What is Integrative Counselling?
Counsellors who have undertaken an integrative training are trained to listen in a particular way, which research shows can be helpful in supporting people to address issues that are affecting them relating to feelings, behaviours, thoughts and emotions. Integrative counsellors will have studied a range of different theories which offer explanations about what causes distress and how it can be addressed. They generally aim to work with the whole person and will be interested in thoughts, feelings, emotions, spirituality and the context in which people live.
What Can Integrative Counselling Help with?
Many of our counsellors are integrative relational counsellors and work with people looking at their childhood relationships and how their childhood experiences impact on their current relationships and situation. They aim to support people to make links between these areas and then to find ways of making changes. The aim is often to be more flexible in relationships/situations and to address issues such as:
Of course, the relationship between the counsellor and the client is another relationship which can be looked. This creates a safe place to explore and gain self-awareness, compassion and understanding.
What is psychodynamic psychotherapy?
Psychodynamic psychotherapy recognises that problems and distress in the present may have originated in early life experiences. Understanding this can provide the first step towards changes in perception, awareness and relationships. Psychodynamic therapy provides a safe place to explore past and present feelings and the connections between past and current relationships.
The relationship with the therapist is an important element in this kind of therapy. The therapist offers a confidential and private setting which facilitates a process where patterns of the patient's inner world become reflected in the patient's relationship with the therapist. This process helps patients gradually to identify these patterns and, in becoming conscious of them, to develop the capacity to understand and change them.
What can Psychodynamic Therapy help with?
Psychodynamic therapy can be particularly helpful when experiencing deeper seated problems such as:
Some people embark on a course of psychotherapy in order simply to learn more about themselves and how the operate. Psychodynamic psychotherapy can have many benefits including increased self-awareness, greater confidence, better relationships and a greater ability to manage stress. Sometimes the treatment might be of short duration but generally speaking psychodynamic psychotherapy is best considered as an open ended treatment.
Psychodynamic Psychotherapy Evidence Base Psychodynamic psychotherapy has a strong and expanding evidence base. There now exists a large number of outcome studies which have alternately examined the efficacy of short-term and long-term psychodynamic psychotherapy and the efficacy of psychodynamic psychotherapy for specific conditions. Of particular note is the consistent finding from this research of significantly increased long-term follow up effect sizes: patients continue to make considerable gains long after treatment has ended.
What is Gestalt Therapy?
Gestalt is a German word meaning the whole and the sum of all the parts.
As an approach, Gestalt therapy draws on the belief that people have a natural tendency towards health, but old patterns of behaviour and fixed ideas can create blocks, interrupting the natural cycle of wellness, therefore affecting communication with others.
Gestalt therapy addresses what is happening in the moment, raising awareness of an individual’s experiences of their responses with others. The belief is that to be fully present in the here-and-now creates the potential for more excitement, energy, and the courage to live life directly. While Gestalt Therapy focuses on current experience, the past is not neglected. Gestalt Therapy pays attention to the past insofar as it is part of lived-experience, either by limiting or supporting the present.
In their work, Gestalt therapists draw on the idea that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, by valuing every aspect of a client: body, mind and soul. A Gestalt therapist works by exploring your thoughts, feelings, and behaviour to help you gain clarity around your experience. They believe our bodies hold messages that when listened to can begin to loosen old patterns, so as to help us become more present and live more fully.
Gestalt Therapy is a collaborative process where the therapist is an active partner in a dialogue, offering both support and gentle challenge. If it seems useful, the counsellor will offer their own feelings, thoughts, and reactions as they emerge in the service of the work. They also work with dreams, metaphor and images, and relate this to a person’s felt experience.
Gestalt therefore places great emphasis on the quality of the relationship between therapist and client, as this is the key to therapy’s effectiveness.
What Can Gestalt Therapy help with?
