What is Psychotherapy?

CBT is a relatively short-term, focused therapy for a wide range of psychological problems including depression, anxiety, anger, relationship conflict, fears and phobias and substance use issues. CBT focusses on the relationship between your thoughts, feelings and behaviors and create new thoughts and behaviors that can significantly improve the way you feel.

CBT sessions are structured and involve self-help homework assigned by the therapist that the patient will work on in between sessions. This allows for real-life application and experiences to reinforce new patterns of thinking, behaving and feeling.

Research demonstrates that patients who carry out homework assignments get better faster and stay better longer. Your self-help homework might include keeping track of your moods, thoughts, and behaviors; scheduling activities; developing goals; challenging your negative thoughts; collecting information; changing the way you communicate with others; and other assignments.

Psychodynamic therapy looks at Identifying general recurring themes and patterns, focusses on affect and expression of emotions, explores attempts to avoid distressing thoughts and feelings, interpersonal relationships, and discusses past, developmental experiences including attachment figures. Psychodynamic therapy is less structured, allowing the patient to speak freely about desires, fears, fantasies and dreams which can be valuable information about how you view self and others, interpret and make meaning of experiences which can get in the way of living a fulfilling and meaningful life.

Psychodynamic therapy also explores how the relationship between client and therapist may reflect patterns which are present in relationships in the clients life outside of therapy.

Short -term therapy that assumes you have been able to overcome difficult situations in the past and therefore have the capacity to overcome or solve your current situation or problems. In therapy sessions, these problems are only discussed to the degree necessary to achieve the desired outcome. This is very much a client-centered approach to therapy that keeps the conversation focussed on what the client can do in order to make the desired changes.

John Kabat Zinn, a prominent and internationally respected teacher of mindfulness defines mindfulness as “Awareness that arises through paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgementally,”

One of the factors that increases the suffering and intensity of negative emotions is our tendency to push away or numb out and distract from them. Mindfulness teaches us to change our relationship with these painful feelings by simply noticing, embracing and allowing them to occur naturally. When we do, the often unexpected discovery is that these feelings are not as bad as we thought and they loose their power over us.

The other aspect that fuels the fire of negative emotions is our judgement towards them. We might think “I should not be angry right now” so we get angry at our anger. Or we get anxious about our anxiety. When we reduce our judgement towards our emotions and meet them with curiosity we can experience alot less suffering.

Something that causes so much unnecessary suffering in our life is self judgement criticism. We judge ourselves so much more harshly than we would ever do a friend, child, family member or loved one. The reason is that we have a false belief that doing so will somehow shape our behavior in desired ways- we will do better next time. People think that if they don’t beat themselves up for making a “stupid” mistake or for poor performance, they will repeat it all over again. The reality is, the opposite is true. If we are more kind and compassionate with ourselves, we will try harder, take more risks and even perform better than if we are extremely critical of ourselves. Not to mention we will suffer so much less, reduce anxiety and depression and live happier, more fulfilling lives. Self compassion has also been shown to increase our capacity to make desired changes in our lives.

Kristin Neff, the author of Self-Compassion and prominent researcher and writer on the topic asks her patient when they are suffering “What am I noticing? What am I feeling? What am I needing? Is there something I can ask of myself or someone else?”

In therapy, I often guide patients through self compassion exercises or meditations.

DBT is a highly structured form of therapy that incorporates the teaching of 4 modules: Mindfulness, Interpersonal Effectiveness, Emotion Regulation and Distress Tolerance. Mindfulness is integrated into all of the modules. DBT teaches a specific skills to use in response to any given situation, intense emotion, specific thoughts or social or relationship interaction. DBT gives people a wide selection of effective tools to use for many different situations.

Just as our family is made up of separate members who play roles which affect the whole, we each have parts with their own impulses, hopes and desires. Some parts play the role of protecting more vulnerable or wounded parts (exiles) from ever experiencing that pain again. IFS works with protector parts to allow space for healing exiles from these burdens. This allows parts the freedom to take on roles which support a more integrated system.