Types of Therapy
Cognitive Behavioral
Cognitive therapists tend to focus on specific problems. These therapists believe that irrational thinking or faulty perceptions cause dysfunctions. A cognitive therapist may work with a client to change thought patterns. This type of therapy is often effective for clients suffering from depression or anxiety.
Behavioral therapists work to change problematic behaviors that have been trained through years of reinforcement. A good example of behavioral therapy would be a therapist working with a client to overcome a fear of heights. The therapist would encourage the client to gradually face their fear of heights through experience. The client might first imagine standing on the roof of a tall building or riding an escalator. Next, the client would slowly expose themselves to greater and greater levels of their fear until the phobia diminishes or disappears entirely.
Benefits of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy
Cognitive and behavioral approaches can be highly effective when treating specific problems. Oftentimes, cognitive and behavioral approaches are combined when treating a disorder. A therapist treating a client with social anxiety may help the client form more accurate thinking patterns as well as focusing on specific behaviors, such as social avoidance.
Psychoanalytic Therapy
Psychoanalytic therapy is one of the most well-known treatment modalities, but it is also one of the most misunderstood by mental health consumers.
Founded by Sigmund Freud, psychoanalytic therapists generally spend time listening to patients talk about their lives, which is why this method is often referred to as "talk therapy." The therapy provider will look for patterns or significant events that may play a role in the client’s current difficulties. Psychoanalysts believe that childhood events and unconscious feelings, thoughts and motivations play a role in mental illness and maladaptive behaviors. Benefits of Psychoanalytic Therapy
While this type of therapy has many critics who claim that psychoanalytic therapy is too time consuming, expensive and generally ineffective, this treatment has several benefits as well. The therapist offers an empathetic and nonjudgmental environment where the client can feel safe in revealing feelings or actions that have led to stress or tension in his or her life. Oftentimes, simply sharing these burdens with another person can have a beneficial influence.
Post Modern Therapy
Postmodern psychotherapists believe that it is difficult at best, and often impossible, for a mental health “expert” to be able to determine what is “psychologically healthy,” since there is no truly objective measurement of mental health. As in postmodern philosophy, art, architecture, and music, “deconstruction” is a dominant theme in postmodern psychotherapy. In psychological terms, “deconstructing” means to regard the “givens” we take for granted as true (for example, “adolescence is a time for teens to separate from their parents,” or “if you don’t earn a good living you’re not successful”) and carefully examine their usefulness/appropriateness from the client’s point of view.
Practitioners of postmodern therapy even question the “givens” of their own profession (e.g. the concept of transference and its relevance to working with clients), and try to pay particular attention to minimizing the unavoidable power of authority granted to the therapist by the client who comes seeking “expert” advice. This is done through working hard to be as collaborative with the client as possible.
The are three main types of postmodern therapies:
Narrative Therapy rests on two underlying principles: a) all human thought and behavior exist in cultural contexts that give them particular meaning and significance, and b) people’s view of the world is shaped through a complex, generally unconscious process of sifting through experiences and selecting those that are most consistent with the story one holds of oneself.
Solution-Focused Therapy emphasizes the construction of solutions to problems, rather than an examination of their causes or how they are maintained. This approach is inherently brief compared with “traditional” psychotherapy, and rests on the belief that clients can solve their problems by doing more of what has been successful for them in the past.
Collaborative Language Systems is a type of postmodern therapy that “dis-solves” problems through conversation and emphasizes a collaborative conversational partnership between therapist and client.
Marriage & Family Therapy
Family can influence our perceptions, our modes of interacting, and our styles of communicating. In Family Therapy, the therapist applies therapeutic principles while engaging the participation of family members, individually and as a group. The process recognizes and reinforces constructive aspects of the family’s relationships while also allowing destructive elements and counter-productive interaction styles to be identified, acknowledged, and changed. A family is considered to be any group of individuals who are committed to one another’s well-being (usually for life).Marital therapy assists couples in working more effectively as a couple and in cultivating mutually acceptable problem-solving strategies. A marriage is similar in its development to individual and family development in that there is a marital life cycle that has fairly predictable stages. At each stage there are interpersonal skills to be mastered and the therapist helps the couple deal with their current issues.
Typical marital problems that couples seek treatment for include:
- Inability to compromise
- Sexual difficulties
- Financial disputes
- Child-rearing conflicts
- Extended family issues (e.g., dealing with in-laws)
Marriage as a whole is different from the sum of its parts. For example, to describe the husband as an individual and the wife as an individual is not the same as describing the pair of them in relationship and interaction. The therapist helps the couple pay attention to the patterns which connect them as a means of appreciating the overall structure of their marriage.
Group Therapy
Group therapy is a form of psychotherapy where two or more clients work with one or more therapists or counselors. This methods is a popular format for support groups, where group members can learn from the experiences of others and offer advice. This method is also more cost effective than individual psychotherapy and is oftentimes more effective.
Benefits of Group Therapy
It is common for those suffering from a mental illness or problem behavior to feel alone, isolated or different. Group therapy can help clients by providing a peer group of individuals that are currently experiencing the same symptoms or who have recovered from a similar problem. Group members can also provide emotional support and a safe forum to practice new behaviors.
Other Types of Therapy
Play Therapy
Play therapy is a therapeutic technique most often used when working with children. While a child may not be developmentally able to articulate their feelings, a therapist can help them express what’s going on through engaging them in play. The sessions take place in a room that is specially furnished with toys, games, and equipment a child can use as tools for the dramatic scenes they direct while working with the therapist. Through play therapy a child can create a world they can master, practice social skills, overcome frightening feelings and/or experiences, and symbolically triumph over traumas or upsets that have threatened their well-being. The therapist meets regularly with the child’s parents to share their observations, learn more about what is happening in the child’s life from the parents’ perspective, and to offer suggestions for how the parents can support their child’s therapy.
Art Therapy
In art therapy, the client uses clay, paint, and other art medium to create images that explore their feelings, dreams, memories or ideas. People come to art therapy for a variety of reasons. For example, individuals suffering with depression, facing loss, coping with trauma, dealing with addiction, recovering from sexual abuse, or seeking means to overcome anxiety have often found relief, courage, and strengthening insight through art therapy. Creativity can provide a means of expression for that which has no words, or is not yet fully understood. Using the client’s art as an interpretive reference point, the art therapist helps the client further explore their feelings, experiences, and perceptions and claim renewed clarity and meaning in their life
Gestalt Therapy
In Gestalt therapy, therapists challenge clients with questions so that the client increases their awareness of feelings and develops a stronger ability to face daily-living situations and problems. Gestalt therapists can use a variety of other techniques, such as role playing and confrontation, to help the client learn more effective means of coping and to assume more responsibility for the activities of their life. The emphasis is on what is being done, thought, and felt at the moment, rather than on what occurred in the past, or what might be, could be, or even what should be. The therapist teaches the client that what is directly experienced and felt is more reliable than explanations or interpretations based on pre-existing experiences or attitudes. The goal of Gestalt therapy is for the client to become aware of what they are doing, how they are doing it, and how they can change themselves—and, at the same time, to learn to accept and value