Gestalt counselling is a holistic and unifying approach, which can bring about increased self-awareness, improved self-acceptance and better contact with yourself and others. As well as offering recovery from symptoms of distress such as depression and anxiety, Gestalt is an important means to all round psychological health and personal development.
What is CBT?
Cognitive behavioural therapies, or CBT, are a range of talking therapies based on the theory that thoughts, feelings, what we do and how our body feels are all connected. If we change one of these we can alter the others.
When people feel worried or distressed we often fall into patterns of thinking and responding which can worsen how we feel. CBT works to help us notice and change problematic thinking styles or behaviour patterns so we can feel better. CBT has lots of strategies that can help you in the here and now.
Evidence Base
CBT has a good evidence base for a wide range of mental health problems in adults, older adults, children and young people. This research has been carefully reviewed by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), who provide independent, evidence-based guidance for the NHS on the most effective ways to treat disease and ill health.
What can CBT help with?
NICE recommends CBT in the treatment of the following conditions:
There is also good evidence that CBT is helpful in treating many other conditions, including:
CBT can be used if you are on medication which has been prescribed by your GP. You can also use CBT on its own. This will depend on the difficulty you want help with.
How CBT is delivered?
CBT can be offered in individual sessions with a therapist or as part of a group. The number of sessions you need depends on the difficulty you need help with. This will usually be between six and twenty sessions, typically of an hour long.
Your therapist can help you to notice any patterns in thinking or behaviours which might be keeping problems going and can offer information about different CBT techniques which could help you.
What is EMDR?
EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing. It is a therapy used to help people recover from distressing events and the problems they have caused, like flashbacks, upsetting thoughts or images, depression or anxiety.
EMDR is recognised by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) as a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and the World Health Organisation (WHO), which also recognises it as an effective treatment for children.
When a person is involved in a traumatic event, they may feel overwhelmed and their brain may be unable to fully process what is going on. The memory of the event seems to become “stuck” so that it remains very intense and vivid. The person can re-experience what they saw, heard and smelt and the full force of the distress they felt whenever the memory comes to mind.
How does EMDR work?
EMDR aims to help the brain “unstick” and reprocess the memory properly so that it is no longer so intense. It also helps to desensitise the person to the emotional impact of the memory, so that they can think about the event without experiencing such strong feelings.
It does this by asking the person to recall the traumatic event while they also move their eyes from side-to-side, hear a sound in each ear alternately, or feel a tap on each hand alternately. These side-to-side sensations seem to effectively stimulate the “stuck” processing system in the brain so that it can reprocess the information more like an ordinary memory, reducing its intensity.
The effect may be similar to what occurs naturally during REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep, when your eyes move rapidly from side to side as the brain processes the events of the day.
Some research suggests that EMDR is effective because concentrating on another task whilst processing a distressing memory gives the brain more work to do*. When the brain is not giving its full attention to processing the memory, it starts to become less vivid. This allows the person to distance themselves from it and begin to remember the event in a more helpful and manageable way.
What can EMDR help with?
When a person’s mental health problems have their roots in a distressing life event, EMDR can be very effective very quickly. Studies have shown that EMDR can significantly decrease PTSD symptoms in just two or three sessions, and that the effect is long lasting People who have experienced several traumatic events, neglect or poor treatment as children usually need more sessions than this.
EMDR is best known for its effectiveness in treating post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). It is widely used by the NHS, charitable organisations and private sector, and the Ministry of Defence use EMDR to help service personnel with PTSD. EMDR can also be used to help treat a variety of mental health problems like depression or anxiety, especially where a difficult life event has been involved. EMDR can be useful for people who have witnessed or experienced an event like a car accident, a violent crime, sexual or emotional abuse, bullying, a social humiliation or the sudden loss of a loved one, and are struggling to recover.
EMDR is suitable for adults, young people and children. Younger children can find it difficult to fully engage with some types of talking therapies, so EMDR can be an effective, simpler alternative. See our page about EMDR and children to find out more.