Information About Psychotherapy

What is Psychotherapy and what does it entail ?

There are many different types of psychotherapy. They are all ways of helping people to overcome stress, emotional problems, relationship problems or troublesome habits. What they have in common is that they are all treatments based on talking to another person . They are the "talking treatments". The person carrying out the treatment is usually called a therapist, the person being seen is usually referred to as the client.

Psychodynamic psychotherapy

This focuses on the feelings we have about other people, especially our family and those we are close to. Treatment involves discussing past experiences and how these may have led to our present situation and also how these past experiences may be affecting our life now. The understanding gained frees the person to make choices about what happens in the future.

Psychodynamic psychotherapy may involve quite brief therapy for specific difficulties. If your problems are long-standing, treatment may mean attending regular sessions over many months.

Behavioural psychotherapy

This tries to change patterns of behaviour more directly. Patients can be helped to overcome fears by spending more and more time in the situation they fear, or by learning ways of reducing their anxiety. They may be given 'homework' exercises, and asked to keep diaries or to practice new skills between sessions. Behavioural psychotherapy is particularly effective for anxiety, panic, phobias, obsessive-compulsive problems and various kinds of social or sexual difficulty. Relief from symptoms often occurs quite quickly.

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy

Like behavioural psychotherapy, it aims at changing thinking patterns directly, but like psychodynamic psychotherapy it encourages discussion of how we think and helps us to get rid of destructive ways of thinking. It does not focus very much on the past - more on the present and future and has achieved particular success in the treatment of certain types of depression.

Family and Marital Therapy

People's problems will often not be theirs alone, but are often the result of relationship problems in a marriage, partnership or family. By focusing very clearly on the relationships involved, and by involving all the people concerned, family and marital family therapy seek to help those relationships to work better.What actually happens? Psychotherapy usually involves regular meetings at the same time, same place every week or two weeks. In most cases the length of the treatment will be agreed between the client(s) and the therapist(s) within a month or so of starting. What happens during a session is usually considered confidential to the people in that session.

In individual psychotherapy, one patient and one therapist talk together in a quiet room, usually for 50 minutes or so.

In marital therapy, a therapist or pair of therapist will meet with a married or committed couple so that they can work on their problems jointly.