Understanding the Different Types of Therapy Used by Psychotherapists and Counsellors
By Arijana Palme, BSW, RSW
Client Coordinator
Registered Social Worker
So you’re interested in finding a therapist or starting therapy and then you encounter the acronyms. CBT, IFS, EMDR, EFT etc. It can feel like you need a Master’s degree in psychology just to begin your search!
It can be overwhelming and that’s exactly why we’ve created this blog full of straight-forward definitions of common therapies and therapy acronyms.
Be sure to check out the sister blog titled “Understanding the Different Approaches to Therapy” as well.
What’s important to note is that therapists will often practice more than one kind of therapy. Usually, they will approach your situation with a unique technique that borrows from one or several of the therapies listed below.
Therapies
ACT - Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: In this therapeutic framework, clients are not necessarily asked to actively alter their thought patterns like in CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy), but rather are encouraged to accept these experiences, reducing the struggle to control intrusive thoughts, and commit to taking part in activities that bring forth alignment with their values.
CBT - Cognitive Behavioural Therapy: a form of therapy whereby unrealistically negative or unhelpful thought patterns are identified, challenged and replaced by more realistic and objective ones. The goal is to change resulting emotions and behaviour choices by targeting the thoughts they stem from. CBT tends to be quite structured and instructional as opposed to a collaborative and free-flowing mode of therapy.
CPT - Cognitive Processing Therapy: this is a form of CBT that focuses on helping folks that are stuck in their thoughts of a certain traumatic memory. The focus is the conflict between beliefs about the world and self from before the traumatic event and information after the traumatic event. In its pure form, this therapy is highly structured.
DBT - Dialectical Behaviour Therapy: This is a modified form of CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy) that focuses on teaching folks how to manage stress, regulate emotions and improve their relationships. An important part of DBT is mindfulness, which helps keep folks in the moment and observe their reactions without judgement.
EFT - Emotion Focused Therapy: a modality that focuses on the acceptance, expression, regulation, making sense of and transforming emotions. The EFT approach focuses on developing emotional intelligence and the importance of secure relationships.
EMDR - Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing: rather than changing thoughts, emotions or behaviours that result from a significant (often traumatizing) experience, EMDR seeks to change the way the memory is stored so it loses its traumatic charge. Often coupled with eye movement, sounds or tapping, these tools for bilateral stimulation are associated with a reduction in the vividness and emotion of traumatic memories.
Exposure therapy - attempts to break the cycle of fear and avoidance of certain fear-inducing activities or objects (phobias like spiders would be a great example). This therapy involves a gradual exposure to the fear-inducing stimuli in a safe environment that doesn’t cause stress and anxiety, which allows you to process the fear in a new and supported way.
The Gottman Method: a highly researched form of couples therapy, The Gottman Method was developed through longitudinal research into more than 3,000 couples. They discovered that how a couple navigates conflict and the emotions they express are predictors of future relationship success. The techniques within this highly structured form of couples therapy are borne out of this research.
IFS - Internal Family Systems: a modality that sees individuals as having a core Self surrounded by multiple parts, or ‘internal families’. IFS was developed to teach people how to heal and integrate their separate and sometimes conflicting parts.
Mindfulness: simply put, mindfulness is an active awareness of the present moment. In therapy, this means paying conscious attention to bodily sensations, emotions, thoughts as they arise in real-time. Usually this practice supports other forms of therapy that benefit from this level of present-moment attunement, like CBT for example.
Narrative Therapy: this form of therapy focuses on the client as the expert on their lives and experiences of the world. A deeply non-pathological and non-blaming approach, narrative centres on the belief that people assign meaning to events and interactions in their lives, build stories and internalize that unique interpretation as opposed to some objective truth or reality.
Solution-Focused Brief Therapy: SFBT is a constructivist approach to psychotherapy, meaning that people naturally construct their own lives from the meaning they derive from events and experiences. In this therapy, the focus is not the problem or the issue at hand but the solution and strength of each client. Each client is urged to look at how they have constructed solutions in the past and continue to do so moving forward.
Somatic therapies: As opposed to focusing only on the mental experience, somatic therapies work on the mind-body connection, believing that trauma and feelings are stored in the body as well as the mind. Along with verbal processing, somatic therapies integrate body-work like meditation, movement, breathing, visualisation, dance etc. to release and process significant experiences.
Looking for some support?
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