Psychotherapy involves exploring feelings, beliefs, thoughts and relevant events, sometimes from childhood and personal history, in a structured and safe way. Psychotherapy can help you identify the defences and coping mechanisms you created in childhood, and whether those structures are still relevant and helpful today. It can help heal your deepest wounds and leave you feeling free to reach your true potential.
Depending on the nature of your problem, therapy can be short or long term.
Psychotherapy aims to help you gain deeper insight into your difficulties or distress. It can create a greater understanding of why you are the way you are, enable you to find more appropriate ways of coping, and can become the facilitator to bring about changes in your thinking and behaviour.
Different Therapeutic approaches
Person centred counselling:
is based on the present (here and now) and helping clients achieve their highest potential. The view that everyone has the capacity and desire for personal growth and change, given the right conditions. There are four basic goals a person will achieve in successful person-centered therapy. They will become open to experience, learn to trust themselves, develop an internal evaluation of themselves and have a willingness to continue growing. The primary technique involved in person-centred therapy is reflection.
Psychodynamic counselling: focuses on past relationships and in particular, traumatic childhood experiences in relation to an individual’s current life. This approach will bring self-awareness and understanding of the influence of the past and present behaviour. The belief is that by revealing and bringing these issues to the surface healing can occur. Psychodynamic Counselling is one of the major traditions within contemporary psychotherapy. Its aim is to help us achieve insight and understanding around the reasons for our problems, and to translate this insight into a mature capacity to cope with current and future difficulties.
Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT)
aims to help you change the way you think (cognitive) and what you do (behaviour). Rather than looking at past causes, it focuses on current problems and practical solutions to help you feel better now. CBT is suitable for counselling clients with anxiety, depression, eating disorders, personality disorders, phobias, OCD's, maladaptive thought patterns etc.
Gestalt counselling: focuses on insight into clients and their relation to the world and often uses role play to aid resolution of past conflict. Gestalt therapy has been successfully integrated into treatment programs for adults and teens who are being treated for substance abuse, addiction, behaviour disorders, mood disorders, eating disorders, grief/loss, trauma, sex addiction, compulsive gambling, bipolar, depression and related conditions.
Solution Focus counselling:
minimizes emphasis on the past and instead focuses on the clients strengths and previous successes, set goals and work out how to achieve them. It is suitable for busy clients, those who have made decision or want to change and with a specific desired goal in mind.
Integrative counselling: involves integrating various approaches to the practice. Integrative counselling aims to promote healing and facilitate wholeness - ensuring that all levels of a person's being and functioning (mental, physical and emotional health) are maximised to their full potential. Clients must be committed to self-exploration and open to identifying what factors in their life are perpetuating problems, and/or are causing current concerns.