linked, meaning unresolved negative emotions from the past may linger in your body and cause you real physical pain when they surface. By developing strategies for mitigating and dealing with these troubling emotions, you will be able to move forward with a healthier mind and body.
Useful for dealing with
Stress, anxiety, depression, grief, addiction, relationship issues, and trauma.
What to expect
You can expect sessions to involve a focus on reliving a past memory that may be a point of pain or discomfort for you. Once you have recalled the memory, your therapist will help you identify any physical reactions you may be experiencing.
Depending on what you find, your therapist will help you to develop strategies for dealing with these feelings in the future, using techniques such as breathing and meditation exercises. Additionally, your therapist may recommend more active strategies on top of your sessions, like yoga or massage. By practicing the strategies you develop with your therapist consistently, you can learn to free yourself from the pain caused by resurfaced experiences and engage more fully in your life.
Interpersonal Therapy
Background
Interpersonal Therapy is an approach which focuses primarily on current relationships and negative thoughts or behaviors associated with them. This approach differs from methods like CBT as it tends to avoid looking at past relationships or issues that don't directly deal with the quality of present-day relationships. IPT provides you with tools and strategies to deal with four main areas: interpersonal deficits, unresolved grief, difficult life transitions, and interpersonal disputes.
Useful for dealing with
Depression and mood disorders including, but not limited to, bipolar disorder.
What to expect
You can expect sessions to be either one-on-one or group format. In the beginning, there will be a large emphasis on your therapist getting to understand any mental health symptoms you may be suffering, as well as understanding your current relationships. As sessions progress, your therapist will work with you to identify problem areas and provide strategies for resolving them.
To make meaningful and consistent progress, your therapist will likely assign "homework" outside of session to solidify and implement the strategies they have provided.
Eclecticism
Background
Eclectic Therapy is an approach which pulls from a wide range of orientations to create sessions that are customized and tailored to the specific needs of the client. Depending on what is discovered in a session, your therapist may choose to alter the strategies or direction of the next session to drive a deeper understanding of specific issues or topics.
What to expect
Sessions in Eclectic Therapy may feel unstructured at first as your therapist works to get a better baseline understanding of the issues you are facing, and in turn choosing a good initial direction. For example, a therapist may realize at first that you would benefit from Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, but as time goes on you will transition to a more Somatic approach as you master the concepts of the previous method or transition to a new topic.
Coaching
Background
Coaching (also referred to as "life-coaching") is a field of counseling which focuses on motivation, support, and generating lasting confidence as a means of helping people establish and reach goals to advance themselves. Unlike most forms of therapy, does not require a degree or official certification, though many programs exist for coaching certification.
What to expect
While other forms of therapy are typically founded on specific theories or concepts, coaching is considered more free-form and can vary greatly from coach to coach, depending on their individual preferences.
Common coaching methods pull from different areas of therapy to help you understand your current circumstances, visualize your goals, and develop strategies to achieve them. In addition, coaches can often be more hands-on and focus on holding you accountable to your goals and progress.
Gestalt
Background
Therapy is a combination of psychotherapy ("talk therapy") and active therapy. The primary goal of Gestalt methods is to increase self-awareness of what is holding you back in the present by better understanding how past experiences still negatively influence you.
Useful for dealing with
Anxiety, depression, self-esteem, and relationship issues.
What to expect
A major thing to note is that Gestalt methods don't want you to simply think about the past, they want you to bring it to the present in order to most effectively determine the underlying causes of what is affecting you now. As such, it's common that a session will involve other forms of experiential therapy, such as role-playing or re-enactment.
By actively recreating past situations, you are able to process these experiences in the present and understand how they may have created negative thought patterns and behaviors that still hold you back.
Once you've successfully identified those obstacles, your therapist will help you to develop tools to reverse and move past those barriers in order to live a more fulfilling life.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
Background
ACT is a form of psychotherapy (talk therapy) that focuses on accepting difficult situations and developing strategies to move forward, instead of becoming stuck.
Useful for dealing with
Career stress, general anxiety, social anxiety, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and psychosis.
What to expect
One of the core principles of ACT is developing and refining your ability to accept the circumstances of your current situation that you cannot or are too difficult to change.
Accepting in this case is not the same as "giving in". Instead your therapist will help you to stop wasting energy and getting swamped by things beyond your control, and offset those things by choosing a path and committing to it.
Drawing similarities to mindfulness-based therapies, another aspect of ACT deals with helping you to recontextualize your thoughts, or change how you perceive the thousands of things that run through your head every day. By changing your perspective and not giving all thoughts equal weight, you will hone the skill of acknowledging thoughts without allowing them to have power over you.
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)
Background
EMDR is a non-traditional therapy technique that involves focusing on any negative or painful emotions that you feel from a traumatic event (as opposed to focusing on the traumatic event itself) and releasing them using a process of 'desensitization'. Additionally, your therapist will work with you to replace those negative emotions with positive ones and to develop strategies for dealing with disturbing feelings in the future.
Useful for dealing with
Post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, phobias, depression.
What to expect
During your first session, you will give your therapist some background on your problems and symptoms, though not necessarily need to dive into the details of any specific events. Then, while actively thinking about any painful thoughts that are affecting you, your therapist will guide you through a process of 'desensitization' wherein you will follow the movement of your therapist's hand, similar to the swinging of a pendulum, and then ultimately working to install new positive thoughts and beliefs.
In future sessions, the focus will shift towards reinforcing those positive beliefs until you arrive at a point where you can handle current and future traumatic feelings comfortably.
Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT)
Background
DBT is founded on the idea of dialectics, or balanced opposites. What does that mean, exactly? Think of it as a mental transition from a black-and-white "either-or" outlook to a balanced "both-and" mindset. Similar to ACT, DBT is focused on developing skills around acceptance and directed change.
Useful for dealing with
Personality disorders, depression, bipolar disorder, post-traumatic-stress disorder, and addiction.
What to expect
You can expect DBT to involve four main strategies or tools for you to take into life: mindfulness, distress tolerance/resilience, emotional regulation, and interpersonal effectiveness. All of these tools will increase your ability to be present, accept your negative emotions and face them head-on, mitigate them in a healthy way, and communicate with others in a strong and respectful manner.
Due to the practical nature of the skills you are developing, you can expect these sessions to be hands-on and have "homework" assigned to reinforce what you're learning in your day-to-day life.
Jungian Psychotherapy
Background
Jungian Therapy (sometimes referred to as "Jungian Analysis") is a form of therapy that works to bring the conscious and unconscious mind together. This involves deeper exploration into what is considered the true subconscious "self" as opposed to simply looking at the "self" that you monitor and present to the world. While Jungian Therapy is used to treat a wide range of mental health conditions, it's also a useful method for anybody looking to gain a deeper understanding of themselves.
Useful for dealing with
Depression, anxiety, grief, phobias, relationship issues, trauma, and self-esteem issues.
What to expect
You can expect sessions to involve a variety of techniques and strategies for deeper exploration, such as interpretation of your dreams, word association exercises, or more expressive activities such as art. All of these techniques aim to bring to light issues that you may be unknowingly connecting to different situations or stimuli.
Jungian Therapy relies heavily on consistent hard work, repeated sessions, and "homework" done outside of session.