Modalities

Below are a few modalities or approaches the Counsellor may choose from when working with a client. These are just a taste of some of the more general approaches taken to counselling and psychotherapy in the modern era.

Emotion Focused Therapy

My main interest lies in using Emotion Focused Therapy (first developed by Dr Leslie Greenberg) as this allows clients to get in touch with their feelings and emotions. Developing self-awareness around feelings and re-experiencing them in the safety of the counselling session can help to facilitate change as the client can feel the difference in their body as well as intellectually. I believe at the very core we are emotional beings who experience feelings as an adaptive mechanism to tell us  what our needs and wants are. If our adult need for connectedness, validation and affection are not met then conflict will arise.  By connecting to our feelings, both secondary or surface feelings like anger, as well as deeper primary feelings such as loneliness, sadness, shame, guilt and fear can allow us to discover our true needs and wants and change the ways we relate to ourselves and others.

Person-Centred

At the heart of the person-centred approach is the belief that everyone is capable of solving their own problems and issues. The role of the therapist is therefore to ensure a supportive relationship develops between the client and counsellor allowing you to move towards a better sense of well being. Counsellors use their interpersonal skills to form a relationship with the client based upon respect, regard and an empathic awareness of what the client is going through.

Most counsellors, if not all, are well versed in the person-centred approach as it provides an important foundation for therapy to be successful. The importance of establishing a supportive therapeutic relationship cannot be overstated providing a safe starting point for the therapist to introduce other techniques and methods.

Solution Focused

A very practical approach is taken towards the issues or concerns of the client where finding solutions to current problems are foregrounded. The therapist works with the client to create new solutions in the present so a brighter future can be created. Clients are encouraged to find the solutions to their problems themselves through thinking positively and sometimes 'outside the box'.

Gestalt

Gestalt therapy is grounded in 'field theory' which is a belief that human beings must be understood by viewing them as part of the environment, context or field they exist in. Like other modalities the aim is for the client to achieve self-awareness in terms of feelings, thinking and behaviour but also for them to become aware of how they interact with others.

Working with the therapist in the 'here and now' allows the focus to be upon how the client behaves in the present moment. When a client becomes fully aware of their particular ways of being and interacting, Gestalt therapists believe change will occur.

Narrative

Based upon post-modernist principles, narrative therapy focuses upon the way we construct our own versions of reality using language to tell our stories. Post-modernists believe there are no absolute truths concerning human behaviour so it is possible to create alternative stories and views of an issue or problem.

A client's problem or concern is seen as separate from them, it is viewed as an external force impacting upon the person. With the attention shifted to the problem as an entity in its own right, the client and counsellor can work together to 'reauthor' a new preferred approach to life.

Psychodynamic

This approach is a modern take on Freud's theories regarding our unconscious motivations and desires. He believed that the unconscious mind often dictates and influences our actions and behaviour but it is difficult to pin down and notice our unconscious mind at work.

Psychodynamic therapy allows the unconscious or hidden motivations and desires to surface into the conscious mind allowing you to understand and appreciate why you behave in certain ways. Patterns from the past that repeat in the present day can be explored using this approach.

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy

This modality encompasses a broad range of approaches but all share the belief that thinking affects behaviour making it possible to monitor thinking and ultimately change negative beliefs. The combination of cognitive and behavioural methods assumes once people start to think differently they will correspondingly act in new and less self defeating ways.

An important belief central to the CBT approach is the fact that it is often not external events that are debilitating but our internal interpretation and view of such occurrences that lead us towards negative thinking and behaviour. Through the collaborative efforts of the client and therapist negative beliefs can be monitored and challenged. This, alongside behavioural techniques, means that you can practise new ways of thinking and rehearse new behaviours.