Therapy Types & Modalities
PSYCHODYNAMIC:
A form of talk therapy, originating from the works of Sigmund Freud, that explores the connection between your past experiences and your current mindset. It’s mainly focused on learning how your subconscious thoughts, feelings, and memories are affecting your current behavior. With this deepened insight and self-awareness, you can develop healthy coping techniques and achieve therapeutic goals, resulting in a greater sense of emotional maturity. Key features of this therapeutic approach include:
- Focus on affect and expression of emotion
- Exploring attempts to avoid distressing thoughts and feelings (defense and resistance)
- Identifying recurring themes and patterns
- Discussion of past experience (developmental process)
- Focus on interpersonal relations
- Focus on the therapeutic relationship (including transference)
- Exploration of wishes and fantasies
BEHAVIORAL
This form of therapy aims to identify and change self-destructive or unhealthy behaviors. The goal is to eliminate maladaptive, self-defeating patterns and replace them with healthy, adaptive behaviors.
Some types of behavioral therapy are:
- Cognitive Behavior Therapy
- CBT is time-sensitive, structured, and present-oriented, helping you to identify and change thinking and behavior patterns that are harmful or ineffective, replacing them with more accurate and beneficial ones.
- Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT)
- Helps you to identify self-defeating thoughts and feelings, challenge the nature of irrational and unproductive feelings, and replace them with positive and healthier beliefs by using the ABCDE model:
- Activating event: The external event that activates how you feel or think
- Belief: Your automatic beliefs about the event, yourself, other people
- Consequence: Your emotional or behavioral responses
- Dispute: When you dispute or question these beliefs
- Effective behavior: When you have resisted irrational beliefs and have changed your behavior
- Helps you to identify self-defeating thoughts and feelings, challenge the nature of irrational and unproductive feelings, and replace them with positive and healthier beliefs by using the ABCDE model:
- Solutions Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT)
- This is a short-term approach that helps you formulate, motivate, achieve, and sustain desired behavioral changes by constructing solutions rather than dwelling on problems. It’s a future-focused strategy that empowers you to take concrete steps towards your goals.
- Exposure Therapy
- Developed to help you confront your fears and decrease avoidance by overcoming objects, activities, or situations that cause panic and anxiety. Different variations and paces can include:
- In vivo exposure – directly facing the fear in real life
- Imaginal exposure – imagining the feared object or activity
- Virtual reality exposure therapy – VR technology is used to stimulate your fear
- Interoceptive exposure- bringing up harmless physical sensations that are feared
- Graded exposure – exposed to mildly difficult fears and then progresses to harder ones
- Flooding – starts with the most challenging fears and then progresses to mild ones
- Systematic desensitization – exposure is combined with a relaxation technique to make symptoms feel more manageable
- Developed to help you confront your fears and decrease avoidance by overcoming objects, activities, or situations that cause panic and anxiety. Different variations and paces can include:
HUMANISTIC
This therapeutic approach focuses on you as a whole person, considering your unique nature, positive qualities, and potential for growth. It emphasizes your capacity for rational decision-making and your ability to draw upon your own instincts to cultivate wisdom, healing, and fulfillment.
- Person-centered
- The therapist adopts a non-directive stance, allowing you to take an active, collaborative role in the therapy process. In turn, the therapist responds with empathy and unconditional positive regard, creating a balanced partnership.
- Existential
- Empowers you to gain self-awareness, understand your worldview, and make choices aligned with that newfound insight. It also encourages you to exercise your free will, cultivating meaning and purpose in your life, even when grappling with feelings of loss, hopelessness, or alienation.
- Gestalt
- Encourages you to focus on the present moment, helping you understand your current experiences and emotions, rather than making assumptions based on past experiences. Self-awareness and self-acceptance are keys to personal growth based on this approach.
- Narrative
- Empowers you to identify your values, skills, and inner strengths by exploring your personal narratives and experiences, thereby helping you gain perspective, reshape your story, and reclaim the role of author in your own life – enabling you to clearly define what you want moving forward.
