Therapy Types & Modalities
Therapy is not one-size-fits-all. Different approaches focus on different aspects of healing — thoughts, emotions, behavior, relationships, meaning, or the connection between mind and body.
The sections below offer a simple overview of some of the most common therapy approaches. Many therapists use a combination of methods depending on your needs, goals, and lived experiences.
Psychodynamic Therapy
Explores how early experiences, emotional patterns, and unconscious processes may influence the present.
+
×
A form of talk therapy, originating from the work of Sigmund Freud, that explores the connection between your past experiences and your current mindset. It focuses on understanding how subconscious thoughts, feelings, and memories may affect present-day behavior. With greater insight and self-awareness, you may develop healthier coping strategies and move toward deeper emotional growth.
- 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 and developmental history
- Focus on interpersonal relationships
- Focus on the therapeutic relationship, including transference
- Exploration of wishes and fantasies
Behavioral & Cognitive Therapies
Practical, skills-based approaches that help identify and change patterns contributing to distress.
+
×
These approaches aim to identify and change self-defeating or unhealthy thoughts and behaviors. The goal is to reduce maladaptive patterns, strengthen coping skills, and support healthier, more adaptive ways of responding.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
A structured, present-focused therapy that helps you identify and change thought and behavior patterns that are harmful, inaccurate, or ineffective, replacing them with more balanced and useful ones.
Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT)
Helps you identify self-defeating beliefs, challenge irrational thinking, and replace it with healthier, more constructive perspectives. REBT often uses the ABCDE model:
- Activating Event – The external event that activates how you feel or think
- Belief – Your automatic beliefs about the event, yourself, or other people
- Consequence – Your emotional or behavioral response
- Dispute – Questioning or challenging those beliefs
- Effective New Belief / Behavior – Replacing irrational beliefs with healthier ones and changing behavior accordingly
Solution-Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT)
A short-term, future-focused approach that helps you formulate, motivate, achieve, and sustain meaningful changes by building solutions rather than remaining centered on problems. It supports concrete next steps and practical hope.
Exposure Therapy
Developed to help you confront fears and decrease avoidance by gradually or strategically facing objects, activities, sensations, or situations that trigger anxiety or panic.
- In vivo exposure – Directly facing the fear in real life
- Imaginal exposure – Imagining the feared object or situation
- Virtual reality exposure therapy – Using VR technology to simulate feared situations
- Interoceptive exposure – Bringing up harmless physical sensations that are feared
- Graded exposure – Starting with milder fears and gradually progressing to more difficult ones
- Flooding – Exposure begins with the most intense fear stimulus rather than building gradually
- Systematic desensitization – Exposure is combined with relaxation techniques to make symptoms feel more manageable
Humanistic Therapy
Focuses on the whole person, emphasizing growth, self-awareness, meaning, and your capacity for healing.
+
×
Humanistic approaches focus on you as a whole person, honoring your uniqueness, strengths, and potential. These therapies emphasize self-awareness, autonomy, growth, and the ability to make meaningful choices that support healing and fulfillment.
Person-Centered Therapy
The therapist takes a non-directive stance, allowing you to play an active and collaborative role in the therapy process. In turn, the therapist offers empathy, genuineness, and unconditional positive regard, creating a supportive and balanced therapeutic partnership.
Existential Therapy
Encourages self-awareness, deeper understanding of your worldview, and choices that align with what matters most to you. It can help you explore meaning, freedom, responsibility, loss, isolation, and purpose.
Gestalt Therapy
Encourages present-moment awareness and helps you focus on your current experiences and emotions, rather than relying only on past interpretation. Self-awareness and self-acceptance are central to healing and growth in this approach.
Narrative Therapy
Helps you explore your personal stories, values, strengths, and lived experiences so you can gain perspective, reshape meaning, and reclaim authorship of your life moving forward.
Motivational Interviewing
Through collaborative conversation, the therapist helps you explore your goals, ambivalence, readiness for change, and motivation in a way that supports autonomy, compassion, and personal choice.
Mindfulness-Based Therapies
Use present-moment awareness and acceptance to reduce reactivity and strengthen emotional regulation.
+
×
These approaches use awareness practices to help you relate to daily stressors, emotions, and internal experiences in a more grounded, nonjudgmental, and less reactive way. A core element is learning to make space for difficult experiences instead of avoiding, suppressing, or denying them.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
Encourages you to stay grounded in the present moment, accept thoughts and feelings without harsh judgment, and move toward healing by aligning your actions with your values. Rather than treating difficult inner experiences as something to eliminate, ACT helps change your relationship to them.
- Acceptance – Making room for difficult internal experiences rather than struggling against them
- Cognitive Defusion – Changing how you relate to thoughts so they hold less power over behavior
- Being Present – Practicing ongoing, nonjudgmental awareness of what is happening now
- Self as Context – The observing self that notices inner and outer experience
- Values – Guiding principles that shape decisions and behavior
- Committed Action – Taking increasingly effective actions aligned with chosen values
Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT)
DBT emphasizes balancing acceptance and change. It helps people better understand difficult emotions, regulate intense feelings, improve relationships, and strengthen mindfulness and coping skills.
