'' Prioritising yourself is your 1st step to freedom ''

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy

or (CBT as it commonly known) is a collaborative programme for looking at the way a person thinks, feels and acts, and the events and relationships that underlie these experiences (often from childhood or earlier in life). 

The emphasis on the important role of thinking in how we feel and what we do. 

It its very heart is the concept that the root of any feeling or behaviour is a thought and that for negative feelings or behaviours specifically, quite often an irrational thought.

CBT helps us to make sense of our significant emotional reactions by dividing them up into smaller parts, allowing us to break them down and understand the relationship between situations we find ourselves in, the thoughts we have about them, how this makes us feel both physical and emotionally, and the actions we then take.

Each of these areas can and will affect the others, so how you think about a situation can and probably will affect how you feel physically and emotionally. It can also alter what you do about it.

This will create a better understanding the relationship between these smaller parts, we are much more able to recognise habitually negative patterns of thinking and how they effect us. 

As a result, we are better able to intervene in our own cognition to ensure we start changing the way we think, feel and behave.  

Dialectical Behavioural Therapy

The Purpose of DBT:

· to enhance an individual’s capability by increasing skilful behaviour.

· to improve and maintain the client’s motivation to change and to engage with treatment.

· to ensure that generalisation of change occurs through treatment.

· to enhance a therapist’s motivation to deliver effective treatment.

· to assist the individual in restructuring or changing her environment in ways that support and maintain progress and movement toward goals.

DBT teaches a balance of ‘acceptance skills’ and ‘change skills.’ These include:

crisis survival skills, reality acceptance skills, and distress tolerance skills related to addiction.

Emotion regulation skills (change) including recognising emotions, changing emotional responses (including cognitive restructuring), and reducing vulnerability to the emotional mind.

Interpersonal effectiveness skills (change) including objectives, relationship, and self-respect effectiveness skills.

Treatment strategies in DBT include:

Dialectical strategies in which attention is paid toward balancing acceptance and change. Techniques include the use of metaphor and paradox, cognitive challenging, and restructuring.

Core strategies include problem solving and validation. Problem solving involves analysis and acceptance of a problem followed by an attempt to generate, evaluate, and implement adaptive solutions. Chain analysis is frequently used to analyse problem behaviours in the context of chains of actions, emotions, physiological responses, and cognitions. 

 Mentalisation-Based Therapy 

This is a type of long-term psychotherapy. Mentalisation is the ability to think about the way you think. 

It helps to make sense of our thoughts, beliefs, wishes and feelings and to link these to our actions and behaviours.

Mentalisation is a normal capacity that we all use in everyday life. It underpins all human relationships. However, some people find it more difficult to mentalise in certain situations than others. 

MBT aims to improve your capacity to mentalise. We focus on what is going on in their mind and in the minds of other people and link this to understand and alleviate problematic behaviours. 

It's particularly useful for people who suffer from long-term difficulties in relationships and who experience intense emotional distress and overwhelming feelings which may result in destructive behaviours such as self-harm or aggression towards others. 

It is also helpful for people who may be distrustful of other people and have difficulty in reading other people’s responses to them. 

Individual mentalisation-based therapy sessions last for 12 to 18 months.

During assessment you have two to four initial meetings with your therapist to understand what your difficulties are and to consider the most appropriate treatment. 

When you focus on understanding your own and other people’s thoughts and feelings, MBT can help you to better understand and control your impulses, emotions and behaviours. This can improve your relationships with other people. 

Narrative Exposure Therapy (NET) 

This is a treatment for trauma-spectrum disorders in survivors of multiple and complex trauma. NET builds on the theory of the dual representation of traumatic memories. 

It is thought to contextualise the particular associative elements of the fear network, the sensory, affective and cognitive memories of trauma to understand and process the memory of a traumatic event in the course of the particular life of a client. Therefore, in NET, you, with the assistance of us, construct a chronological narrative of your life story with a focus on the traumatic experiences.

Fragmented reports of the traumatic experiences will be transformed into a coherent narrative. Empathic understanding, active listening, congruency and unconditional positive regard are key components of your therapist’s behaviour. For traumatic stress experiences your therapist asks in detail for emotions, cognitions, sensory information, physiological responses and probes for respective observations.

