There are many different styles of therapy. We take into account several different perspectives of human psychology and behaviour. This stems from our belief that everyone is unique, with his or her own personal experiences, and that each client deserves to be supported in a unique way. Whatever your current difficulty, our training and experience gives us a choice of possible approaches from the structured, logical and skills-based to the more fluid, creative and intuitive. Your personally tailored counselling or psychotherapy may be fully model-specific or include integrative aspects of the following approaches:

Dialectical Behaviour Therapy

Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT) is a specialist treatment that was initially developed for people living with the diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder. DBT offers a research-supported treatment, which combines cognitive behavioural theory (CBT) and methods with mindfulness principles and practices. This therapy was designed to address problems in regulating overwhelming emotions, impulsive behaviours and thinking and has also been applied in treating conditions such as eating disorders, trauma and substance abuse. To find out more about different components of DBT please visit the DBT Programme section of this website.

DBT Prolonged Exposure for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

Until recently individuals presenting with multiple and comorbid problems such as suicidal and self-injurious behaviour, dissociation, substance misuse and personality disorders were often excluded from trauma treatments due to their severity. When not treated, however, PTSD increases the risk of suicidal and self-harming behaviours and is likely to interfere with achieving recovery. DBT-Based Prolonged Exposure protocol was developed by Dr Melanie Harned specifically to treat PTSD among high-risk and multi-problem clients who are receiving DBT. It was designed to help these tremendously suffering individuals recover from trauma and build lives worth living. Research indicates that this treatment is feasible to deliver, acceptable to clients, safe, and effective in reducing PTSD symptoms, suicidal and self-injurious behavior, dissociation, shame, guilt, depression and social impairment. To find out more about the DBT PE protocol please click here.

Radically Open DBT

Radically Open Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (RO DBT) is a new treatment for patients who suffer from emotional over-control. RO-DBT has been developed over the past 20 years and research results suggest that it is effective in working with people where too much self-control is a problem. Excessive self-control is associated with social isolation, poor interpersonal relations, and contributes to difficult-to-treat conditions including anorexia nervosa, chronic depression and anxiety. RO-DBT offers a fundamentally different way to treat over-control. The treatment starts by observing three core components of emotional well-being which are designed to relax rigid and inflexible patterns of reacting to life events: 1) Openness to feedback, even when this is challenging, 2) Flexibility in our responses to changing environmental demands, and 3) Communication of our emotions, with a recognition that expressing emotion is crucial when forming close interpersonal bonds. To find out more visit the Radically Open DBT section.

Cognitive Behaviour Therapy

Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) is a structured, logical therapy, which explores the way our thoughts, beliefs and perceptions of our experience affect our mood and behaviour. The therapist helps the client to identify unhelpful or destructive thoughts and behaviours and to use practical skills and tools to challenge problematic thought patterns or change behaviour. CBT challenges individuals to examine and make changes in the way they think, interpret events and behave in order to ameliorate their suffering.

Mentalisation Based Therapy

Mentalisation Based Therapy (MBT) is an evidence based psychological therapy for borderline personality disorder (BPD). Mentalising refers to our ability to attend to mental states in ourselves and in others as we attempt to understand our own actions and those of others on the basis of intentional mental states. A focus on this very human activity as a therapeutic intervention forms the core of mentalization based treatment. MBT was initially developed for the treatment of borderline personality disorder (BPD) by clinicians and researchers at the Anna Freud Centre although it is now being used for a wider range of difficulties. MBT is particularly suitable for people who have unstable and intense relationships and aims to support them in learning to recognise the effects their behaviour has on other people, to put themselves in other people’s shoes and to differentiate and separate out their own thoughts and feelings from those around them. To find out more about our MBT programme please visit the MBT section of this website.

Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy

Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) is based on scientific study of adult love and bonding processes in couples and is designed to address distress in the intimate relationships of adults. Couples seeking counselling to improve their relationships may find this method a beneficial approach, as it can help people better understand both their own emotional responses and those of significant people in their lives. EFT is interested in how problems are produced, not just why. According to EFT, couples have relationship problems when they are feeling emotionally disconnected at important moments. EFT reframes what on the outside looks likes negative communication into a client’s effort to get their need for attachment met. The goal is to help the couple identify, accept and share their individual needs and emotions with each other, and learn to spot when they are starting to feel disconnected in their relationship. Therapist's role is to help facilitate the creation of secure, lasting bonds between intimate partners and family members and reinforce any preexisting positive bonds. The goal is to learn how to interact with romantic partners in more loving, responsive, and emotionally connected ways, which can result in an increased sense of security, closeness, and connection in intimate relationships.

