Types of Therapy

Contemporary approaches to psychotherapy and counselling, as practiced by psychotherapists, psychologists and counsellors in Australia today.



The ancient Greek word 'Psyche', meaning Spirit/Soul, has commonly been limited in modern language to signify 'mind' and intellectual process. In Psychodynamic concepts, th ... Read more.
Gestalt therapy integrates the body and mind, by stressing awareness and integration. Integration of behaviours, feelings, and thinking is the main objective in Gestalt therap ... Read more.
Process work is a cross-disciplinary approach to support individual and collective change. It developed in the 1970s and 1980s when Dr. Arnold Mindell, a Jungian analyst in Z ... Read more.
Creative arts therapy is a style of intervention within the mental health, allied health and human services professions. Creative arts therapists use creative, arts-based ... Read more.
Psychosynthesis therapy provides a safe and supportive atmosphere for the exploration of personal issues and concerns. It honours the client's developmental level and unique ... Read more.
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy focuses on the unconscious and believes the repressed unconscious influences our everyday behaviour. Each person is understood to be driven by unc ... Read more.
Jungian psychotherapy, as it is currently practiced, covers a wide range of perspectives, ranging from a primary stress on the analysis of the archetypal material of dreams an ... Read more.
Somatic Psychotherapy embraces a comprehensive and holistic approach to personal growth and development. This approach acknowledges that all facets of human experience are int ... Read more.
Narrative therapy is premised on the idea that a person's life and relationships are shaped by: the knowledges and stories that communities of persons negotiate and en ... Read more.
Person-centred therapy, originally called client-centred therapy, is perhaps the best-known form of humanistic therapy. Founded by Carl Rogers in the 1940's, Person-centred t ... Read more.
The intention of all modes of therapy is to develop in consciousness. Traditionally, psychotherapy has focused on the mind, to the exclusion of other aspects of our existence. ... Read more.
Hakomi is body-centred psychotherapy that makes it possible for clients to discover the habitual, automatic attitudes, both physical and psychological, by which they generate ... Read more.
Emotionally Focused Counselling and Therapy helps clients to understand and express their emotional experience; including their feelings, thoughts, and behaviours. Emotional ... Read more.
Existential Psychotherapy is a form of psychotherapy, which aims at enhancing self-knowledge in the client and allowing them to be the author of their own lives. Existential ... Read more.
Since transpersonal therapy is a stance, a place from which to work, rather than a tightly defined and explicit system, transpersonal therapies differ in how they regard the ... Read more.
Somatic Experiencing is a gentle body-mind oriented approach to dealing with and healing from trauma and stress disorders. Human beings have an innate inner impulse moving u ... Read more.
Embodied Imagination is a therapeutic and creative way of working with dreams and memories, pioneered in the late 1970s by Robert Bosnak (1948 - ), a Dutch Jungian analyst. Hi ... Read more.
The Conversational Model evolved from the collaborative work of Robert Hobson (who gave the model its name) and Russell Meares in London, in the 1960's with patients suffering ... Read more.
Journal Therapy is a healing process allowing the client to improve physical, spiritual, and emotional wellness through the processing of events and emotions, and the creation ... Read more.
Equine Assisted Therapy is a growing field that uses the horse as a catalyst for personal growth. Horses are able to become our mirrors by responding to incongruence within us ... Read more.
Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy (ISTDP) is a form of short-term psychotherapy developed through empirical, video-recorded research by Habib Davanloo, MD. ISTDP's ... Read more.
Structured Relapse Prevention (SRP) is a counselling approach that employs cognitive-behavioral treatment to help clients learn the coping skills they need to deal effectively ... Read more.
Emotional Freedom Techniques is an emotional healing modality based on the idea that the cause of negative emotions is a disruption in the body's energy system. Essentially ... Read more.
Mindfulness is a modern reworking of ancient meditation traditions. It is designed to help you deal with day to day difficulties by putting you in control of your own mind. In ... Read more.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, known as "ACT" and pronounced as the word 'act' is one of the recent mindfulness-based therapies shown to be effective with a diverse range ... Read more.
For many of us, stress is a major obstacle in achieving peak performance. Stress is the body and mind's response to any pressure that disrupts its normal balance. Stress occu ... Read more.
The four main concepts in the Schema Therapy model are: -- Early Maladaptive Schemas -- Schema Domains -- Coping Styles, and -- Schema Modes. The 18 Early Maladaptive Sch ... Read more.
Soul Centred Psychotherapy attends to the human experience through the everyday stuff of life: thoughts, emotions, body sensations and symptoms, and the relationships people ... Read more.
Transactional analysis is a social psychology developed by Eric Berne, MD Over the past four decades Eric Berne's theory has evolved to include applications to psychotherapy, ... Read more.
The founders of family therapy were psychiatrists who had been trained as (or by) psychoanalysts, and they had inherited an expectation for that standard of theory. If their ... Read more.
Solution Oriented therapy is usually a brief and focused encounter with a therapist or group. Most models of therapy can be considered problem-focused because they concentra ... Read more.
