THERAPY
Psychologists work with people to understand and
address their emotional difficulties.
COGNITIVE AND BEHAVIOURAL THERAPY
WATCH: What is Cognitive Behavioural Therapy?
Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) is a type of talking treatment which focuses on how your thoughts, beliefs and attitudes affect your feelings and behaviour, and teaches you coping skills for dealing with different problems. It combines cognitive therapy (examining the things you think) and behaviour therapy (examining the things you do).
ACCEPTANCE AND COMMITMENT THERAPY
WATCH: What is Experiential Avoidance?
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) aims to help individuals identify their values and take committed action to achieve them.
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ACT identifies key processes that enable individuals to develop greater ‘psychological flexibility’ and teaches skills that help to change the relationship between an individual and their experience.
ACT aims to develop psychological flexibility by highlighting the avoidance of difficult thoughts and emotions in a person. It aims to help a person create space between themselves and the thoughts they have, be able to observe their thoughts and actions without judgement.
ACT encourages contact with the present and develops commitment to required actions that bring a person closer to living their core values.
Supported by an extensive and ever growing evidence base, ACT takes the view that trying to change difficult thoughts and feelings as a means of coping can be counter-productive, but new, powerful alternatives are available, including acceptance, mindfulness, cognitive defusion, values, and committed action.
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DIALECTICAL BEHAVIOUR THERAPY
DBT was developed by an American Psychologist, Marsha Linehan in the late 1970s in response to people who experience strong emotional instability feeling invalidated by the focus of change found in traditional CBT approaches.
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An acceptance based approach, DBT focuses on weaving acceptance with change. Dialectical strategies help clients and therapists see truth in two viewpoints. So rather than becoming stuck with rigid thoughts, feelings and behaviours, both therapist and client can move with pace towards change whilst accepting things as they are. Evidence based results abound and the model has been adapted to work with addictions, adolescents and trauma, among other presentations.
WATCH: How mindfulness empowers us
I have extensive experience of working with people who experience chronic emotional instability which has resulted from a history of trauma and invalidating experiences at some point or throughout their lives. Autistic Spectrum Conditions create anxiety in individuals and often they feel unable to manage emotions appropriately. There is an increasing number of young people experiencing anxiety and have found DBT informed approaches to be very helpful. DBT focuses on developing skills in four areas: Interpersonal effectiveness; mindfulness; distress tolerance, and emotion regulation.
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People with emotionally unstable personality traits may describe many of the following:
• feeling okay one moment and then feeling deeply despairing, angry, sad or anxious the next
• emotions or moods that change very rapidly
• feeling out of control of, or overwhelmed by, their emotions
• self-harming in response to emotional pain, or when in crisis
• feeling hopeless and burnt out, sometimes considering hurting themselves or others
• being very sensitive to criticism and rejection and fearing people leaving them
• feeling mistreated or misunderstood quite a lot of the time
• periods of feeling numb or empty inside, or ‘cut off’ and disconnected from reality
• problems with self-esteem, self-worth, or having little sense of who they are
• feelings of guilt, shame and wanting to punish themselves at times
• a tendency to act on impulse, putting themselves at risk of harm as a result
• a tendency to get into very intense relationships, then experience problems in relationships such as control or abuse, or fear of rejection and abandonment
• having very high standards and expectations of themselves and others
• struggling to be assertive in a calm and effective manner, resulting in feelings exploding in outbursts or getting turned inwards in self-destructive behaviours
• finding it difficult to ask for help or communicate distress effectively