- Motivational Interviewing
- Through collaborative conversations, the therapist guides you in exploring your objectives, next steps, and motivations for change, all while fostering an atmosphere of acceptance and compassion focused on the your personal goals.
MINDFULNESS BASED
This therapeutic approach employs numerous awareness exercises to help you cultivate present-moment focus and learn to experience daily situations and stressors in a nonjudgmental, non-reactive manner, aiming to enhance self-awareness and reduce automatic responses. A core tenet of mindfulness is acceptance of negative internal experiences, rather than avoidance, suppression, or denial.
- Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
- Encourages you to stay grounded in the present moment, accepting your thoughts and feelings without judgment and helps you move forward by channeling your energy into healing, rather than dwelling on negative emotions. The goal is to transform how you relate to your difficult thoughts and feelings – no longer seeing them as “symptoms”, but rather as transient and harmless psychological experiences, even when they’re uncomfortable. It accomplishes this by its six core processes:
- Acceptance – Instead of avoiding difficult experiences, this involves actively and mindfully accepting the private events shaped by your past, without unnecessary efforts to alter their frequency or nature – particularly when such changes could lead to psychological harm.
- Cognitive Diffusion – Aims to alter how you engage with your thoughts by establishing contexts that diminish their unhelpful functions.
- Being Present – Promotes ongoing, non-judgmental awareness of psychological and environmental experiences as they unfold, with the aim to help you engage with the world more directly, enabling increased flexible behavior that aligns with your personal values.
- Self as Context – The aspect of a human being that does all the noticing (the “observing self”) of one’s inner and outer world.
- Values – Guiding principles that shape your decisions and behaviors. They are not goals, in the sense that you can never “accomplish” a value, because they aren’t things to be achieved or completed.
- Committed Action – Encourages the development of increasingly effective actions aligned with chosen values.
- Encourages you to stay grounded in the present moment, accepting your thoughts and feelings without judgment and helps you move forward by channeling your energy into healing, rather than dwelling on negative emotions. The goal is to transform how you relate to your difficult thoughts and feelings – no longer seeing them as “symptoms”, but rather as transient and harmless psychological experiences, even when they’re uncomfortable. It accomplishes this by its six core processes:
- Dialectal Behavior Therapy (DBT)
- This approach emphasizes finding the right balance between acceptance and change, with the goal being to gain insight into difficult emotions, learn strategies for regulating intense feelings, enhance interpersonal relationships, and cultivate mindfulness – all of which can lead to greater overall well-being. DBT does this by teaching these main principles:
- Mindfulness – The act of observing, describing, and participating in the moment, as well as doing it non-judgmentally.
- Emotional Regulation – Helps reduce the frequency and impact of unpleasant emotions and overall emotional distress. This involves: 1) understanding the purpose and function of emotions, including the specific action tendencies they trigger, and 2) learning when to act on or resist those emotional impulses.
- Distress tolerance – Teaches you self-soothing skills by utilizing distraction techniques, engaging with your senses, and focusing on radical acceptance, among others.
- Interpersonal effectiveness – Involves setting healthy boundaries, expressing yourself clearly and respectfully, negotiating and compromising with others, understanding your needs and wants, and building self-respect.
- This approach emphasizes finding the right balance between acceptance and change, with the goal being to gain insight into difficult emotions, learn strategies for regulating intense feelings, enhance interpersonal relationships, and cultivate mindfulness – all of which can lead to greater overall well-being. DBT does this by teaching these main principles:
- Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR)
- A multifaceted approach where the therapist guides you through the practice of mindfulness meditation – a proven method for reducing stress and emotional distress. By exploring the mind-body connection through meditation, dialogue, and gentle movement, you learn to access your inner resources for coping, personal growth, and healing.
SOMATIC
This form of therapy focuses on the connection between the mind and body, helping you develop an awareness of your physical sensations. It teaches you to feel safe in your body as you recall thoughts, experiences, and emotions, while also providing a means to release pent-up feelings.
