What is Psychotherapy?
Psychotherapy is a form of talk therapy that helps people manage, cope, and work through their mental illnesses and emotional difficulties. Psychotherapy can help people learn techniques to decrease their symptoms in order to improve functioning and enhance their life.
Problems that psychotherapy can help with include coping with daily life stressors; traumas; medical issues; grief and loss; transitions such as divorce, relocations, life changes; and specific mental health issues like depression and anxiety. Often psychotherapy is used in conjunction with medication but it can also be effective on it’s own.
Therapy Sessions
Therapy can be used to help individuals, families, couples, or in group settings and both children and adults can benefit. Usually therapy will start out with one session a week, anywhere between 30-60 mins. As the client stabilizes sessions will start to decrease in frequency. Eventually when the client has met treatment goals they are ready for discharge and therapy will terminate.
During the initial session, the clinician will perform an evaluation of the client, also called an “Assessment”. This helps the clinician to determine what your needs are and what therapeutic interventions are most appropriate. It is also a great opportunity for both the clinician and the client(s) to get a feel for each other. The most essential factor in the success rate of a client is the connection and comfort they have with the clinician. Together the client and the clinician will develop a treatment plan to address the clients desired goals, which will be the basis of the therapeutic sessions.
Finding A Psychotherapist
Many different types of clinical professionals can provide psychotherapy to include, licensed social workers, licensed marriage and family therapists, licensed professional counselors, psychologists, and psychiatrists. Here at Changing Minds, we strive to offer a variety of therapists that have different skills, backgrounds, expertise, and unique personalities. If you are ready to start your journey towards healing, we have the right therapist for you!
Types of Psychotherapy
There are many different modalities of psychotherapy. Depending on the needs/goals of the client, the clinician will utilize one or a variety of techniques/modalities. Below are a few of the most common:
Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) - similar to CBT, this therapy focuses more on helping clients regulate emotions better. It was developed originally for people with severe suicidal ideation and borderline personality disorder (but effective for many other disorders and symptoms). It works by teaching clients new skills to take personal responsibility to change their problem behaviors that induce their suffering.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) - helps people identify and change the way they think and their behavior patterns that have caused them ineffective results and replaces them with more rational and accurate thoughts and behaviors. This type of therapy helps increase a client’s ability to problem solve.
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) - developed to treat emotional responses to trauma, anxiety, and panic. This treatment safely reconnects the traumatized client to images, self-thoughts, emotions and body sensations associated with the trauma and then facilitates a natural healing of the brain to move towards adaptive resolution.
Play Therapy - used with children to help them identify and articulate their feelings and emotions through play.