Person-Centred Counselling

Person-centred counselling endeavours to create a comfortable, non-judgmental environment by demonstrating genuineness, empathy and unconditional positive regard toward clients. This supports clients in deepening their understanding, gaining new insights and finding solutions to their problems. Of crucial importance to this approach to counselling is the therapeutic relationship as an ongoing co-creation, involving both client and therapist. Carl Rogers, who developed person-centred counselling, spoke of this therapeutic approach as follows: "I’m trying to be a companion to you in your search and your exploration. I want to know, am I with you? Is this the way it seems to you? Is this the thing you’re trying to express? Is this the meaning it has for you?” So in a sense I’m saying, “I’m walking with you step by step, and I want to make sure I am with you. Am I with you?”

Psychodynamic Psychotherapy

Psychodynamic or analytic psychotherapy are types of therapy where the client and therapist may explore the client's past and think about how events from the past may be shaping current behaviour. Analytic therapy can focus on repeating patterns that were set up in childhood as a way of coping with emotional difficulties and deprivations. The therapist and the patient work together to recognise their maladaptive patterns and then to revise and change the patterns. Analytic therapy is particularly helpful for helping patients recognise relationship patterns that continue throughout life and are difficult to change without help.

Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy

Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) was developed by Zindel Segal, Mark Williams and John Teasdale, based on Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction. The MBCT programme was designed specifically to help people who suffer repeated bouts of depression. The MBCT programme takes the form of 8 weekly classes. A set of guided meditations accompanies the programme, so that participants can practice at home once a day throughout the course.

Focusing-Oriented Psychotherapy

'Focusing' is about entering into a special kind of awareness, different from our every day awareness. It is open, turned inward, centered on the present and on your body’s inner sensations. When doing 'Focusing' you silently ask “How am I now?” and work with bodily felt sense. This gradually opens up space for an innate movement towards healing simply but beautifully stated by Eugene Gendlin when he writes: "The sense of what is wrong carries with it, inseparably, a sense of the direction toward what is right." To learn more about 'Focusing' and focusing-oriented therapy visit the website of The Focusing Institute at www.focusing.org.

Core Process Psychotherapy

Core Process Psychotherapy (CPP) draws on both Western and Buddhist understandings of human nature and experience. Having been established in 1982 it is one of the original mindfulness-based psychotherapies. A bedrock to the work is the Buddhist premise that we are essentially free. Underlying our conditioned and sometimes restrictive belief in who we think we are lies a core state of being which is unconditioned; the source of our aliveness, well-being and sense of relatedness. CPP provides a safe and supportive atmosphere where the work is in developing mindfulness around what is obstructing us from this innate health and sense of well-being. We begin to recognise the cause of our suffering. Experience is welcomed without judgment or appraisal. How we hold onto our historic patterning affects the present. As obstructions begin to loosen, other possibilities emerge and a natural movement towards well‐being is free to flow once more. To learn more about CPP please go to www.karuna-institute.co.uk.

Gay Affirmative Therapy

Gay Affirmative Therapy, or LGBT‐affirmative therapy, is a form of psychotherapy for clients who identify as non‐heterosexual, which encourages them to accept their sexual orientation as opposed to attempting to "change" them to heterosexual or to "eliminate or diminish" same‐sex attraction. It is rooted in the global scientific consensus that non‐heterosexuality is not a mental illness and that accepting and embracing one’s sexuality can be a key factor in improving one’s emotional well-being. Clients who choose not to act on their same‐sex attraction, for example due to their religious background, will be neither encouraged nor discouraged by the therapist to maintain celibacy.

Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing

Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR) and is a form of therapy that effectively relieves symptoms of Post‐Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), such as flashbacks or nightmares. When a person is emotionally overwhelmed, their brain struggles to process information as it does normally. A distressing memory can then become "frozen in time," and remembering a traumatic event may feel as bad as going through it the first time because the images, sounds, smells, and feelings haven’t been processed and remained unchanged. Such memories have a lasting negative impact on lives of some people with a history of trauma, which then interferes with the way they perceive the world, other people and themselves. EMDR helps to restore the natural ability to process information and can lead to seeing the disturbing memories in new and less unsettling way.