- Mindfulness – Observing, describing, and participating in the present moment nonjudgmentally
- Emotion Regulation – Learning how emotions work and how to respond more effectively to them
- Distress Tolerance – Building self-soothing and coping strategies for overwhelming moments
- Interpersonal Effectiveness – Strengthening boundaries, communication, self-respect, and relationship skills
Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR)
A multifaceted approach that guides you through mindfulness meditation, gentle movement, and mind-body awareness practices that can help reduce stress, emotional distress, and automatic reactivity.
Somatic / Body-Based Therapies
Focus on body awareness, nervous system regulation, and the connection between physical sensation and emotional experience.
+
×
Somatic therapies focus on the relationship between the mind and body. They help you develop awareness of physical sensations, build safety in the body, and work with stored stress, overwhelm, or trauma-related activation in a gradual and regulated way.
Somatic Experiencing (SE)
A body-based trauma therapy designed to help resolve stress and trauma responses through bottom-up processing. It supports greater awareness, nervous system coherence, and self-regulation.
- Grounding – Anchoring yourself to the present moment
- Resourcing – Attuning to sensations of safety, support, or “okayness”
- Pendulation – Moving gently between more activated and more resourced states
- Titration – Working through trauma slowly and in manageable pieces rather than all at once
Sensorimotor Psychotherapy
Combines body awareness with emotional and cognitive processing to help regulate the nervous system and heal trauma. It often unfolds in three broad stages:
- Stabilization and symptom reduction – Includes regulation of attention, emotion, and behavior
- Working with traumatic memory – May include completing or regulating defensive responses that were interrupted
- Reintegration – Explores attachment patterns, relational habits, and the restoration of fuller functioning
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)
Uses bilateral stimulation — such as guided eye movements, tones, or taps — to help process distressing memories in a way that reduces emotional intensity and supports healing. EMDR is typically described as an eight-phase process:
- History Taking – The therapist assesses readiness and identifies treatment targets
- Preparation – The therapist explains the process, builds safety, and teaches calming skills
- Assessment – Images, beliefs, feelings, and body sensations connected to the target are identified
- Desensitization – Bilateral stimulation begins while focusing on the target memory
- Installation – A positive belief is strengthened and linked to the memory
- Body Scan – The body is checked for lingering distress and reprocessing continues if needed
- Closure – The session is brought to a safe close and between-session coping is reviewed
- Reevaluation – Progress is reviewed in future sessions
Biofeedback
A technique that allows you to monitor and influence certain bodily functions, such as heart rate, breathing, or skin temperature. During a session, sensors track these internal rhythms and provide real-time feedback, helping you build awareness and practice regulation skills under the therapist’s guidance.
Neurofeedback
A non-invasive approach that uses real-time feedback to help the brain learn healthier patterns of activity. Over time, this may support improved regulation, attention, emotional stability, and overall brain functioning through the brain’s natural capacity for change, known as neuroplasticity.
Brainspotting
Brainspotting is designed to help access, process, and release trauma, difficult emotions, and even psychologically related physical pain through eye position, nervous system attunement, and body awareness.
- Focus on Eye Position – Identifying “brainspots” linked to emotional or psychological distress
- Dual Attunement – The therapist tracks both the relational process and the brain-body response
- Somatic and Sensory Processing – Attention is brought to bodily sensations and shifts that emerge during processing
- Resource Spotting – Identifying visual positions linked to calm, strength, resilience, or empowerment
Integrative Therapy
Combines different therapeutic methods to support healing in a more flexible, individualized way.
+
×
Integrative therapy brings together different approaches to fit the person rather than forcing the person into one model. Depending on the therapist, this may include parts work, creativity, body-based methods, relational work, or other blended strategies.
Internal Family Systems Therapy (IFS)
IFS helps you explore the different “parts” of your inner world while strengthening connection to your core Self. Through a compassionate, structured process, it aims to reduce the burden of wounded or extreme parts and create more inner harmony.
- Find – Turn inward and notice sensations or emotions connected to a part
- Focus – Bring your attention to that part
- Flesh Out – Notice more about the part, such as its emotions, age, image, or qualities
- Feel Toward – Explore how you feel toward that part
- Befriend – Begin relating to the part with curiosity and compassion
- Fear – Discover what the part is afraid might happen without its role
The ultimate goal is to help wounded or extreme parts unburden and to strengthen an internal system led by the Self.
Expressive Arts Therapy
A multimodal therapy that may include writing, music, dance, movement, drama, painting, or other creative forms. With the support of a qualified therapist, you explore feelings, reactions, and insight through the process of expression rather than words alone.