- Somatic Experiencing (SE)
- This therapeutic approach aims to treat trauma and stress-related disorders by modifying the trauma-induced stress response through bottom-up processing. It helps you develop greater awareness, coherence, and self-regulation, fostering a deeper mind-body connection that enables you to better release and regulate your emotions. It accomplishes this by utilizing these main techniques:
- Grounding – A skill that helps you center and anchor yourself to the present moment.
- Resourcing – The practice of inviting your mind/body to attune to even the smallest sensations of safety or goodness. By attending to a felt sense of “okayness,” you begin teaching your nervous system that it can move from stress to a state of calm.
- Pendulation – This process introduces “resourced” states into your awareness, helping you develop confidence in your nervous system’s capacity to transition between opposing states. By practicing this back-and-forth movement between more and less resourced states, you can cultivate greater resilience and adaptability.
- Titration – The process of deliberately slowing down to work through trauma gradually. This is important because trauma often involves being overwhelmed by “too much, too fast, too soon.” This is countered by working through small and manageable increments of challenging material at a time, pausing to notice bodily sensations related to what is being discussed and move towards completing protective responses that were not previously able to be fully expressed.
- This therapeutic approach aims to treat trauma and stress-related disorders by modifying the trauma-induced stress response through bottom-up processing. It helps you develop greater awareness, coherence, and self-regulation, fostering a deeper mind-body connection that enables you to better release and regulate your emotions. It accomplishes this by utilizing these main techniques:
- Sensorimotor Psychotherapy
- This therapeutic approach combines physical awareness with the processing of thoughts and emotions related to difficult or traumatic experiences. The therapist guides the client to notice bodily sensations and uses techniques to regulate and calm the body, laying the groundwork for healing from past traumas. There are three main stages:
- Stabilization and symptom reduction – includes regulation of attention, behavior, and emotion
- Working with and reprocessing traumatic memory – includes completing or regulating instinctive defensive responses
- Re-integration – examines how attachment styles and relational failures influence proximity-seeking behaviors and other actions that support overall life success
- This therapeutic approach combines physical awareness with the processing of thoughts and emotions related to difficult or traumatic experiences. The therapist guides the client to notice bodily sensations and uses techniques to regulate and calm the body, laying the groundwork for healing from past traumas. There are three main stages:
- Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)
- Utilizes a body-focused technique called bilateral stimulation, in which the therapist guides you through eye movements, tones, or taps. This is an eight phase process that helps access and relocate memories that have been improperly stored to a more functional area of the brain, thereby reducing the intense emotional charge of past experiences, and in turn, facilitates emotional healing.
- History taking – The therapist assesses your readiness and develops a treatment plan. You and the therapist identify possible targets for EMDR processing (these include distressing memories and current situations that cause emotional distress.)
- Client preparation – The therapist explains the therapy process, terms, and sets expectations. Any concerns and questions you have are addressed and a safe therapeutic alliance between you and the therapist is developed. The therapist, then, teaches you a variety of imagery and stress reduction techniques to ensure you are adequately able to handle emotional distress during and between sessions.
- Assessment – The event to reprocess is identified, along with images, beliefs, feelings, and sensations about the event.
- Desensitization – Side to side eye movements, sounds, or taps are begun while focusing on the traumatic event, and continue until your distress reduces to zero (or 1 if appropriate). During this time, new thoughts, sensations, images, and feelings may emerge.
- Installation – You associate and strengthen a positive belief with the event until it feels completely true.
- Body scan – You are asked to hold in mind the event and the positive belief while scanning your body from head to toe. Any lingering disturbance from the body is reprocessed.
- Closure – The therapist asks you to keep a log during the week, which should document any related material that may arise. It also serves to remind you of the self-calming activities that you learned in phase two.
- Examination – Consists of examining the progress made thus far.
