Individual Psychological Therapy for Adults

CBT is a type of psychotherapy that focuses on how someone’s thoughts, attitudes, and beliefs may affect their actions and feelings. This type of therapy focuses on challenging and changing cognitive distortions (such as thoughts, beliefs, and attitudes) and their associated behaviours to improve emotional regulation and developing personal coping strategies that target solving current problems.

Therapy sessions focus on exploring and developing methods to deal with challenges and behaviours that arise from day-to-day life. The therapist's role is to assist the client in finding and practicing effective strategies to address the identified goals and to alleviate symptoms.

ACT is an action-oriented approach to psychotherapy that stems from traditional behaviour therapy and cognitive behavioural therapy.

Clients learn to stop avoiding, denying, and struggling with their inner emotions and, instead, accept that these deeper feelings are appropriate responses to certain situations that should not prevent them from moving forward in their lives. With this understanding, clients begin to accept their hardships and commit to making necessary changes in their behaviour, regardless of what is going on in their lives and how they feel about it.

Schema Therapy can help individuals identify the thought and behaviour patterns underlying and perpetuating mental health conditions. Schema therapy is built on a model of core emotional needs and the negative impact on a human being when our core needs are unmet. When emotional needs (one’s basic needs for affection, guidance, love, shelter, and safety) go unmet in childhood, individuals may enter adulthood with deficits in their abilities to find ways for these needs to be met, independently and through healthy relationships with others.

Schema therapy is based on the belief that early maladaptive schemas form based on these adverse childhood experiences. These maladaptive schemas, which can be described as ways individuals interpret life events and the behaviour of others, can later disrupt life: Individuals may make unhealthy choices, form toxic relationships, lack fully developed social skills, engage in destructive behavior patterns, have a poor sense of judgment, and experience feelings of worthlessness or self-doubt.

Identifying and modifying maladaptive schemas is central to schema therapy. Discovering the origins of one’s unmet emotional needs and learning to construct nurturing relationships through schema therapy can help people begin to build feelings of self-worth and adequacy. 

CPT is a cognitive-behavioural treatment for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) which was developed in the late 1980s.  It has been shown to be effective in reducing PTSD symptoms related to a variety of traumatic events. CPT recognises that it is normal for people to have psychological reactions to traumatic events, over time these reactions generally resolve without intervention.  In the CPT model, PTSD occurs when something gets in the way of the natural recovery after trauma.

Often it is a person’s beliefs about why the traumatic event happened that causes them difficulties.  These beliefs cause people to feel strong emotions, which then tends to lead to avoidance (of anything associated with the trauma) and then prevents clear thinking about the trauma. CPT focuses upon how the person’s understanding of the traumatic event and their experiences in the aftermath. CPT is aimed at helping the individual develop more helpful and balanced beliefs about the trauma.