Therapy

People decide to seek therapy for all kinds of reasons. Some people have a specific problem like panic or depression they want to address while others may feel lost and unsure what is wrong. Like others you may have tried to solve the problem with only limited or partial success. It is not easy sometimes acknowledging that you can’t solve the problem yourself, but two minds are often better than one when it comes to overcoming problems.

What approaches do we use?

This depends on what your needs and preferences are, and the best ways of meeting them. Sometimes it makes sense to use one model of therapy to address problems while at other times to draw on several. We most frequently work with people using Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy, Cognitive-Analytic Therapy or Schema Therapy. At regular intervals during therapy we will ask for your feedback on how useful you are finding therapy, and we also use brief questionnaires to help us understand how well therapy is working for you. This allows us to make any changes we need while we work together to keep your therapy on track.

What is Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT)?

The end of a valued relationship can be disappointing and upsetting, but if you concluded that you were a failure and believed that you would not find another relationship then it might mean that natural sadness turns into depression and hopelessness. The idea behind Cognitive Behavioural Therapy is that your thinking influences the way you feel and act. We all have our own ways of understanding events around us, and the meaning we give to them can in some situations lead to problems such as anxiety, depression or low self-esteem.

CBT is collaborative and we would work together to understand the ways you think, identify unhelpful thinking styles that lead to mood problems, and promote more balanced ways of seeing things. CBT is a therapy that needs your active participation and it can give you the skills and strategies to overcome your problems and cope more effectively with any future problems that arise. An important part of CBT is working on tasks between sessions agreed between us.

CBT has been shown to be effective for a wide variety of problems. The length of therapy will depend on your circumstances but CBT usually lasts for between 8-16 sessions.

What is Cognitive Analytic Therapy (CAT)?

If you frequently ask yourself “Why do I always feel this way?” and can’t find an answer, or find you keep having the same problems in your relationships, or feel that you constantly struggle with issues of self-control around sex, food, or drugs then CAT may well be worth considering.

CAT is different from CBT because it involves a deeper exploration of your relationships and experiences during childhood and adolescence as a way of understanding why things go wrong for you now. These understandings are then used to find solutions to unhelpful or self-defeating patterns and enable you to move forward in your life. As in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, therapist and client work collaboratively to provide the tools to help you find solutions during therapy and beyond. Most importantly, it can help you break a cycle of despair when it feels as if however hard you try to solve your problems, you end up back where you started.

CAT has been shown to be effective in the treatment of a wide vary of problems such as relationship problems, self-harm, mood disorders and addictions.

CAT usually lasts for between 16-24 sessions, although in some circumstances it can be shorter.

What is Schema Therapy?

If you feel you’ve been struggling with the same problems for some time Schema Therapy may well be able to help. How we see the world often feels right to us and ‘schema’ refers to the lens through which we see the world at a particular time, colouring how we feel about our lives, ourselves and other people. Schema Therapy involves a deeper exploration than offered by CBT into why you feel the way you do, combined with a focussed approach to change. The therapist will initially work with you to understand how your current issues developed and what keeps them going now.

Schema Therapy is particularly effective when intellectually you feel you know what’s wrong, but you get stuck when you try and make lasting, meaningful change – as if another side of you gets in the way and you end up back in the same situation you started in. So for example, you might have underlying fear of being somehow defective or a failure (despite outwardly doing well) making it hard to let people get close to you. Or, you might have a part of you that feels you have to do everything to a very high standard, leaving you feeling under constant pressure to achieve beyond what is realistically possible. Having understood which schema are holding you back, the therapist gives you what you need to develop a ‘healthy side’ that is able to negotiate situations and feelings differently, so you can move forward in the direction you want to.

Schema therapy has good evidence for its effectiveness in problems relating to self- image, low mood / depression, eating problems, anxiety and relationships problems. It has also been shown to be effective with more severe problems such as BPD (Borderline Personality Disorder) and Narcissism. The length of therapy depends on your goals, and a provisional time frame can be agreed with your therapist at the end of the assessment (usually 2-4 sessions).