Types of Therapy
Christian Counseling
Christian counseling works by recognizing the close connection between a person’s emotional or psychological well-being and their faith. It allows clients to bring their whole selves into therapy in order to develop coping strategies that align with their personal beliefs. Christian counseling draws upon the principles of Christianity to help individuals navigate mental health conditions like depression and anxiety, relationship problems, grief, or anger. It is important to note that not all Christian counselors are licensed therapists. While some integrate evidence-based psychological principles into their practice, others may not.
Coaching
Life coaching is an increasingly popular profession that has no specific licensing or academic requirements. Though psychologists also often consider themselves life coaches, these therapists don’t focus on treating mental illness. Instead, they help individuals realize their goals in work and in life. An executive coach, for example, may be enlisted to help a chief executive become a better manager, while a “love” coach may map out a plan to help a client find romantic fulfillment.
Cognitive Behavioral (CBT)
Cognitive-behavioral therapy stresses the role of thinking in how we feel and what we do. It is based on the belief that thoughts, rather than people or events, cause our negative feelings. The therapist assists the client in identifying, testing the reality of, and correcting dysfunctional beliefs underlying his or her thinking. The therapist then helps the client modify those thoughts and the behaviors that flow from them. CBT is a structured collaboration between therapist and client and often calls for homework assignments. CBT has been clinically proven to help clients in a relatively short amount of time with a wide range of disorders, including depression and anxiety.
Compassion Focused
Compassion-Focused Therapy (CFT) may assist individuals who struggle with mood disorders, anxiety, or feelings of shame and self-criticism, often stemming from early experiences of abuse or neglect. Through exercises like role-playing, visualization, meditation, and activities that promote gratitude for everyday life, CFT teaches clients about the mind-body connection and guides them in practicing awareness of their thoughts and bodily sensations. This helps clients cultivate self-compassion and compassion for others, which can help regulate their emotions and foster a sense of safety, self-acceptance, and comfort.
Culturally Sensitive
Culturally sensitive therapists provide therapy that is culturally sensitive. They understand that people from different backgrounds have different values, practices, and beliefs, and are sensitive to those differences when working with individuals and families in therapy.
Experiential Therapy
Experiential therapy is a therapeutic technique that uses expressive tools and activities, such as role-playing or acting, props, arts and crafts, music, animal care, guided imagery, or various forms of recreation to re-enact and re-experience emotional situations from past and recent relationships. The client focuses on the activities and, through the experience, begins to identify emotions associated with success, disappointment, responsibility, and self-esteem. Under the guidance of a trained experiential therapist, the client can begin to release and explore negative feelings of anger, hurt, or shame as they relate to past experiences that may have been blocked or still linger.
Family / Marital
Family and Marital therapists work with families or couples both together and individually to help them improve their communication skills, build on the positive aspects of their relationships, and repair the harmful or negative aspects.
Family Systems
Family Systems therapists view problems within the family as the result not of particular members’ behaviors, but of the family’s group dynamic. The family is seen as a complex system having its own language, roles, rules, beliefs, needs and patterns. The therapist helps each individual member understand how their childhood family operated, their role in that system, and how that experience has shaped their role in the current family. Therapists with the MFT credential are usually trained in Family Systems therapy.
Intervention
An intervention is a planned attempt by the family and friends of the subject to, in effect, get them to seek help for an addiction (i.e. drugs, medications, gambling) or other serious problem. Interventionists (as they are sometimes called) or intervention specialists often work with treatment facilities in order to provide the patient after-care that will be necessary.
Multicultural
Multicultural awareness is an understanding and sensitivity of the values, experiences, and lifestyles of minority groups. Differences in race, culture, religion, gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, are all tackled by Multicultural counseling. In the counseling setting, the counselor recognizes that the client is different from the counselor and treats the client without forcing the client to be like him or her.
Person-Centered
Relational
Relational life therapy offers strategies to combat marital dysfunction and restore harmony in relationships. Couples–those recovering from affairs, traumatic events, or a lull in passion–can find RLT helpful. To repair discord, the therapist identifies the main conflict upsetting the couples’ emotional intimacy. Once the partners see how they both contribute to the problem, the therapist teaches them skills to improve the ways they relate to each other. Couples may see a change in their relationship within three to six months.
Trauma Focused
Trauma focused cognitive behavioral therapy (TF-CBT) helps people who may be experiencing post-traumatic stress after a traumatic event to return to a healthy state.