Self-psychology was conceived by Heinz Kohut in Chicago in the 1960s, as a modern psychoanalytic theory with clinical applications. It is still being developed as a contempora ... Read more.
This therapeutic intervention requires a trusting environment and a willingness to open heart and mind to the "unspoken", "unknown" feeling place that guards secrets, angers, ... Read more.
Reality Therapy was developed by William Glasser MD, an American Psychiatrist, and its techniques, theory and wider applications continue to evolve through his notions of Con ... Read more.
Developed by Dr.Albert Ellis in 1955, Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy has spawned a variety of other cognitive-behaviour therapies. Its relative effectiveness, short-term ... Read more.
Radix is based upon the principle that each individual is a whole person consisting of a mind, feelings, and a body. For personal growth to be effective and lasting, it must ... Read more.
Sex therapy is a professional and ethical treatment approach to problems of sexual function and expression. It reflects the recognition that sexuality is of legitimate concer ... Read more.
Psychodrama was pioneered by J.L. Moreno, who got his ideas from watching children playing in the park in Vienna. "Psychodrama is a method of psychotherapy in which clients a ... Read more.
Provocative Therapy (PT) is a form of very brief client-centred counselling that uses humour as a therapeutic tool, developed by Dr Kaplan and Frank Farelly who have been int ... Read more.
Play is one of the primary activities of childhood. It is important for children's physical, social and emotional learning and development. Play therapy is the use of play si ... Read more.
Object Relations is not so much a therapy as a set of theories which postulate that relationships, beginning with the mother-infant dyad, are primary, and that intrapsychic, ... Read more.
Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) was begun in the mid-seventies by linguist John Grinder and mathematician Richard Bandler, who had strong interests in (a) successful peopl ... Read more.
Myers-Briggs Type Indicator Katherine Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers found Jung's types and functions so revealing of people's personalities that they decided t ... Read more.
Music therapy is the prescribed use of music by a qualified person to effect positive changes in the psychological, physical, cognitive, or social functioning of individuals ... Read more.
Meditation is an activity that calms the mind and keeps it focused on the present. In the meditative state, the mind is not cluttered with thoughts or memories of the past, n ... Read more.
Family therapy is based on the idea that the behaviour of individuals and families is influenced and maintained by the way individuals and systems interact with each other. T ... Read more.
Interpersonal therapy is a form of psychotherapy in which the focus is on a client's relationships with peers and family members and the way they see themselves. Interpersona ... Read more.
Inner Child therapy is appropriate with clients who present symptoms that may originate in a childhood lacking in love or emotional support, such as: General lack of con ... Read more.
Imago Relationship Therapy is the process of giving couples information and even more importantly, teaching them tools to: help make the unconscious aspects of their relat ... Read more.
Hypnosis is a tool that when used correctly can successfully fast-track an individual from where they are to where they want to be. Issues typically addressed with hypnothera ... Read more.
Freud developed the theory and techniques of psychoanalysis in the 1890s. He believed that much of an individual's personality develops before the age of six. He also propose ... Read more.
EMDR is a client-centred approach in which a clinician works with the client to identify the specific problem or problems that will be the focus of treatment. The clinician g ... Read more.
Experiential therapy is a treatment approach that combines theory with action. It is a technique that therapists claim touches people's lives deeply and intimately. Treatment ... Read more.
Milton H. Erickson, M.D., is generally acknowledged to be the world's leading practitioner of medical hypnosis. His writings on hypnosis are the authoritative word on techniq ... Read more.
Emotional Release is a process whereby people learn how to exchange effective help with each other in order to free themselves from the effects of past distress experiences. ... Read more.
Affective Developmental Psychotherapy and other attachment therapies are forms of treatment effective with trauma-attachment disordered children. Attachment theory was pionee ... Read more.
Dream work outside the clinical setting is not a substitute for psychotherapy, or other professional treatment, and should not be used as such. "Working with dreams" means re ... Read more.
What is Dance Movement Therapy?Dance Movement Therapy is a form of therapy based on the principle that interaction between body and mind influences an individual’s overall f ... Read more.
Underlying Theory of Cognitive Therapy The central insight of cognitive therapy as originally formulated over three decades ago is that thoughts mediate between stimuli, such ... Read more.
Christian Counsellors let the client set the agenda and pace for Counselling. They help people reach understanding and conclusions for themselves, rather than telling them wh ... Read more.
Based on Reichian theories, which maintain that the body and mind are closely linked and reflect each other, Biodynamic massage was developed by Gerda Boyesen in Norway in th ... Read more.
Art Therapy is based on the belief that the creative process involved in making art often runs parallel with the healing process. In the context of a therapeutic alliance with ... Read more.

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types of therapy

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