Okay, so, it’s just occurred to us that we haven’t really spoken about strategies or types of therapy that has helped our clients develop better mental health, take control of their lives & invest in their wellness.
Honestly, we don’t know why it’s taken us this long to write about it, given that mental health & wellness makes up our entire site…
Nevertheless, today that’s what we’re discussing! Let us start by saying this isn’t a one size fits all model. Strategies and therapy is very, very individualised to meet your specific problem, or goal.
However, there are basic tools, strategies, & therapies, we (psychologists) use to help you with whatever you’re going through. Every therapist is different, but this is how we like to do things here at SMP.
- The first one is listening to your story of what has brought you to us. We give you the safe space you need to get things off your chest because it often feels so good! We don’t like to go in with the idea of diagnosing or telling you what’s wrong with you, we want to get to know what’s been bothering you and how we can help.
- The second is gathering information about the specific problem- take anxiety for example, which a lot of us have. We’d like to know what’s brought on this anxiety, how long it’s been with you, strategies you’ve found helpful and not helpful. We do this so we can work with you, to decrease the problem.
- Next, we’ll develop a therapy that works for your specific needs. Often, clients will find general counselling helpful, sometimes all it takes to feel better is just finding someone to listen. Others however, will need tools to help them keep feeling better. Taking the example of anxiety again, using Acceptance and Commitment therapy is useful, also know as ACT. ACT helps clients accept the things they cannot change & work towards committing to things they can change. With anxiety, committing to the using the tools come up with in session helps decrease symptoms of anxiety (panic attacks, increased heart rate, avoiding situations etc).
- As sessions progress we will often use more than one sort of therapy. If you’re a psych nerd, like us. You may be familiar with CBT, also known as Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. Which focuses on doing or using the tools you’ve come up with to radically decrease a problem. For anxiety, it would include deep breathing every time you felt a panic attack coming on or when you felt anxio-us. We being using CBT in session as it’s a safe space to get our clients used to using the tools which they then take out of session. CBT is the most commonly used & most effective form of therapy used today. Using 5-8 sessions of CBT with clients has honestly changes lives & clients often speak about how great it is.
CBT & ACT are some of our favourite tools because they work for decreasing symptoms of most issues. However, there are other types of therapeutic tools we use depending on age groups. Would you guys be interested in another post like this discussing the types of tools we use for different age groups? If so, like this post so we know to write another one!
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