What Type of Therapy Do I Need?

The previous blog post was all about what therapy is and how you get into it, but the next question you're faced with is, what's the right type of therapy for me? So, now we're going to look at the different types of therapy.

Individual counselling is where you come on your own; just you and the therapist. This is about you, how you are feeling, how things are impacting you.

Couples counselling is designed to try and look at problems within the relationship. It is about the part where the two of you overlap. It looks at your communication difficulties, how your attachment styles interact with each other and underlying resentments. It's very different from individual counselling and you need to speak to a therapist who is specifically qualified to work with couples.

Family therapy, also known as systemic therapy, is looking at family dynamics. It's similar to couples counselling in that it's looking at how all of you interact, how you all overlap with each other, but it's looking at the family dynamics. So again, you would need a specialist counsellor for this type of work.

And then group therapy is a group of individuals who share a common problem. For example, you might find an anxiety, depression or grief therapy group.

Then there's the model of therapy you need to choose. You may have seen when you're trying to find a therapist that some therapists say that they work in an integrative way, or from a humanistic model, or from a psychodynamic model, or your GP might have told you to go and seek some CBT.

So, what does all this mean?

CBT is Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. We're looking at how thoughts impact behaviours and how behaviours impact feelings. So, this is focusing more on the present and the future. It's less concerned with the past, less concerned with why we feel the way that we do. But essentially it's trying to change the way that we think and behave in certain situations in order to change the way that we feel. CBT tends to be more structured, it tends to be more time limited, and you may get tasks to do between sessions at home.

Humanistic therapy covers a wide range of counselling models and you might also see this described as person-centred therapy. This is focussed on self-development, self-growth, how you treat yourself and with a pull towards achieving your full potential. Your therapist will be trying to understand you through your frame of reference.

Psychodynamic or psychoanalytic theories look more at our unconscious thoughts, patterns and processes. It is trying to understand how these have developed throughout our lives and how they're impacting on the way that we think, feel and behave now. It's looking more into the past, what has happened for us, the impact it’s had, and how we are then unconsciously playing out some of these things in our present.

Integrative therapy is where a therapist has been trained in many of the major models of counselling and then draws those together in a way that works for the client. So rather than fitting the client into the model, they fit the model around the client. This is acknowledging that everybody is different and everybody will need something different from their therapist.

And there are many more models of counselling not listed here.

 The last thing to think about is whether you would like to work in a time-limited way or an open-ended way. Time-limited therapy is where you have a set number of sessions; it might be six sessions, it might be 12 sessions, it might be for a few months. But there is a definite end point and you know when that is going to be at the beginning. It can give some structure, but if you're just starting to get into something or you're not quite feeling where you would want to be when you finish your therapy, it can be quite restrictive. An open-ended way of working is basically having as many sessions as you need. You could choose to have just six sessions or you could choose to be in therapy for several months or years if you feel like that's needed. Open-ended just gives you that bit of flexibility to work with your therapist until you both feel that it's an appropriate time to end.

Next up we’ll be looking into how to choose the right therapist for you. And if you are interested in counselling sessions check out more information here.