- Utilizes a body-focused technique called bilateral stimulation, in which the therapist guides you through eye movements, tones, or taps. This is an eight phase process that helps access and relocate memories that have been improperly stored to a more functional area of the brain, thereby reducing the intense emotional charge of past experiences, and in turn, facilitates emotional healing.
- Biofeedback
- A technique that allows you to monitor and regulate your involuntary bodily functions, such as heart rate and skin temperature. During a biofeedback session, sensors connected to your body track these internal rhythms and provide real-time feedback. This heightened awareness helps you develop greater body awareness, and enables you – under the therapists’s guidance – to learn and practice relaxation techniques that influence the body’s autonomous responses.
- Neurofeedback
- A non-invasive treatment that helps harmonize brain waves, encouraging the brain to develop healthier patterns of activity. During sessions, the brain “learns” to bring abnormal fast or slow waves into the normal range. The ultimate goal is to change how you think and feel by altering brain function at a biological level. This is possible thanks to the brain’s natural ability to change and adapt, known as neuroplasticity – a process that neurofeedback is known to facilitate.
- Brainspotting
- BSP is designed to help you access, process, and overcome trauma, negative emotions, and pain, including psychologically induced physical pain. It accomplishes this by utilizing these key features:
- Focus on Eye Position – The therapist helps you identify specific “brainspots” – eye positions linked to areas of emotional or psychological distress.
- Dual Attention – The therapist remains connected to the therapeutic relationship (exploring the reasons behind your emotional distress) as well as identifying the brain-body response through using the visual field.
- Somatic and Sensory Processing – The therapist will encourage you to tune into bodily sensations related to the activating issue and to track any shifts or changes in those sensations as their processing occurs.
- Resource Spotting – The therapist guides you in identifying areas in your visual field that evoke positive emotions like peace, strength, resilience, and empowerment. This process mirrors the way therapists locate brainspots linked to difficult feelings or memories, but the focus shifts instead to visual areas associated with uplifting emotions rather than challenging ones.
- BSP is designed to help you access, process, and overcome trauma, negative emotions, and pain, including psychologically induced physical pain. It accomplishes this by utilizing these key features:
INTEGRATIVE THERAPY
- Internal Family Systems Therapy (IFS)
- The process guides you in exploring the different sub-personalities or “parts” of your mind, helping you acquire self-awareness and a stronger connection to your true self. Through a six-step collaborative process, you’ll come to understand, engage with, and reduce the influence of destructive mental patterns, ultimately empowering you to cultivate greater inner peace and lead a more self-directed life.
- Find – You will be asked to turn your attention inward and pay attention to the sensations in your body that come up to identify a part to work with.
- Focus – You will then be asked to turn your focus to this part.
- Flesh Out – After identifying and concentrating on a specific part, it’s time to flesh it out. Consider what emotions it evokes, whether it has a distinct color, and if it represents you at a particular age.
- Feel Toward – How do you feel about this part? This will give your therapist an idea of how big or small of a role this part is playing in your life.
- Befriend – This requires acknowledging the part’s presence in your life. Since it involves a degree of acceptance of the part’s existence, it might be one of the hardest steps.
- Fear – In the process of befriending, you will discover what the fears are of that part of you. What are they afraid will happen without their presence in your life?
- The ultimate goal of IFS is to unburden or restore extreme and wounded parts and establish a trusted, healthy, harmonious internal system that is coordinated by the Self.
- The process guides you in exploring the different sub-personalities or “parts” of your mind, helping you acquire self-awareness and a stronger connection to your true self. Through a six-step collaborative process, you’ll come to understand, engage with, and reduce the influence of destructive mental patterns, ultimately empowering you to cultivate greater inner peace and lead a more self-directed life.
- Expressive Arts Therapy
- A multimodal approach that may incorporate writing, drama, dance, movement, painting, and/or music. During this therapy, you are encouraged by a qualified therapist to explore your responses, reactions, and insights through pictures, sounds, explorations, and encounters with art processes.
- Note: A person is not required to have artistic ability to use or benefit from expressive arts therapy.