The Client is encouraged to relive these emotions while narrating without losing their connection to the “here and now”: using permanent reminders that the feelings and physiological responses result from memories, the therapist links the experiences to episodic facts.

Anger 

We feel this when when we are being hurt; our boundaries are being violated; our needs are being ignored; or, during numerable other scenarios where our expectations are not being met. In these situations we express anger as a means of regaining control and in that regard, it is a perfectly natural state. 

However anger can become a real problem when it’s experienced too frequently, too intensely, or for long periods of time and when this occurs it can have a dramatic impact on the quality of our relationships, careers, health and lives. 

The reason why we’re successful at helping clients to resolve anger issues is because we work across both the conscious and unconscious parts of the mind.

Through the principles of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy we also work at a rational and logical level and the combination of the two can be very powerful indeed.

Add a little wisdom and that most scarce of resources within the therapeutic environment  We focus on helping clients affect rapid and genuine changes in the way they think, feel and behave so that old unwanted anger that seemed to have so much control over them, easily and comfortably becomes a thing of the past.

Art Therapies 

In counselling and psychotherapy we encourage clients to use artistic expression to communicate their problems in different ways to their therapist.

The creative expression of art therapies has been found to assist in the recovery of mental distress. By using creative arts in a therapeutic setting with a specialist therapist clients are able to draw on their inner resources and express their thoughts and emotions without speaking.

Art therapies are types of psychotherapy that uses art and other artistic mediums to help people challenge their thoughts and emotions in a different way. The concept is to use art as the primary means of communication, something that can be useful for those who find it difficult to say how they feel. 

These modalities are practical, use physical objects and require movement. This frequently enables people to express more about how they view and feel the world around them. 

Art therapies can be beneficial to many groups of people including children, the elderly and those in custody. participants do not need to be good at art, drama or music as their work cannot be criticised as it is their expression of emotions being released. 

Sexuality/Sexual Identity

Having trouble coming to terms with, or understanding your sexual identity, coming out or telling people about it?  Whether this be a cultural issue or a stigma, This is for you.

By talking through the problems you face with a trained therapist in a safe, non-judgemental and confidential environment you can begin to build up a solid base of support that can equip you with the coping strategies to challenge the problems you face.

Your therapist can provide you with the tools and techniques to be able to cope effectively with events/situations that might precipitate distress, and help you explore complex and painful emotions in safety and comfort.

Your therapist can help you target surrounding issues such as depression, anxiety or substance use which may be blocking your way to better mental health.

Therapists can also explore issues surrounding sex and relationships, and support you through to achieving both your short and long-term outcomes. 

Finally, we can also offer couples counselling, if both you, and your partner feel this would be of benefit to the relationship. 

Humanistic Therapies

These concentrate on your self-development in the ‘here and now’. They do not tend to dwell on the past. 

Our self-esteem is based on a set of judgments we unconsciously make in relation to our value and worthiness in life. It is therefore critical to our ability to live a happy and healthy life.

It is a fact that in terms of self esteem, we are all born equal. We are all born believing that we are the most valuable human being in the universe and that everyone else is there to serve our needs.

However as a direct result of our formative conditioning and early life experiences, that very natural and valuable of resource can be damaged.

As a result we can grow up believing that we are not worthy of love and success, or that we are not enough to achieve them, or that generally we do not fit in.

This invariably means that we are more prone to difficult emotions such as anxiety, depression, anger, jealousy or the like and, that life’s little knocks seem to have a grater impact on us than others.

Ultimately, having low self-esteem can have huge implication on our ability to feel secure, confident, content, assertive and ultimately happy.

Psychoanalytical and Psychodynamic 

The focus here is on the unconscious relationships that evolved from childhood and how they are affecting you now.  

A lot of our clients have likened depression to a black curtain of despair coming down over their lives. 

They describe how prolonged feelings of sadness, sorrow, and hopelessness have led to a lack of interest in many of the things in life that used to bring them pleasure and joy.

Most of our clients have tried many different ways to relieve the symptoms of their depression, from medication to counselling and from food intake to exercise, all of which may have had some short term benefit.

Rather than dealing with the symptoms, our approach is to help our clients identify and finally resolve the underlying cause of their depression so they can live altogether happier and healthier lives.